Click both images for larger.The red flower of the poppy (Papaver somniferens / sleep-bringing poppy) is the symbol of veterans of the United States and the UK and Commonwealth militaries, and has been since World War One. Veterans sell poppies everywhere in advance of Veterans Day in the USA and Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth nations.
The Armistice which ended fighting on the Western Front in 1918 was signed at 5 a.m. on 11 November, and provided that both sides would cease hostilities 6 hours later. Thus the guns fell silent on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
In Europe, men of the most civilized, cultured and religious civilizations stopped machine-gunning and bayonetting each other and bombarding each other with high explosives and drifting clouds of poison chlorine and mustard gas. It was the first war to pit waves of charging footsoldiers against the recently perfected machine gun. This machine had been invented in 1882 by the Anglo-American Hiram Stevens Maxim, later knighted, who believed that such an unimaginably lethal weapon would end land warfare altogether; no nation would intentionally order its young men to charge into the teeth of such weapons.
The poppy quickly became the symbol of English-speaking veterans after the publication, in 1915, of this poem by a Canadian Army medical officer, written after the death during one of the battles of Ypres of his young soldier friend. Ypres is in the Flanders region of Belgium. The poem was first published anonymously in Punch.
In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
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.
3 comments:
This cannot have effect in actual fact, that's what I think.
This will not have effect in fact, that's exactly what I suppose.
Thanks so much for the post, quite helpful piece of writing.
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