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Ode to the poppy

Article By: Cynthia Ross Cravit

Oct 30, 2011

The poppy has been an international symbol of remembrance since the 19th century Napoleonic Wars, over 110 years before it was adopted by Canada.

In November, Canadians wear scarlet poppies to pay tribute to those who have died in war and military operations. At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month — the time the Armistice of World War I was signed in 1918 — people across the country are asked to observe two minutes of silence to remember those servicemen and women who have sacrificed their lives.

The poppy has been an international symbol of remembrance since the 19th century Napoleonic Wars, over 110 years before it was adopted by Canada. A record from the time reflects on how the destruction wrought by war transformed bare land into fields of blood-red flowers which grew around the bodies of fallen soldiers.

Scarlet poppies (popaver rhoeas), long known as the corn poppy because it flourished as a weed in grain fields, grew abundantly in the trenches of the war zone. Artillery shells and shrapnel stirred up the earth and exposed the seeds to the light they needed to germinate. While the seeds of the flower can remain dormant for years, they are known to blossom spectacularly once the soil is churned.

The poppy became a lasting memorial o the fallen in Canada and the Commonwealth due largely to Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian Medical Officer during the First World War. During the Battle of Ypres in 1915, Lt.-Col. McCrae wrote the poem In Flanders Fields when he saw poppies growing beside a grave of a close friend who had died in battle.

While the poppy has become a modern symbol of sacrifice, its legend reaches back thousands of years. The flower has been found in Egyptian tombs dating back 3,000 years. Homer mentions poppies in the Iliad when he compares the head of a dying warrior to that of a hanging poppy flower.

And in ancient Greece, poppies were considered sacred to Hypnos, the god of sleep. Ancient imagery depicts Hypnos with poppies in his hands and crowning his head. The doorway to his temple was also decorated with poppy blossoms. Hypnos was thought to bring prophetic dreams and relief to those suffering from grief or emotional pain.

Ancient Greeks thought that poppies were a sign of fertility. Poppy seeds were thought to induce vitality and strength so Greek athletes were given mixtures of poppy seeds, honey, and wine.

The Romans knew the god Hypnos as Somnus, which is echoed in the flower’s Latin name Papaver somniferum — somnus ferre — bringer of sleep. The poppy was also associated with Thanatos, or Hades the Lord of Dead, and of eternal sleep.

Poppies can also be linked to the Mogul leader, Genghis Khan. In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Mogul Emperor led his warriors on campaigns south to India, and west to Russia as far as the Black Sea. According to legend, pure white poppies erupted on churned up battlefields drenched with blood.

(And while Oriental poppies contain opium, the corn poppy, does not. And remember when Dorothy fell asleep in a field of flowers in the Wizard of Oz? The flowers were poppies.)

The first artificial poppies as memorial symbols were distributed in Canada in 1921. Today the volunteer donations from the distribution of millions of poppies are an important source of revenue for the Royal Canadian Legion that goes toward various programs helping ex-servicemen and women.
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.

John McCrae, 1915




From poppies to peace: Poem remembers the fallen
Article By: John Macdonald - Aug 05, 2011

Learn the story behind one of Remembrance Day's most famous poems.

Undoubtedly one of the world’s most famous poems, written by a Canadian doctor on a blood-soaked battlefield in war-ravaged Belgium during World War 1, In Flanders Fields has become an international plea for world peace.

Dr. John McCrae had just buried one of his closest friends, killed by a direct hit from a German shell. The friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was buried in a crude grave marked by a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were just beginning to bloom between the crosses marking the many graves.

McCrae had been in the trenches every day for several weeks attending hundreds of wounded and dying soldiers near Ypres, Belgium, in an area traditionally called “Flanders.”

“It was a nightmare,” he wrote his mother. “For 17 days and 17 nights, none of us have had our clothes off… gunfire and rifle fire never ceased.”

McCrae sat in the morning sun on May 3, 1915, outside his makeshift field hospital, listening to the chirping of birds amid the thunder of the guns. He looked over at the nearby cemetery with its rows and rows of crosses amid brightly colored poppies.

Tearing a page out of his dispatcbook, he quickly wrote a short poem of just 15 lines, yet an immortal 15 lines –

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.

John McCrae

It was printed anonymously on Dec. 8, 1915, in Punch, a leading British magazine. The short but moving poem struck a nerve, and struck a chord with soldiers and civilians alike. Within two years, it had been reprinted throughout the British Empire and the United States, playing a major role in attracting public donations for the war effort through the sale of Victory Bonds.

