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Remembrance Day and the Poppy

On Remembrance Day — November 11 — also known as Armistice Day or Veteran’s Day, it is traditional to wear a poppy flower to commemorate those killed in World War 1 and other wars. The Flanders poppy (Papaver rhoeas) 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 Australian war historian C.E.W.Bean, a valley south of ANZAC beach was named Poppy Valley “from the field of brilliant red poppies near its mouth.”

Legend has it that the poppy was associated with human sacrifice in the time of the Mogul leader, Genghis Khan. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Mogul Emperor led his army on campaigns south to India, and west to Russia as far as the Black Sea. The armies of Genghis Khan would isolate their enemies, surround and completely annihilate them. The battlefields were literally drenched with blood, and, on those fields, white poppies grew in great quantities.

In 1921, a group of widows of French servicemen called on the British Commander-in-Chief to ask for help in coping with the aftermath of the war. They carried with them 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. This started the tradition of selling poppies to raise money for war veterans and their families.

The red Flanders’ poppy was first described as a flower of remembrance by the Canadian Colonel John McCrae, who went to France in World War One as a medical Officer with the first Canadian Contingent. At the second battle of Ypres in 1915, he wrote a poem 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.
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.

Colonel John McCrae, 1915

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