"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days .... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done" A young friend and former student of Major McCrae, Lt Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2nd May. Helmer’s death particularly affected Major McCrae. Lt Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae’s dressing station, and in the absence of the chaplain, McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony. Sitting on the back of an ambulance on the next day, McCrae started to compose a poem with sentiments of his pain and anguish. In 1915, at the second battle of Ypres, he wrote in pencil on a page from his dispatch book a poem that has come to be known as “In Flanders Fields” which describes the poppies that marked the graves of soldiers killed fighting for their country. McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling lines in a notebook. Cyril Allinson, who was a young twenty two year old sergeant major at that time, watched McCrae write it. Allinson was delivering mail that day when he saw McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant major stood there quietly. Allinson recalled “His face was very tired but calm as he wrote”. “He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer’s grave.” When he finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and without saying a word, handed his pad to the young soldier. Allinson was moved by what he read.
"On the afternoon of Sunday May the 2nd, the 2nd Battery is being strafed heavily. Lieutenant Alex Helmer had left his bunk. En route, an eight inch lands on him, blowing him to pieces. As soon as the strafing stops, a couple of his men go to the burying ground and dig the grave. The others go around the area, picking up as many of the pieces as they can find to put into sand bags, which are then laid into an army blanket in the form of a body. A small group gathered together and John McRae recites part of the burial service, which we all are familiar with: "I am the resurrection, and the life." John McRae was terribly moved. Alex Helmer had been one of his close friends. Shortly after that, he went and sat on the ambulance, looking at the grave and then writing the original version of 'In Flanders Fields'.
Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent to the newspapers in England. “The Spectator” in London rejected it, but “Punch” published it on 8th December 1915. To this day McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains one of the most memorable war poems ever written, with its lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient.
In Flanders Fields In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row by row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard among 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 yea break faith with us who die We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
McCrae was a chronic asthmatic, and his lungs had been badly damaged by the chlorine gas at Ypres.
On 25 January 1918, he fell ill with pneumonia, and in three days he was dead.
Selengkapnya....
On 25 January 1918, he fell ill with pneumonia, and in three days he was dead.