But McCrae never returned home to enjoy the acclaim. He had suffered much in three years of war, including a poison gas attack which seriously aggravated his asthma. Yet throughout his time, he worked with little rest and under horrendous conditions to care for the wounded.

McCrae died on January 8, 1918, of pneumonia and meningitis in the military hospital at Wimereux, just up the coast from Boulogne, France, and was buried the next day with full military honours in the Wimereux cemetery. A hundred nursing sisters in uniform formed a line at the graveside. One later wrote, “All came as we did, because we loved him so.”

Canadians mourned the death of their soldier/doctor/poet with nation-wide tributes, including a stained-glass window at McGill University with the inscription: “Pathologist, Poet, Soldier, Physician, Man Among Men.”

Famed Canadian writer Stephen Leacock wrote in tribute: “John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields will live as long as the memory of the heroic struggle of the Canadians that formed its inspiration.”
Today, while millions know the poem In Flanders Fields, few know anything of the author.

John McCrae was born on Nov. 30, 1872, in Guelph, the second son of a soldier, Lt. Col. David McCrae. Always interested in the military, he joined the Militia field battery in Guelph, commanded by his father. He also attended the University of Toronto and graduated as a medical doctor in 1898 — it was while at university, he developed a flair for writing poetry. McCrae took part in the Boer War, not as a doctor but as an officer in the Guelph contingent of the Canadian Field Artillery.

Following the Boer War, he dropped his military connections and concentrated on medicine, gaining renown for his work in Montreal, lecturing at McGill and other universities, even writing several medical textbooks. When Canada declared war on Germany on Aug. 4, 1914, McCrae was one of the first to join, as brigade-surgeon to the Canadian Forces Artillery with the rank of major.

McRae’s homestead in Guelph, a small stone cottage turned into a museum, sits on a quiet street overlooking the Speed River. In 1966, a group of Guelph citizens purchased the cottage, built in 1857, to honor McCrae’s memory. Today, it’s a small but interesting museum, with several rooms displaying furniture from the year McCrae was born plus historical displays illustrating his life.

This Nov. 30 will be a major event at the homestead as it marks the 125th anniversary of McCrae’s birth.

“November 30 will be a major happening here,” says Val Harrison, program co-ordinator at the Centre. “We’ll be opening a new exhibit on John McCrae’s life and celebrating his birthday with parades and church services. Even a big birthday cake.”

For the past eight years, the Guelph Amateur Radio Club has used the homestead as a base to broadcast during Remembrance Day Week, transmitting messages of peace to thousands of “ham” radio operators around the world. Club members will be sending and receiving messages at the homestead from Nov. 4 to 11. And beside the cottage, a memorial cenotaph and garden of remembrance is the scene of many ceremonies of remembrance by Guelph veterans.

After McCrae’s tragic death in France, Moina Michael, in charge of a New York YWCA hostel, was intrigued by the concept of a poppy as symbol of peace after reading In Flanders Fields and distributed some for people to mark Armistice Day. A friend took her idea back to France and set war widows and orphans to work making artificial poppies to raise funds specifically for war-torn areas.

In 1921, the British Legion picked up the idea and within a year, it had spread to Canada, United States, New Zealand and Australia. And today, that symbol of peace, the poppy, along with McRae’s famous poem, lives on as a reminder of the sacrifices made by armed forces in numerous conflicts throughout the decades.



Giving birth as bombs fall

Article By: Jenny Hetherington
May 13, 2010


An unsung hero: the amazing story of one woman's selfless acts of bravery and compassion.

History is not kind to the humble. Stories celebrating selfless acts of bravery and compassion are often never told because the heroes shy away from praise and attention. My mother, Halina Pisarski, was one of these special people.

Her story begins in May 1940, three days after Germany invaded Belgium. My father was off fighting for the British forces. Nine months pregnant and with 8- and 10-year old sons in tow, she boarded a train hoping to reach the relative safety of France.

It took three days for that train to cover 75 kilometres. During the trek there was nothing to eat or drink. What little food she had brought along was quickly exhausted. Things seemed impossibly desperate – and then she went into labour. The train stopped and she found herself stranded somewhere in southern Belgium, near the city of Tournai. How she protected her children from repeated attacks by low-flying aircraft strafing the train with bombs and machine-gun fire is a story in itself.

Now in full labour, she managed to get to a makeshift hospital where she met a young student nurse who helped deliver the baby. And there, in the middle of a war zone, I was born.

