Dear Friends,

Ninety-three years ago another war, on different battlefields, but these words still speak to us today. The article is reposted from 2007, yet the sentiments remain current.

There are those who say that unless Americans have relatives on the battlefields of Iraq or Afghanistan, the war is not their war, that for the nation as a whole, the fighting is nothing more than a blip on the evening TV news.

Perhaps, for some, this may be true, but on this Memorial Day, if we had x-ray vision, we would be able to identify broken hearts and anguished thoughts of millions of our people over the suffering displayed in living color in our morning papers, in hospitals across the land, and in our cemeteries.

All the wounded, the deceased, the frightened, lonely men and women “over there” are “over here” in our thoughts and prayers. We may not know their names, but they are ours. We are a proud and grateful people for their sacrifice and courage.

Concurrently, as suspicions grow about the questionable driving force of oil interests behind the war that asked and continues to ask so much of those so young, a counter-force is growing to bring to justice those who may have perpetrated this farce of blood for oil upon our trusting people.

Yet, for this day, we will lay aside such dire thoughts and join our fellow citizens, creating an invisible but real Church of God, as we raise our voices in petition for peace and mercy, for wisdom and courage, for compassion and steadfastness, whether in grand mansions or simple cottages hugging sparkling mountain streams.

At times, poetry can express what leaves prose limping around in circles. Such a poem is In Flanders Fields by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918), which remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. The Arlington National Cemetery Website offers us the story of the making of the poem:

Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible for McCrae to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, in his dressing station.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men – Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans – in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it: “I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of those seventeen days ... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.”

One death particularly affected McCrae, a young friend and former student. Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May, 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae’s dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l’Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. “His face was very tired but calm as he wrote,” Allinson recalled. “He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer’s grave.”

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

“The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.”

In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915. ( Updated: 11 September 2004)

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm

May God grant rest to those who have given their lives that we might live in freedom’s peace. May He comfort those in sorrow with His presence and bestow upon them hope for a Kingdom beyond the guns of war.

Amen.

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