The poppy is for sacrifice
With Remembrance Day coming up on Wednesday I bought a red poppy from a Legacy chap at the post office on Friday.
In fact, I gave the man $5 and he handed over four poppies, so I gave two of them to Jim and Maggie.
I always get a little reflective and melancholy around Remembrance Day.
It really is a fitting reminder of the horrors of World War One and a chance for me to ensure the memory of my great uncle James Gorey (pictured below) lives on.
The Anzac Day website contains this information about the red poppy symbol:
November is poppy month, the time of the year when by the wearing of a simple emblem, a red poppy, we salute the memory of those who sacrificed their health, their strength, even their lives, that we might live in a free country.
Long known as the corn poppy (Papaver rhoeas) because it flourishes as a weed in grain fields, the Flanders poppy as it is now usually called, grew profusely in the trenches and craters of the war zone. Artillery shells and shrapnel stirred up the earth and exposed the seeds to the light they needed to germinate.
This same poppy also flowers in Turkey in early spring – as it did in April 1915 when the ANZACs landed at Gallipoli. According to Australia’s official war historian C.E.W.Bean, a valley south of ANZAC beach got its name Poppy Valley “from the field of brilliant red poppies near its mouth”.
The modern story of the poppy is, of course, no legend. In the years immediately following World War 1, governments and the whole of society, had not accepted the responsibility for those incapacitated and bereft as a result of war. In Britain, unemployment accentuated the problem. Earl Haig, the British Commander-in-Chief, undertook the task of organising the British Legion as a means of coping with the problems of hundreds and thousands of men who had served under him in battle.
In 1921, a group of widows of French ex-servicemen called on him at the British Legion Headquarters. They brought with them from France some poppies they had made, and suggested that they might be sold as a means of raising money to aid the distressed among those who were incapacitated as a result of the war. The first red poppies to come to Australia, in 1921, were made in France.
In Australia, single poppies are not usually worn on Anzac Day – the poppy belongs to Remembrance Day, 11 November. However, wreaths of poppies are traditionally placed at memorials and honour boards on ANZAC Day.
The red Flanders’ poppy was first described as a flower of remembrance by Colonel John McCrae, who was Professor of Medicine at McGill University of Canada before World War One. Colonel McCrae had served as a gunner in the Boer War, but went to France in World War One as a medical Officer with the first Canadian Contingent.
At the second battle of Ypres in 1915, when in charge of a small first-aid post, he wrote in pencil on a page torn from his despatch book:
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.
What a very interesting post. It’s nice to learn some of your country’s history and how you remember it. Thank you for sharing!
Yes I also bought a poppy from the man outside the post office.
It is just as well it wasn’t as hot as today, last Friday, the poor legacy men & women would have had a struggle sitting in the heat.
My grandfather always had poppy flowers in his garden at his house in Port Augusta. I can remember he never liked anyone to pick them to put in a vase, inside, because he said they dropped their petals, once picked.
An interesting post Michael.
Both my Grandfathers served in WWI, and returned. My maternal Grandfather William (Bill) Bailey with the British army on the Western Front, and my paternal Grandfather Albert Leslie (Les) McFarlane with the AIF at Gallipoli, where after 10 days he was wounded and evacuated to hospital Malta.
There are a couple of good websites that record service details of enlisted soldiers:
- The AIF Project: http://www.aif.adfa.edu.au:8080/index.html
and
- Mapping our Anzacs: http://mappingouranzacs.naa.gov.au/
I have posted an extract from Grandfather McFarlane diary on this site at:
http://our-anzacs.tumblr.com/post/92112874/pte-albert-leslie-mcfarlanes-gallipoli-diary