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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

During the Second Battle of Ypres a Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2 May, 1915 by an exploding shell. He was a friend of the Canadian military doctor Major John McCrae.

McCrae was asked to conduct the burial service owing to the chaplain being called away on duty elsewhere and later that evening he began to write his poem ‘In Flanders Fields’.

Today, nearly a century after McCrea’s poem was written, the wearing of the poppy which it inspired has increasingly attracted as much controversy as it has publicity.

Since The Saturdays were invited to frolic half naked in a sea of poppies to launch this year’s Poppy Appeal, you can’t turn on the television (is it just me, or like Halloween and Christmas, does the build up to Remembrance Day seem to start earlier every year?) without seeing celebrities, sportsmen, presenters, politicians and other public figures mandatorially adorned with the scarlet flower (Check out the X Factor this weekend and you’ll see what I mean!). Ben Griffin, the first SAS soldier to refuse to go into combat has called it a ‘month-long drum roll of support for current wars’.

Whether you agree with him, the Poppy Appeal by the British Legion (which hopes to raise £36m this year) is for many a most worthwhile of charitable causes. Whatever we may think of the modern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, British servicemen and women injured there, or in earlier conflicts, surely deserve our respect and care. Service people don’t start wars but they are the ones on the front line and we are all in their debt because of that.

That’s why the fate of the simple poppy and its meaning in the mass-media age is a real concern. Has it become so banalised that its ambivalent origins and meaning, as McCrae’s poem, have been forgotten?

Attempts to enforce poppy-wearing as a patriotic act diminish the true value of the poppy as a personal statement. Likewise the attempts, allegedly by some national retailers in Belfast City Centre, Connswater Shopping Centre and other retail outlets around Northern Ireland to prevent staff from wearing poppies (and even refusing to serve some customers who wear them) are an affront to the memory of all those who sacrificed themselves in defense of their country and a denial of the freedom that they fought for.

The wearing the poppy is not political (although some would make it so).

As one commentator has said quite rightly this weekend, ‘The scarlet poppy is a symbol of blood sacrifice and death; it is also a symbol of the stubborn renewal of hope and life. It can be worn as a symbol of pride but also as a symbol of grief and of refusal to forget the lessons of the past’.

So let’s not allow the politicians, the military and the bigots to exploit the meaning of the wearing of this scarlet symbol for their own agendas.

Let’s not forget today or on Thursday, or on any day what the real significance of the simple little Poppy is.

Silent Single

If you want to show your support for the Poppy Appeal this year you can also purchase the Silent Single now on iTunes, featuring Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, superproducer Mark Ronson, David Cameron, Bryan Ferry, Bob Hoskins and tennis star Andy Murray during two minutes of silence.