In Flanders Field

Family lore is that one of our great aunts was married to John McCrae, the author of In Flanders Fields.  In fact, McCrae was never married, but was in love as a young man with an unnamed woman who died and left him heartbroken.   My grandfather did serve in US Expeditionary Forces and we still have the dented helmet to prove it. Since the last veteran of the Great War died recently, I have been thinking and reading about the "War to End Wars".  I have always been fascinated by it. We cannot image the futility and carnage of that conflict and it is now slipping beneath the tides of history with the Civil War and the 19th Century generally.  But I knew someone who actually stood in those trenches and suffered in those battles.  How amazing! To begin then, McCrae's In Flanders Fields. (Poem Source)  Image Source

In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, May 1915

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.

A few weeks ago, I watched the Canadian file Passendale The graphic above depicts the actual site in 1917. The battle was a turning point in the war and a high (or low, depending on your point of view) watermark for Canadian participation.  Dr. McCrae treated his fellow Canadians during and after the battle, so there is a link there. What got me started with this wonderful (if somewhat improbable) movie was a search for trench warfare on YouTube.  (With respect to the film, the end is just too coincidental to be believed, I am sorry.  But otherwise a great and romantic film, with graphic portrayals of the casual violence of war and of the hatred that German-Canadians as well as German-Americans experienced.)   Here is part of the penultimate battle scene from the movie.  This has to rank very close to the "ambush scene" in Last of the Mohegans for exciting hand to hand combat.



Here is Siegfried Sassoon in 1918. Close you eyes and imagine you have been fighting over the same ground for four years.  Hundreds of thousands of casualties and hardly a mile of ground has been gained.  What was a lark that was supposed to "end by Christmas" has become a bitter, unending way of life.

And some have maintained that this was a war that did not end, finally, until a pistol shot in a bunker in Berlin in 1945.

THE REAR-GUARD

Groping along the tunnel, step by step,
He winked his prying torch with patching glare
From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air.
Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know,
A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed;
And he, exploring fifty feet below
the rosy gloom of battle overhead.
Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw someone lie
Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,
And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug.
"I'm looking for headquarters." No reply.
"God blast your neck!" (For days he'd had no sleep.)
"Get up and guide me through this stinking place."
Savage, he kicked the soft, unanswering heap,
And flashed his beam across the livid face
Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore
Agony dying hard ten days before;
And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.
Alone he staggered on until he found
Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair
To the dazed, muttering creatures underground
Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound.
At last, with sweat of horror in his hair,
He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,
Unloading hell behind him step by step.