In Flanders Fields

The poem on the John McCrae Memorial, located at the home where he was born in Guelph , Ontario, Canada. Photograph taken on Remembrance Day , 2009

In Flanders Fields (German Auf Flanderns Feldern ) is one of the most famous English-language poems about the First World War . It was written on May 3, 1915 by the Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae , whose friend had died the day before in a grenade attack in the Second Battle of Flanders near Ypres . McCrae processed his grief in a poem about the fields in Flanders , where the red flowering poppy is reminiscent of the shed blood of the fallen and yet nourishes the hope that life will go on. The text, held as a rondeau , was first published on December 8 of the same year in the British satirical magazine Punch . In Flanders Fields became the most popular poem in the English-speaking world about World War I and the poppy blossom symbolized the fallen .

background

Trench with poppies, Dodengang in Diksmuide , West Flanders

During the Second Battle of Flanders on April 22, 1915, German troops attacked Allied positions with chlorine gas for the first time , which is considered to be the actual beginning of the gas war . Because the gas is heavier than air, it sank into the trenches , killing an estimated 10,000 soldiers, most of whom were painfully suffocated . Towards the end of the Ypres offensive, on May 25, 1915, about 35,000 German soldiers had died, the losses of the Allied troops were about twice as high, entire places were razed to the ground, the landscape devastated. Soon after the battle, poppies grew between the rows of graves with the countless wooden crosses.

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae

The doctor and writer John Alexander McCrae (1872-1918), who served as a medical officer on the Western Front , lost his best friend and former student, the 22-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, to a shrapnel in an attack on May 2, 1915 . Helmer was the same day on a tomb near McCrae's dressing station buried at the port of Ypres. In the absence of a clergyman, McCrae held a small funeral ceremony. The next day, tired of war, Lieutenant Colonel saw poppies blooming near the fresh grave, and he began to write down the impression and his thoughts on it in a notebook. He was watched by the 22-year-old sergeant Cyril Allinson, who was distributing the field mail. When McCrae finished his notes, he handed the paper to the young soldier. Allinson was moved by the lines; he later recalled: “The poem was an accurate description of the scene that presented itself to both of us. The word blow did not originally appear on the first line, but only later, when the poem appeared in Punch . But it was used on the penultimate line. He used the word blow because a light easterly wind was actually blowing on the poppy that morning. I didn't think at the moment that it would ever be published. It just seemed to me to be an exact description of the location. "

Commemorative plaque in Essex Farm Military Cemetery

Memorial at Essex Farm Military Cemetery

The poem almost never got published: McCrae threw it away without further ado. According to various sources, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Morrison - an editor from Ottawa in civil life - found the document and sent it to newspaper publishers in Great Britain, where it was finally published by the satirical magazine Punch on December 8, 1915.

John McCrae died on January 28, 1918 of complications from pneumonia in connection with meningitis in a military hospital near Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France. He was buried with military honors in nearby Wimereux . A collection of his poems was published posthumously in the same year under the title In Flanders Fields and Other Poems .

In Flanders Field wrote something north of Ypres, at the point where McCrae's poem, now houses the Military Cemetery Essex Farm Military Cemetery . The bunkers and trenches have been preserved. A memorial by the Bruges sculptor Pieter-Hein Boudens commemorates John McCrae; his poem is engraved on a commemorative plaque attached to one of the bunkers. There are 1,204 graves in the cemetery, including 1,107 British, nine Canadians, 83 unidentified victims and five Germans.

There is also a US military cemetery named after In Flanders Field , where 368 Americans are buried. The cemetery is near the Belgian town of Waregem , not where McCrae wrote his poem. The bronze base of the flagpole of the memorial is planted with poppies and daisies.

The poem

Copy of McCrae's handwritten note. The first line of the poem ends with “grow” in contrast to the printed version.

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.

symbolism

Poppy seeds remain viable for a very long time and germinate if the soil in which they are deposited is disturbed. This happened during the First World War through constant bombardment.

Artificial poppies commemorate the dead of the world wars on Remembrance Day .

Poppy meadow

The poppy (Engl. Poppy ) was due to the poem to the flower of remembrance of the numerous and nameless victims of war, why the war dead memorial in English-speaking countries of Remembrance Day , also Poppy Day is called. On this day, artificial poppies, so-called Remembrance Poppies , are distributed in exchange for donations and worn on the lapel. Poppy flowers are often laid at the memorials and graves. In most English-speaking countries, as well as Belgium and France, this memorial day is November 11th.

In addition to the association with the red color of the blood of the fallen, the poppy in McCrae's poem is also interpreted in connection with the narcotic effects of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) , from which morphine is obtained, which was used as a strong pain reliever for the seriously wounded soldiers.