REMEMBERING “THE GREAT WAR”

In Flanders Fields

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.

                      By John McCrae (1872-1918)

When I was in elementary school (1955-1961), one of my teachers assigned several poems for us to memorize. My teacher assigned them, but I credit my mother for teaching me the nuances of poetry recitation, pointing out where to pause and where to continue the thought. “There’s no comma at the end of that line,” she would say, “which means you continue to the next line without pausing.” She listened to me recite over and over, often while we did the supper dishes. “Don’t sing-song,” she would say. “Keep your voice even.” On a given day in school, we would stand individually before the class to recite the poem – yes, for a grade. I’m sure I was nervous, but I was prepared and confident, thanks to my mother.

When I announced to my parents that I was to memorize In Flanders Fields, the news was accepted with solemnity, almost reverence. “They know about this,” I thought to myself. My dad explained that soldiers from our country who fought in World War I had been killed and buried in Flanders (present-day Belgium), but I was just a child and the significance of that was lost on me. What he didn’t say – and what I see today – was that the author, John McCrae, himself a soldier, was speaking on behalf of the fallen. (Wikipedia tells me that Lt. Col. John McCrae, M.D., was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier who served as a surgeon during World War I. He died of pneumonia before the end of the war.)

My parents, born in 1904 and 1909, both had memories of the World War I era, and one day when I was older, they talked about it.

“As the boys went off to war, we would have a picnic in the park, and everybody would go to say good-bye,” Mother said.

“You didn’t know if you would ever see them again,” I observed, suddenly struck by the poignancy of that event.

“You figured you wouldn’t,” she said, matter-of-factly. “And we had so little news of the war. We wanted to know what was happening. But when ‘Johnny Jones’ was drafted, we knew he would tell us all about it when he came back. He was such a talker! He never quit talking.” Johnny did come back, she said, but he never talked again. The war had changed him.

Poppies became a symbol of World War I, and I have another childhood memory of little artificial poppies being sold on the street in Lewiston, probably by the American Legion. Mother gave the man two dimes for two poppies. He had little safety pins available, and she pinned one on my collar and one on her own. “It means that you remember those fallen in World War I,” she said. Another time she stressed to me that the poppies were about World War I, not World War II. KW