[lit-ideas] Re: Canadian content(?)
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2005 09:17:37 -0700
on 4/26/05 10:57 AM, Chris Bruce at bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I have the distinct impression that John McRae was a Canadian
You might like to see, Linda Granfield, "In Flanders Fields; the Story of
the Poem by John McCrae." (ISBN 0-7737-3333). It's an illustrated
children's book. Very well done.
"In Flanders Fields" began with the death, on the second of May, during the
second battle of Ypres, of McCrae's close friend, Lieutanant Alexis Helmer.
It was published in "Punch" (!) on December 8, 1915.
McCrae came from a military and medical background. He was the son of a
soldier, had won a medal for being the best drilled cadet in Ontario, at
fifteen was a bugler in his father's battery, at eighteen was a gunner. At
university he joined the Queen's Own Rifles. While working in hospitals in
Canada and the U.S., he wrote poems in which, "peace after death was a
repeated theme." [I quote because I haven't seen these poems]. He served
in the Boer War and joined up again in 1914, hoping for a command in the
artillery.
Is it an anti-war poem? It was not treated as such. One line--if ye break
faith...we shall not sleep-- was used in recruiting efforts and in sales'
pitches for war bonds. McCrae's military background and fondness for brave
sentiments--in a scrap book he copied out, "They are slaves who will not
dare/All wrongs to right, all rights to share"--suggest that he thought
might could, in some circumstances, make right. But he had a very tough
war, treating casualties from Second Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge and
Passchendaele. The diagnosis when he died was "Pneumonia with meningitis,"
but they could have put down "exhaustion." I doubt that he was an ardent
warrior after all that.
Not long after his death, the war ended and Earl Haig's Fund for Ex-Service
Men of All Ranks, began using the very same lines in posters asking for
donations. "Wear a Flanders Poppy" was the pitch. Soon French war widows
and orphans were making silk poppies for sale in North America and there was
talk of replacing the maple leaf, Canada's national symbol, with a red
poppy.
I think we now tend to hear, "We are the Dead. Short days ago we lived..."
as a complaint against the awful waste of that war. But then we have to
step around the beginning of stanza three, "Take up our quarrel with the
foe..." It's very much a poem of 1915, beyond the first enthusiasm but not
yet at Owen's bleak vista.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon
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