John BarberMon

In The Great War and Modern Memory, his celebrated study of the traumatized literature that sprang from the horrors of trench warfare, U.S. soldier-critic Paul Fussell paused to “break a butterfly on the wheel” — his victim being the most famous of all Canadian poems, the very one that schoolchildren solemnly recite every November, that is engraved on the $10 bill and countless monuments across the country, that has given us a symbol as sacred as the maple leaf, and is entrusted like no other...