A few months before my father passed away last spring, he asked that I bring him copies of two poems. Poems I can remember him referencing in my youth: Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”–an extended metaphor comparing death to crossing the “sandbar” between the tide of life and death; and, “In Flanders Fields”–a war poem, written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae.
The text to the latter poem reads as follows:
In Flanders fields
the poppies grow
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.
McCrae fought in the second battle of Ypres, an ancient town in the Flanders region of Belgium. Ypres occupied a strategic position during the First World War because it stood in the path of Germany’s planned conquest across the rest of Belgium and into France from the north.
At 5 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, 1915, the German Fourth Army launched a surprise attack against French and Canadian divisions attempting to hold the Allied front line.
The warm, sunny spring afternoon was abruptly shattered with a devastating and frightening new development in modern warfare: a cloud of poisonous gas.
British officer Alfred Oliver Pollard described the horrific incident in his memoirs, “Dusk was falling when from the German trenches in front of the French line rose that strange green cloud of death. The light north-easterly breeze wafted it toward them, and in a moment death had them by the throat. The whole air was tainted with the acrid smell of chlorine that caught at the back of men’s throats and filled their mouths with its metallic taste.”
McCrae, in a letter to his mother, described the encounter as a “nightmare.”
To further add to MaCrae’s torment, on May 2, ten days following the attack, Alexis Helmer, a close friend of McCrae’s, was killed in battle. McCrae performed the burial service himself, at which time he noted how poppies grew around the graves of those who died at Ypres. The following day, he composed the memorable poem while sitting in the back of a canvas on wooden frame ambulance.
In an attempt to identify the gases being used, Scottish physiologist John Scott Haldane, at the request of British Secretary of State of War, Lord Kitchener, travelled to the battle scene. Famous for his fearless self-experimentation, Haldane instructed troops to urinate on their handkerchiefs and place them over their nose and mouth to counter the effects of the gas.
Private W. Hay of the Royal Scots arrived in Ypres just after the chlorine-gas attack:
“We knew there was something wrong. We started to march towards Ypres but we couldn’t get past on the road with refugees. We went along the railway line to Ypres and there were people, civilians and soldiers, lying along the roadside in a terrible state. We heard them say it was gas. We didn’t know what the Hell gas was. When we got to Ypres we found a lot of Canadians lying there dead from gas the day before, poor devils, and it was quite a horrible sight for us young men. I was only twenty so it was quite traumatic and I’ve never forgotten nor ever will forget it.”
On November 9, 1918, inspired by McCrae’s poem, a young Georgian teacher, Moina Michael, wrote a poem in response called “We Shall Keep the Faith.” In tribute to the opening lines of McCrae’s poem, Michael vowed to always wear a red poppy as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in the war.
My father, who annually clipped a red poppy to the visor in his car, now sat confined in his wheelchair during a verbal trivia game at Gracepointe Crossing in Cambridge, Minn. At one point, the activity director asked, “Who can cite the next stanza to this much beloved war poem? “In Flanders fields the poppies grow . . .”
My father, without lifting his head, spoke out in a frail but certain voice, “Between the crosses, row on row.”
Yes, this Memorial Day, let us pause to remember those “Between the crosses, row on row.”
Former Cook County Commissioner Garry Gamble is writing this ongoing column about the various ways government works, as well as other topics. At times the column is editorial in nature.
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