Today is Poppy Day

Originally this date was set aside as Armistice Day, less formally named Poppy Day, to commemorate the end of The Great War at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month and the millions who perished in that conflict, also known, hopefully, as The War to End All Wars: 17 million dead; 20 million wounded. That spirit of hope was torn apart within a mere 20 years when The War to End of All Wars became known with horrific  simplicity as World War I and eventually Armistice Day became known by different names because so many other wars have been fought  and so many more people have perished, so many more dead to memorialize.

In the U. S. we call it Veterans Day. In Great Britain and the British Commonwealth states, they now call it Remembrance Day. Veterans Day in America probably is more notably marked as a time for big sales on everything from cars to bed sheets. The lessons of 1914 to 1918, like the ones of 1939 to 1945, elude us. This seems less so in Great Britain, where the day is marked by greater solemnity and the wearing of plastic poppies to remember the fallen of World War I in the trenches and bogs of the European lowlands. Remarkably, the arrival of spring every year of the war and ever afterwards brought the fresh crop of poppies, blood-red covering the fields of death.

The phenomenon inspired a poem “In Flanders Fields,” written in 1915, less than a year into the war, by Major John McCrae, a Canadian soldier serving in the battle field of Ypres, Belgium,  whose friend and fellow Canadian, Lt. Alexis Helmer had just been killed by a German shell blast.

As the story goes, there was no chaplain on hand to conduct a funeral for Helmer. McCrae was asked to fill in. After burying his comrade in arms, McCrae wrote the following poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
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 fields.

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 fields.

Easy to assume that in writing of keeping the faith with those dead passing on the torch, McCrae had in mind a more glorious experience than this ghastly war turned out to be. It was early on, and who could have imagined the bloodbath to come and the one that would follow within a single generation?

     By the end of the First World War, the tone of poetry from that generation was far less optimistic and glorious, as in such as “Dulce at Decorum Est,” by Wilfred Owen, a soldier poet who was killed by a German bullet on the battlefield of Northern France, November 4, 1918, only one week before the end of the war. This poem, published two years after Owen’s death, described a battlefield under gas attack, the first widespread use of chemical warfare that characterized the war:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*

 *Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, from Horace’s Odes, translates roughly to “How sweet and right it is to die for your country.”