In Flanders
Fields
The poppy is such a beautiful, delicate, vibrant red flower, I love how the petals blow gently in the
breeze and with the lead up to Remembrance Day it brings us a sea of these pretty red flowers
and of course I know, as we all do, that the poppy commemorates the loss of soldiers lives who
fought in WW1.
I doubt many people know why the poppy was chosen so
I decided to find out and to share it with you. I personally
found it very interesting and here I give you a short version of
why it has become synonymous with great loss of life in war.
The field poppy is an annual plant which flowers each year.
Its seeds are disseminated on the wind and can lie dormant
in the ground for a long time. If the ground is disturbed from
early spring the seeds will germinate and the poppy flowers
will grow.
This is exactly what happened in parts of the front lines in
Belgium and France. Once the ground was disturbed by
the fighting, the poppy seeds began to germinate and grow
during the warm weather.
During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres, a
young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer,
was killed. He was serving in the same Canadian artillery
unit as a friend of his, the Canadian military doctor and
artillery commander, Major John McCrae. When John
McCrae returned to the Battle fields, the sight of these
delicate red flowers growing on the shattered ground caught
his attention. He noticed how they had sprung up in the
disturbed ground of the burials around the artillery position
he was in. He is believed to have composed a poem
following the death of his dear friend. The first lines of the
poem have become some of the most famous lines written in
relation to the First World War.
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In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
The origin of the red Flanders poppy as a modern-day
symbol of Remembrance was the inspiration of an American
woman, Miss Moina Michael, who was on duty at the YMCA
Oversea War Secretaries’ headquarters in November 1918.
A young soldier passed by and left a copy of a journal on her
desk. On reading the poem by John McCrae, Moina made
a personal pledge and vowed always to wear a red poppy
of Flanders Fields as a sign of remembrance. Three men
attending the conference then arrived at Moina’s desk. On
behalf of the delegates they asked her to accept a cheque
for 10 dollars, in appreciation of the effort she had made to
brighten the offices with flowers at her own expense.
She was touched by the gesture and bought one large and
twenty-four small artificial red silk poppies with the money.
She wore one of these poppies on her coat collar. The
delegates from the Conference crowded round her and she
told them why she was wearing her poppy and on hearing
this they asked her for poppies to wear.
According to Moina, this was the first group-effort asking
for poppies to wear in memory of “all who died in Flanders
Fields”. Since this group had given money with which to