John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
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.
This is the poem we learned in grammar school for Memorial Day. It was written during World War I by a Canadian Physician after the poignant loss of his friend. In my childhood, veterans sold red poppies made of wire and red crepe paper to be worn in the lapel on Memorial Day [Decorations Day]. Then in 1963, on a visit home for the holidays, I was told that a childhood friend, David, had been killed in a war – a place called Viet Nam. At the time, I’d never heard that name. It was before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that heralded our full engagement in Viet Nam.
I never found out for sure how David died, or why he was in Viet Nam so early – at a time when we had only "advisers" there. His name didn’t appear on the Memorial Wall in Washington. He is still listed as ‘address unknown’ on our high school alumni roster. I suppose it was so early in that conflict that casualties from that period weren’t yet being catalogued.
But he’s the one I always think of on Memorial Day, and at other times throughout the year. And I think of the people who died in 9/11. And I think of the kids I met at an airport motel one morning a couple of years ago loading onto the bus to go for basic training at Fort Benning Georgia before deploying to Iraq. Like McCrae, I don’t want David to be forgotten, but I don’t have a sense of taking up the torch to honor him. It just feels tragic.
I would add as a companion to “In Flanders Field” the WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in France at age 25, one week before the armistice.
Owen wrote, not about the glory and honor or war heroes. He said this about his small, but impressive output of anti-war poems:
“This book is not about heroes. . . . Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.