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#3348 -
The Nonduality
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In
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
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.
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
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 varied 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
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 composing a poem. The major was no
stranger to writing, having authored several 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
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 we 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 poem was
exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. 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 description of the scene."
In fact, it was very
nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the
poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to
newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but
Punch published it on 8 December 1915.
Thanks to Mack Welford
for reminding me of this great poem.
Updated: 11 November 2008
The above is reprinted
from http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm