Flanders

In Flanders Field

By Lieutenant Colonel John McCrea

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 McCrea, a doctor serving with the Canadian Armed Forces, was so deeply moved by what he saw in Northern France that, in 1915, in his pocket book, he scribbled the following verses:

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 "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 unrecognisable normality.

Moina Michael an American War Secretary with the YMCA, and herself a writer of verse, had been moved by McCrae's work and had written:

"And now the torch and Poppy red
Wear in honour of our dead."

Miss Michael bought red poppies with money that had been given to her by work colleagues, and wearing one of the poppies she had bought, sold the remainder to her friends to raise a small amount of money for servicemen in need. Her French colleague, a Madame Guerin, encouraged by what Moina Michael had achieved with the poppy emblem, proposed the making of artificial poppies, and their sale, to help ex-Servicemen and their dependents. So the movement started.

Shipmate Wayne Neighbors writes: "the first half of the poem was a challenge ... the second half of the poem is a sequel ... or an answer... or an acceptance of the challenge ... I believe it was written by R. W. Lilliard ... an American. The title of his poem ... or his portion of the poem was:

"America Answers".

Sleep on, brave soldiers, sleep, sleep where
the poppies grow.
Sleep on, brave soldiers, in your places,
row on row.

The lark's still soaring in the sky.
Still bravely singing, soaring high
Away above the cannon's roar.
Scarce heard amid the guns as yore.
Before you slept in Flanders Fields.

The faith with you we've kept and battled
with the foe
On crimson fields by you we've slept
where poppies blow.

The torch you flung to us we caught;
With blistering hands we've bravely fought
to hold it high
To guard you thru the Night.
And at the dawn to guide you to the light,
when you awake from Flanders Field.