As has been a custom for years, if you gave a donation to the American Legion a few weeks before Memorial Day, [this year, on Monday, May 26] you received a little red paper poppy in return.
One of the most-asked questions is, “Why Poppies?” The answer is that poppies only flower in churned-up soil. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years, but will sprout only when someone roots up the ground.
Poppies, common in Europe, sprouted in profusion on the battlefields of the Western Front during World War I. These fields now hold the bodies of thousands of men who gave their lives there.
In May, 1915, before the United States entered the war, Canadian Major John McCrea wrote one of the most memorable war poems ever written, as poppies bloomed around him.
The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts, beside dabbling in poetry. As a surgeon he spent weeks treating injured men - Canadians, British, Indians, French and Germans - in the fierce fighting of the “Ypres salient.”
Sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near a dressing station, Major McCrea penned the following poem (first two verses):
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the corpses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
That larks, still bravely singing, fly
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.
Today, American Legion poppies are assembled by disabled, needy and aging veterans in Veterans Administration hospitals. Proceeds go toward these veterans and to maintain veterans’ rehabilitation and service programs.
Walter Karas is the Commander of the Little Neck-Douglaston Post #103 of the American Legion.
Editor’s Note: Major John McCrea, a life-long asthmatic, developed pneumonia in January of 1918 and died five days later. He was 42-years-old. The second battle of Ypres, in 1915, lasted for a month. Over 105,000 men were killed, wounded or went missing. The battle was “indecisive.”