My brothers were told to wait outside. In all the confusion, a team of Red Cross workers collecting orphaned or stranded children picked them up and put them in their vehicle. An hour after I was delivered, the bombing became so intense that the building was evacuated. Clothed in only a short hospital gown and wrapped in a sheet, holding her one-hour-old infant close to her, my mother was put in an ambulance with severely wounded soldiers. The ambulance never had a chance to leave.

An explosion ripped off the roof of the vehicle and killed the driver. My mother somehow got out. She grabbed a coat from a dead soldier and rummaged around other dead bodies for handkerchiefs and anything else useful for herself and her newborn.

She was frantic over her missing sons but with no idea where to look and night falling, she took refuge in a barn with several other stranded women. One was a 17-year-old girl who had also just given birth but was unable to breastfeed. Another was a nurse who was caring for a baby whose mother died during childbirth. She too had no milk to feed the infant, so my mother fed all three newborns, one after the other. At night, the women had to stay awake to chase away rats. My mother remained in that barn for a few days in order to regain her strength. She begged at a nearby German army encampment for food for her as well as the other women.

My mother eventually took to the road and started looking for my brothers. She walked from orphanage to orphanage, asking every person she met if they knew where displaced children might have been taken. During the day, when one diaper was soiled, she would rinse it in a puddle of water and hang it on her back to dry. At one point, she took shelter for the night in the entrance of a chapel only to find out in the morning that there had been a sign outside the gated grounds with the warning: “Beware: Mine Field.”

And on she walked. Another night, she came upon a large deserted house. She found her way to one of the bedrooms and collapsed on a bed, completely exhausted from carrying her baby all day under a hot May sun. She had barely fallen asleep when a German soldier arrived and warned her that the house had been requisitioned as a hospital for German soldiers. However, he took pity on us and told her she could spend the night. He even brought her some hot soup to eat. She finally found my brothers at a nunnery and returned home to Brussels.

At this point, I should mention that my mother was Polish, and that she had dark brown eyes and black hair. Even though she had attended university, the only work she could find was cleaning houses. It was wartime and people were wary of foreigners. She was constantly on her guard on her way to and from work because the Gestapo would frequently pick up anyone who looked remotely Jewish.

In 1943, even though I was barely three, I remember the Gestapo coming to our apartment building to take away the Jewish family who lived downstairs. By a stroke of good fortune, the youngest daughter was not at home that evening. A few days later, my mother was approached and asked to take the little girl to Antwerp where a family would hide the child. My mother accepted the mission without hesitation.

I vividly remember how she recounted that story to me. There was a German officer seated on the train across from my mother and the little girl. He kept glancing back and forth between her and the girl. While he was staring, all she could think about was her three-year-old daughter and her now 11- and 13-year-old boys at home alone. They had been strictly instructed not to leave the apartment. She battled slipping into panic. What would happen to them if anything happened to her?

When she arrived in Antwerp, the arrangement called for my mother to sit on a bench with the girl. A woman would come, sit on the other side of the child and my mother would leave. However, my mother was so traumatized by the ride on the train that her legs were frozen in place and incapable of supporting her. Finally as darkness came, she found the strength to get up and board the train back to Brussels.

These were not her only heroic deeds. She sent parcels to that Jewish family in the German work camp even though she barely earned enough to feed herself and her children. I still have the postcards they sent her asking for food and clothing. I remember how she told me that she had had to work one full day to purchase one egg for me! For three long years after I was born, she pumped her breasts every single day and took the excess milk to the Red Cross to feed preemies and newborns whose mothers had died or couldn’t produce breast milk and who could not properly digest cow’s milk. She was given a booklet where they tracked the number of litres of milk she donated! I still have that precious document in my possession. She only stopped when her teeth literally started to disintegrate from lack of calcium. Any cow’s milk she worked so hard to purchase was for us children; she never drank a drop.

There are only two of us left now, a younger brother and I. Who will remember my mother when we are gone? I do not want her name to pass into oblivion after I am no longer here to cherish and honour her memory and her contributions. I decided to contact Plan Canada, an international development and relief organization, I have long been supporting. They set up an Endowment Fund in my mother’s name to keep her memory alive. It is designed so that all the proceeds go toward Plan Canada’s Children of War Fund. I know my mother would be proud of helping children in conflict zones even after her passing. Through this fund, the legacy of her courage and goodness will live on.

I had the privilege of calling this great woman “Maman.” To others, she was simply Halina Pisarski.
Jenny Hetherington lives in Toronto. For more information on setting up a legacy or endowment fund, please go to Plancanada.ca/waystogive.