In Flanders Fields

The poppies blow...

Last Sunday, many of us stood in the gloom of a November morning to see serving and ex-military men march past war memorials and dignitaries lay poppy wreaths. My stepfather, as a Lieutenant Commander in both the Navy and the RNR, has been the Parade Commander of the Brighton Remembrance Service since time immemorial (or at least 1996). When we first took my daughter, then aged two, in a suitably poppy-red faux fur little coat and hat, she watched her grandfather giving the commands of “Parade, stand at - ease!” and memorably called, “Stop shouting, Grumps!” We’ve seen a whole generation of Mayors of Brighton struggle their way through Laurence Binyon’s For The Fallen (It’s “They shall grow not old”, not “They shall not grow old” because it’s poetry -and word order matters, people!) although this year’s mayor took it a step further by saying “We shall not…remember them” before correcting himself.

Both my daughter, who works in a secondary school, and I, in my primary setting, had Remembrance Day services on Monday this week, 11am on the 11th November, to commemorate the time when Armistice was declared at the end of the First World War. And at both schools we had readings of John McCrae’s famous poem “In Flanders Fields”. The secondary school students predictably massacred the tricky enjambment in the third verse: “To you from failing hands we throw/The torch be yours to hold it high” neglecting to see the need to join “throw” with what is actually being thrown (the torch). To avoid such pain (and believe me, I’ve tried and failed repeatedly with Year 5 and 6 classes in my time to perform it grammatically correctly), I read the poem aloud this year.

And what a complex poem it is! Not just because of the layout. Tricky, and troubling, to our post-modern sensibilities. It’s so well known, like, say, the words to the Lord’s Prayer, or a nursery rhyme, that we don’t often reflect on the poem’s true meaning. It’s often seen as a heartfelt and poignant lament for the fallen, which it is, but it’s also an equally heartfelt call to arms.

The author of the poem, John McCrae, was a Canadian physician, poet and soldier. He had already fought in the Second Boer War as part of a Canadian militia, so he knew first hand what battle entailed. When enlisting for The Great War, he wrote to a friend, “I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay home with my conscience.” At 41 and with years of medical training, he could have joined a medical unit, but instead signed up for front line soldiering.

He fought in the second Battle of Ypres in 1915, which was where his friend Alexis Helmer, who he’d known since his militia days, was killed. McCrae presided over the funeral, and the next day, wrote the poem, sitting at the open back of a field ambulance looking out over the freshly dug graves, where poppies were already starting to bloom (or “blow”), while new gunfire was already competing with birdsong.

Poppies growing on battlefields had been noted since Napoleonic times. The freshly churned up soil, and the high proportion of lime released into it from the rubble of fallen masonry, provided ideal conditions for poppy seeds to flourish.

The poem is in the form of a rondeau (round), a mediaeval French poetic form in which the first line of the poem is repeated as the last line of subsequent verses. It is pastoral and elegiac in tone, written from the point of view of the dead soldiers. In the final verse, the lament turns into an exhortation - continue the fight, or our sacrifice has been a pointless waste. “If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep”.

McCrae’s poem was published in December 1915 and immediately became linked with military recruitment and gaining funding for the continuation of the war in the form of Victory Bonds.

McCrae, who had written poetry all his life, was mildly amused but pleased with the success of the poem and its use as pro-war propaganda. He struggled with being, in his mind, “demoted” to leading a the Canadian General Hospital in Northern France the month after the poem was written, saying to a colleague, “All the doctors in the world will not win this bloody war; what we need is more and more fighting men.”

McCrae himself died in 1918, and did not live to see the victory and peace he had been fighting for. He contracted meningitis and died of pneumonia in the Canadian General Hospital where he had operated on wounded soldiers for the past three years.

The popularity of his poem continued to surge after his death. Because of its reference to the poppy, women in America, then France, and then the British Legion, began to wear, then sell, poppies to remember those who died in war. Remembrance Day is now known to many as “Poppy Day”. And the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance is in large part due to this doctor and poet’s observations from the back of an ambulance, looking out over the devastation of Ypres and seeing beauty and hope in it.

Since the poem’s publication, dozens of composers have set it to music. In my choir last night, we performed two versions, one by Howard Goodall, written as part of his Eternal Light Requiem:

And one written by our associate conductor and my friend, Sam Barton.

Both composers get over the post-modern complexities of the third verse being essentially a call to arms. Goodall makes the rondeau form even rond-ier by starting with the repeated Latin phrase “Dies Irae” (day of anger) and having the piece work up to Verse 3, then back to Verse 2, and ending at the start with Verse 1 and the “dies irae”. It makes the whole piece sound - well - angrier. The fury in the music is squarely aimed at the futility of war, rather than being an exhortation to continue it.

Sam, on the other hand, arranged his piece so that two voice parts continue to sing the words of Verse 2 while the other parts sing Verse 3, then ending with Verse 2 again, so that the audience is left with “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”. Here’s a snippet of his piece, which he recorded from the conducting desk during our rehearsal, hence the slightly odd angle:

It’s Sam who taught me, by the way, that the title of the poem should be pronounced “Flanders” with a short “a” as in “flan” (not as in “tart”), as that’s how McCrae, as a Canadian, would have pronounced it.

Both versions we sang yesterday were beautiful and extremely moving. Performed in this way, the poem becomes achingly sad, a real lament and a reflection on our own inability to achieve a lasting peace in this world. This interpretation says a lot more about us, from our standpoint of over 100 years since the piece was written, than it does about John McCrae’s original intent in writing it. But it does not diminish its power. Rather, it reminds us that one does not have to agree with everything in it, nor even understand every word, to be profoundly moved by poetry.

References:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCrae

http://www.howardgoodall.co.uk/works/choral-music/eternal-light

Did you know the origin of this poem? Do you have experience of being moved by poetry even when you didn’t understand it all? Let me know in the comments!

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