In Flanders Field
By Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae
The areas of Northern France known as Flanders and Picardy, saw some of the most concentrated and bloodiest fighting of the First World War.
There was complete devastation. Buildings, roads, trees and natural life simply disappeared. Where once there were homes and farms there was now a sea of mud - a grave for the dead where men still lived and fought.
Only one other living thing survived. The poppy, flowering each year with the coming of the warm weather, brought life, hope, colour and reassurance to those still fighting.
John McCrae, a doctor serving with the Canadian Armed Forces, was inspired to write this poem on 3 May 1915 after presiding over the burial of his friend and fellow soldier, Alexis Helmer, who was killed the previous day
in a German artillery barrage during the Second Battle of Ypres. He was so deeply moved by what he saw in that he scribbled the following verse in his pocket book:
| In Flanders Fields the poppies grow Between the crosses row on row That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead, short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved and now we lie In Flanders Field. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you, from failing hands, we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us, who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders Field. |
McCrae's poem was eventually published in the 8 December 1915 edition of "Punch" magazine under the title "ln Flanders' Fields"
and the people of Britain, and the Empire, were able to learn at first hand what the war in France, and in the trenches, really was like.
Three years later McCrae was to die in a Military Hospital on the French Channel Coast. Shortly before he died, with the British coastline visible
on the horizon and the words of the poem in his mind, he is said to have murmured:
"Tell them this,
if ye break faith with us who die,
we shall not sleep."
On the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month, The First World War ended. Thousands had died; thousands more had been injured and scarred by their experiences. The men
and women who had survived returned to their homes. For them though, the world would never be the same. People at home had learned to manage without them and, all over Britain, and its Empire, there were men and
women, old beyond their years, trying to fit back into an unrecognizable normality.
Moina Michael a school teacher from Georgia, and herself a writer of verse, had been moved by McCrae's work and had written:
|
"And now the torch and Poppy red |