In Flanders Fields

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One of the most famous poems to come out of World War I was written by Canadian physician, John McCrae.

In April 1915, McCrae was stationed in the trenches near Ypres, Belgium, in an area called Flanders, during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. In the midst of the battle, McCrae’s friend, twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed by artillery fire and quickly buried in a grave not far from the front line. Due to the absence of a chaplain, McCrae conducted Lieutenant Helmer’s funeral service. After seeing the field of makeshift graves blooming with wild poppies, he wrote his poem “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.

9 thoughts on “In Flanders Fields”

  1. A considerably better poem about that bloody, horrific war:

    Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen

    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
    Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
    Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
    And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
    Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
    But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
    Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
    Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

    Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
    Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
    As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

    In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
    He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

    If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
    Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
    And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
    His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
    If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
    Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
    Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
    Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
    My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
    To children ardent for some desperate glory,
    The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

    ————————-

    Edit: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (a line from Horace) is usually translated as: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”

    • A ‘minor’ detail for anyone who might want to criticise Wilfred Owen’s bitter anti-war fervor, in November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of twenty-five, one week before the Armistice.

      • And John McCrae died of pneumonia and meningitis while commanding a hospital behind the same front, nine months before that. Having died in a war does not make anyone exempt from criticism. Having died in that war doesn’t do much more than prove you were there.

        That said, I disagree sharply with your opinion that Owen’s poem is ‘considerably better’. I don’t care for his technique, which is rough and choppy, or for the undisciplined welter of images; but it is the tone that is the worst. No doubt it is all very fine and correct to take that tone, especially among people who have never seen war. But it comes down to this: Owen is hectoring his audience, passing judgement on the entire phenomenon of war because he has made the shocking discovery (so obviously unknown till then) that war is ugly. That men are killed in battle is news to no one. That men killed in battle die horribly, and men at war often live horribly, is not news either; but Owen has appointed himself the bearer of those exceedingly late tidings.

        Nor do I care for the way he twists Horace. If you read the passage from Ode III.2 in context, Horace is not saying that dying in battle is a good thing; only that it is far better than being slaughtered as you run away. A pacifist in a comfy chair reading Wilfred Owen is at liberty to forget this only because thousands of his countrymen remember it and keep themselves prepared for war.

        I shall leave the last word to George Orwell, From ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’:

        We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don’t take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

        • 1. What matters is not the original context of that line, but how it was used by the English monarchy to justify sending millions of young men off to die in order to cling onto their empire.

          2. War is choppy and ugly. Making poetry about it pretty is part of the lie that Wilfred Owen was objecting to. I loathe McCrae’s belief that it is an honour to die fighting a war between monarchies and I loathe how he ‘prettied it up’. It is a soppy poem celebrating bad values.

          3. The point of my mentioning Owen’s death is to refute exactly what you said: that is only a ‘pacifist in a comfy chair’ who objects to a bloody slaughter. Owen was the absolute opposite of that, and if anyone had a right to hector about the LIES that soldiers were told as they were sent off to die in that horrific and unnecessary war, it was he.

          4. Yes, sometimes you have to fight to survive, but war must only happen when it IS a fight to survive. In the case of WWI, there was no fight to survive, only a fight between the aristocracy in two nations to retain their empires.

  2. 1. What matters is not the original context of that line, but how it was used by the English monarchy to justify sending millions of young men off to die in order to cling onto their empire.

    2. War is choppy and ugly. Making poetry about it pretty is part of the lie that Wilfred Owen was objecting to. I loathe McCrae’s belief that it is an honour to die fighting a war between monarchies and I loathe how he ‘prettied it up’. It is a soppy poem celebrating bad values.

    3. The point of my mentioning Owen’s death is to refute exactly what you said: that is only a ‘pacifist in a comfy chair’ who objects to a bloody slaughter. Owen was the absolute opposite of that, and if anyone had a right to hector about the LIES that soldiers were told as they were sent off to die in that horrific and unnecessary war, it was he.

    4. Yes, sometimes you have to fight to survive, but war must only happen when it IS a fight to survive. In the case of WWI, there was no fight to survive, only a fight between the aristocracy in two nations to retain their empires.

    • I shall leave with these last words from myself. If there is one thing a poet has the duty to tell, it is truth. If it is a truth that many would prefer not to hear such as in the truth about wars and those who profit from them, then it is, even more, the duty of a real poet to tell that truth and tell it in all its stark ugliness.

      • the duty of a real poet to tell that truth and tell it in all its stark ugliness.

        Real poets? Like real authors? Serious writers?

        Let’s raise a glass to poets, authors, and writers who don’t give a hoot about being real, serious, or accepting duties imposed by bystanders.

  3. Instead, I’ll raise a glass to poets who give a hoot about their work being more than fluff, ones like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But you do you.

    • Real poets, real writers, and serious writers know fluff when they see it.

      Poets, authors and writers rely on them.

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