The Times-Advocate, 2002-10-30, Page 18Is It Nothing to You?
Lest We Forget
On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day
of the eleventh month ...
Excerpt from "Welcome to Flanders Fields - The
Great Canadian Battle of the Great War : Ypres,
1915", by Daniel G. Dancocks, McClelland and
Stewart (Toronto, Canada), 1988
Although he had been a doctor for years and had
served in the South African War, it was impossible to
get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood
here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard
enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime. As
a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade,
Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in
1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto,
had spent seventeen days treating injured men --
Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans --
in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought
possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the var-
ied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen
days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone
had told us we had to spend seventeen days there,
we would have folded our hands and said it could
not have been done."
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young
friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of
Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2.
Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the
little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station,
and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in
the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, 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 vented his anguish by compos-
ing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored sev-
eral medical texts besides dabbling in poetry. In the nearby cemetery,
McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that
part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scrib-
bling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two
year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted
McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson
approached, then went on writing while the
sergeant-major stood there quietly. "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 five minutes later, he took his
mail from Allinson and, without saying a word,
handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was
moved by what he read.
The word blow was not used in the first line
though it was used later when the poem later
appeared in Punch. But it was used in the second
last line. He used the word blow in that 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 descrip-
tion of the scene. "
In fact, it was very nearly not published.
Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem
away, but a fellow officer -- either Lt.-Col.
Edward Morrison, the former Ottawa newspaper
editor who commanded the 1st Brigade of
artillery, or Lt.-Col. J.M. Elder, depending on
which source is consulted -- retrieved it and sent
it to newspapers in England. "The Spectator," in
London, rejected it, but "Punch" published it on
December 8, 1915.
McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this
day one of the most memorable war poems ever
written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle
in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.
Jerry
Mathers Ltd.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002 25Exeter Times–Advocate
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In Flanders Fields
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, saw dawn, felt sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up your 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.
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