Remembrance Day Poppies

We were doing some morn­ing gro­cery shop­ping at Granville Island. At about 11 o’clock an elec­tric bell rang. For a moment I thought it was a fire alarm. For­tu­nately, it wasn’t. Instead, there was an announce­ment over the PA sys­tem request­ing that we all observe 2 min­utes of silence in remem­brance of the sol­diers who had died in the past World Wars. Then the bell rang again to sig­nal the start. It was a bright morn­ing, a brief break in the rain, and the suns rays came stream­ing in to the mar­ket, while every­body (except for a few fussy chil­dren) stayed quiet and still. It was quite an amaz­ing moment, in a place that is nearly always full of activ­ity and a low hub­bub of chat­ter. The bell rang once more, and every­thing returned to nor­mal. Out­side, as we walked home, sev­eral squadrons of air­craft flew in for­ma­tion, in the sur­pris­ingly clear late-morning sky (it’s now back to rain as I write this).

The obser­vance of Cana­dian sol­diers who died in the wars has also been in evi­dence for about a week or two prior to today, when every­body wears the lit­tle red fab­ric pop­pies on their jacket or coat. I’ve seen tele­vi­sion per­son­al­i­ties and sports com­men­ta­tors wear­ing them. You can typ­i­cally get one by mak­ing a dona­tion to one of the vet­er­ans with them on street cor­ners. I’ve worn mine for a week or two, but actu­ally have gone through 2 or 3, as they keep falling off, since they’re only held on with a straight pin.

The red pop­pies come from Lieu­tenant Colonel John McCrae’s poem, In Flan­ders Fields. McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario, and as a sur­geon attached to the First Field Artillery Brigade in World War I, he wrote it the day after a friend of his, Lieu­tenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2, 1915. Sit­ting on the back of an ambu­lance parked near the dress­ing sta­tion beside the Canal de l’Yser, just a few hun­dred yards north of Ypres, McCrae wrote the poem. He described that in the nearby ceme­tery, he could see the wild pop­pies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe. He spent about 20 min­utes writ­ing these lines in a notebook:

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.

Cyril Allinson, a young sergeant-major, was deliv­er­ing mail that day when he saw McCrae writ­ing the poem. McCrae looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writ­ing while the sergeant-major waited. “His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,” Allinson recalled. “He looked around from time to time, his eyes stray­ing to Helmer’s grave.” When McCrae fin­ished, he took his mail from Allinson and, with­out say­ing a word, handed his pad to other sol­dier. Allinson read what McCrae had writ­ten, and said later: “The poem was exactly an exact descrip­tion of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that (first) line because the pop­pies actu­ally were being blown that morn­ing by a gen­tle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be pub­lished. It seemed to me just an exact descrip­tion of the scene.”

In fact, it was very nearly not pub­lished. Dis­sat­is­fied with it, McCrae threw the poem away, but a fel­low offi­cer retrieved it and sent it to news­pa­pers in Eng­land. The Spec­ta­tor, in Lon­don, rejected it, but Punch pub­lished it on Decem­ber 8, 1915. Now in Canada, it is prob­a­bly the most mem­o­rable war poems ever, and although it is offi­cially a legacy of the bat­tle of Ypres in the spring of 1915, it’s come to sym­bol­ize those from the Allied coun­tries whose troops died in World War I. In just thee years in 1918, while still serv­ing in the field hos­pi­tal, McCrae caught pneu­mo­nia and menin­gi­tis and died.

A por­tion of the poem is now printed on the Cana­dian $10 bill. The rea­son that Allinson pointed out the word ‘blow’ in the first line is prob­a­bly because there was a false rumour for a while that the word was a mis­print on the money (and should have been the more com­mon ‘grow’). The lines “To you from fail­ing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high” have been adopted as the motto of the Mon­treal Cana­di­ens hockey team.