Posted on 11/01/2014 8:14:41 AM PDT by GreyFriar
Little was recognisable of 22-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer after he took a direct hit from a German shell at Ypres on the Western Front one May morning in 1915. His pals gathered what they could find of his remains into sandbags and then arranged them in the shape of a human inside an army blanket.
At sunset he was buried — just another of the hundreds of thousands of men of the British Empire to die in World War I.
The officer who spoke over his grave as the battle raged around them was his close friend Lt-Col John McCrae, an Army doctor.
The next day, after a night of tending chlorine gas victims, he looked out from his first-aid post onto a sea of wooden crosses — his friend’s the latest, mingling with the wild red corn poppies that grew there.
Then he tore a page from his dispatch book and began to write. In 20 minutes, it was done:
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.
Not just an immortal poem was created that morning. It was also the beginning of the corn poppy as the symbol of remembrance of those who die in battle.
Continue the article and the story of the lady who gave us the poppy as a rememberance of those lost in WWI
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Yes, they are. As the story points out, they're also nearly the only thing that would grow in the muddy, cratered morass of a WWI battlefield. Nobody really knows why.
It's a lovely custom, and when it comes up I feel like a bit of a party poop in pointing out that the rest of the original poem is, in fact, a call to "take up the torch", carry on the mission, and defeat the Germans, and not quite the lament against the overall wastage of war that it is sometimes portrayed as. It is an entirely understandable emotion given the circumstances and I don't fault McCrae one iota for expressing it. But let's not misrepresent it too much.
They still do in these parts...usually station a volunteer outside of a grocery store.
We too need “to take up the torch” aka mission of defending our brethren and countries against threats and enemies today as was being done by the Allied Armies in WWI. Today the primary enemy is the radical Moslems of ISIS and Al Qaeda that wish to destroy Western culture and society.
Thanks for the ping!
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