Poppies grow best in churned earth, and so were an enthusiastic resident of cemeteries in the First World War. Not all of the impromptu cemeteries were for entire persons – some were for arms and legs amputated with all the haste that 1915’s medical technology insisted on. LOTS of graves, large and small. Poppies flourish in the fresh wounds of the earth.
Major McCrae was a surgeon in the First World War. Near the end of 17 days of surgery in the Ypres salient, a feat that he later likened to Hades and said he would not have thought possible if told from the outset what would be expected of him, one death in particular affected him. His friend and former student Lieut. Alexis Helmer was killed in a shell burst. In the absence of chaplain McCrae performed the funeral service himself.
The next day he took a short break with his notebook, leaned on the back of an ambulance. He looked at the cemetery, the poppies blown by a breeze from the east. A witness, 22yr old sergeant major Cyril Allinson was delivering mail and walked over to McCrae, who looked up but continued writing. In twenty precious minutes he composed “In Flanders Fields” in the form of a French rondeau. Allinson reported that the surgeon looked calm but very tired, and kept glancing toward Helmers grave. He also confirmed that what is depicted in the poem is an exact representation of what the scene looked like.
McCrae was dissatisfied with the poem and tossed it aside, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. One of them, Punch, published it on December 8th 1915. In the years since it has become a fixture of Remembrance Day, recited with (and sometimes without) feeling at memorials and school celebrations. For the most part it is praised as one of the most memorable poems of it’s time. Some literary critics have decried it for its recruiting poster feel in the last stanza. I say, if one has not spend 17 days up to their elbows in the entrails their comrades, one is wise not to question the motivations of the author’s mind – and just be grateful to have never been in the circumstance, and grateful to the person who was.
So it’s remembrance day, when we remember fallen soldiers with gratitude and respect. And those still serving. And those who’ve been broken or damaged by battles. And, for my part, anyone who’s job it is to run toward something I’d like to run away from – in 2001, I remembered fire fighters and police who’d fallen in duty, and have each year since. (These days, I also take a moment to shake my fist in the direction of Westborough Baptist Church for protesting soldiers funerals and being dinks in general.) And each year I give a minute to McCrae, for the corner of his beaten and brutalized mind that distilled a moment in time into the poem we know today. I remember the soldier, the surgeon, the writer.
