Poppies in Flanders Field: Dr. McGrae will be honored with two statues

I recently wrote a post of “Poppies in Flanders Field” mentioning Dr. John McGrae’s (a Canadian doctor served in WWI in the Western Front) famous poem.  He’ll be honored with two statues: one in Ottawa and one in his home town.

It is of interest that we also read about poppies in the first chapter of Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (the story of WWI).

“The wind plays with our hair; it plays with our words and thoughts.  The three boxes stand in the midst of the glowing, red field-poppies.”

“It might easily have happened that we should not be sitting here on our boxes today.  It came dame near to that.  And so everything is new and brave, red poppies and good food, cigarettes and summer breeze.”

The following are the poignant stanzas of McGrae’s  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.

Why read All Quiet on the Western Front?

To read is to find the truth and enjoy the beauty and this applies to science as well as humanity.  We tend to forget that there is beauty in science/mathematics, as Paul Dirac said “God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.”

Books in humanity talk about beautiful people, minds and stories in beautiful language, and above all, the truth.  One only needs to read two chapters, or perhaps one, of All Quiet on the Western Front to know why it was one of the books burned by Hitler’s Nazi regime.  It is a fiction talking about the truth in the battle field and may be some of what I call “savage beauty”.

I picked up the book while reading WWI, but knowledge of WWI is not a prerequisite to enjoy this book.  It is a very small book; one can finish it in a day or two with no interruption or making notes.  I’ll give you a taste of some samples:

Go to the front:
There are rumors of an offense. . . . on the way to the front, they saw polished, brand new coffins.  They still smell of resins, and pine, and the forest.  There are at least a hundred.

“That's a good preparation for the offense,” says Muller, astonished.

“They are for us,” growls Detering.

“Don't talk rat,” says Kat to him angrily.

“You be thankful if you get so much as a coffin,” grins Tjaden, “they'll ship you a water proof sheet for your old Aunt Sally of a carcass.”

What earth means to a soldier:

To no man does the earth mean so much as to the soldier.  When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully, when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her security; she shelters him and releases him for ten seconds to live, ten seconds of life; receives him again and often forever.

Earth!--Earth!--Earth!

Earth with thy folds, and hollows, and holes, into which a man by fling himself and crouch down.  In the spasm of terror, under the hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-own life.  Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm, streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones, bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony of hope bite into thee with our lips!