A Flower in the Brown Band

In 1918 the Armistice between the Allies and Germany to end the Great War, now known as World War I, took effect at 11:00 am of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918.  Like too many conflicts, the Great War began from a series of missteps, misunderstandings, missed communications, and missed opportunities to end it before it began.  Today has become larger than Armistice Day as it was first known.  In the United States it is now known as Veteran’s Day, to honor all those who have served their country.  There is no greater symbol of the Great War than the poppy which was popularized in the poem “Flanders Fields” written by Canadian Doctor John McCrae. Why did the poppy become such a powerful symbol of such a terrible series of events and battles?  While the color of the poppy recalls the blood that was shed in this engagement, it seems to me the poppy is also a symbol of hope.  How could a flower in a sea of devastated landscape not provide some hope?  In the wet, dark trenches any sign of life was probably an event to which the men looked forward.  To understand is to see the contrast between devastation and the flower, between death and life, between war and peace.

Flanders Fields

Methods of war in 1918 were different than that seen with the blitzkrieg and speeds of World War II.  It mainly involved trench warfare, with sides making little headway but realizing great casualties.  Between battle lines there lay a vast waste zone; but for men and rats, little survived.  Any one reading the great work of this war, All Quiet on the Western Front, or having seen Hollywood movies of the war, a most recent being “War Horse”, the images can tell more than what this writer can describe.  Although to set an image of the landscape produced by a war 100 years ago, let me turn to the words of an American mercenary, James McConnell, who would fly for the French in 1916 and describe what he saw over the battlefield of Verdun:

Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band ... Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago - when there was no Battle of Verdun. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature. It seems to belong to another world. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard; of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together... On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of troubled earth. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.

Alexis Helmer

From August of 1914 until November 11, 1918, this described the battle fields of the Great War.  Accounts tell us that, in contrast to the cold of war, the weather in Belgian Flanders was unusually warm in 1915.  Locals, still needing to make a living, would plant their fields early that spring, some up to near the lines of battle.  The red field poppy would grow at the edges of grain fields.  While the plant is an annual, it will reseed itself for the next year and bloom once again from seed in earth disturbed.  Ground disturbed on the field of battle would see poppy seeds germinate, grow and flower.  It was the view of these flowers in 1915 which would catch the attention of John McCrae.

Accounts vary on where McCrae wrote the poem that has come to represent a war  One has it being on the rear step of an ambulance, another after the burial of his comrade Alexis Helmer, and another account, by his commanding officer, had him writing it between arrivals of groups of injured soldiers.  We do know that he wrote it in early May 1915 near Ypres, by what is termed the Ypres Salient, a portion of the line that bulged into German lines leaving this section surrounded on three sides.  Helmer was killed on May 2, a Sunday morning, by a German mortar which tore his body apart.  He was buried later that night.  As the brigade chaplain was away attending to other duties, Helmer's graveside burial, at least of those body parts able to be collected, was conducted by John McCrae.  It is reported that he conducted a simple service using part of the Church of England’s “Order of Burial for the Dead.”  Helmer had a simple wooden cross to mark a now long lost grave in the Ypres Salient. 

Dr John McCrae

While a Canadian man may have written the poem in Belgium, it was an American women, in New York, who would popularize the use of the poppy as a remembrance of those that died.  She came across the poem, two days before the Armistice, in an issue of “Ladies Home Journal” while between work at Hamilton Hall where she tended to needs of service men coming and going from the Western front.    The poem in that issue was titled “We Shall not Sleep” an alternative name to “In Flanders Fields.”  She would decide then to wear a poppy to remember those who had given their all in the war to end all wars.  But, she would also search part of New York and eventually find red silk poppies that she would give to attendees of a war conference at Hamilton Hall.  To Moina Michael, the poppy was more than a symbol or recalling the dead of the war.  She viewed it as a symbol of optimism.  The war had ended and peace had now come over a war weary world.   Maybe it was presaging the shift of power for the old world to the new, but it is interesting that a war in Europe has a symbol set forth in a poem by a Canadian, with the symbol popularized by an American.

Battlefield of the Great War (World War I)

One symbol of old Europe would be the Tower of London.  A prison and symbol of terror in its own right,  it housed and saw the executions of Thomas More and others.   But, this fall it has its moat (August until November 11) filled with ceramic red poppies.  It displays one red poppy for each of the 888,246 persons from the British Empire, like Alexis Helmer, who had perished in the Great War.  It is a remarkable and haunting reminder of the human cost of war.  The poppy, while having a red color that reminds us of the blood that is shed in times of war and police actions, is also a symbol of hope-- that from fields thought barren due to battle new life can arise.  Peace can overcome strife. 

Ceramic Poppy display at the Tower of London

On this November 11, our thoughts go to veterans both dead and alive, particularly those who served in the Great War, and our other conflicts. Personally I think of my Dad who served in WWII, and my brother-in-law who served in varied conflicts in the Mid-east and the Balkans.  These conflicts, of course, unfortunately show that the Great War did not lot live up to President Woodrow Wilson’s claim of putting an end to all wars. Interestingly, it was the armistice begun almost a century ago that perhaps did more than any other factor to lead to the rise of a fanatic to take power, leading to a conflict even more costly than the Great War a generation later. Yet, we still look to the poppy to represent those who have been called to serve the nation.

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.

(poem by John McCrae)

 Photos from Google Images