Around Memorial Day, red poppies begin to make their annual appearance, pinned to people's lapels, tote bags or even hats. These colorful flowers, often made of fabric or crepe paper honor and memorialize fallen soldiers, as well as serving as a fundraiser to support our nation's war veterans. The resilient little flower's roots run deep, all the way back to the battlefields of World War I, where they grew in the unlikeliest of places.
From 1914 to 1918, World War I took a greater human toll than any previous conflict in history, with some 8.5 million soldiers dead of battlefield injuries or disease. Across northern France and Flanders (northern Belgium), the brutal clashes between Allied and Central Powers soldiers tore up fields and forests, tearing up trees and plants and wreaking havoc on the soil beneath. From the devastated landscape of the battlefields, the red poppy would grow and, thanks to a famous poem, become a powerful symbol of remembrance.
But in the warm early spring of 1915, bright red flowers began peeking through the battle-scarred land: known variously as the Flanders poppy, corn poppy, red poppy and corn rose. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian who served as a brigade surgeon for an Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of poppies that spring, shortly after the Second Battle of Ypres (22 April – 25 May 1915). McCrae tended to the wounded and got a firsthand look at the carnage of that clash, in which the Germans unleashed lethal chlorine gas for the first time in the war. Some 87,000 Allied soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing in the battle (as well as 37,000 on the German side); a friend of McCrae’s, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was among the dead.
Overcome with sorrow and struck by the sight of bright red blooms on broken ground, McCrae wrote a poem, "In Flanders Field," told from the perspective of the fallen soldiers buried beneath the poppies, it honored the troops who lost their lives in that conflict. Published in London's Punch magazine in late 1915, the poem would be used at countless memorial ceremonies and became one of the most famous works of art to emerge from the Great War.
"In Flanders Fields" by John McCrae
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.
Its fame had spread far and wide by the time McCrae himself died, from pneumonia and meningitis, in January 1918.
After World War I, the poppy flourished in Europe. Despite their cheerful flowers, poppies were technically classified as weeds. Even though the landscapes were left devastated, red poppies arose from the wreckage come spring, like tiny beacons of hope for those who witnessed the devastation of the war. Scientists attributed the growth to soils in France and Belgium becoming enriched with lime from the rubble left by the war.
Across the Atlantic, just two days before the armistice, Ladies Home Journal published "In Flanders Fields" in its November issue. Moina Michael, a professor at the University of Georgia at the time the war broke out, read it. She had taken a leave of absence to volunteer at the New York headquarters of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which trained and sponsored workers overseas. Inspired by McCrae’s verses and unable to get it out of her mind, Michael wrote her own poem in response, which she called "We Shall Keep Faith."
"We Shall Keep the Faith" by Moina Michael
Oh! You who sleep in Flanders fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders field
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that you wrought
In Flanders field
In addition to the poem, as a sign of this faith, and a remembrance of the sacrifices of Flanders Field, Michael vowed to always wear a red poppy to honor the fallen soldiers. She found an initial batch of fabric poppies for herself and her colleagues at a local department store.
After the war ended, she returned to the university town of Athens and came up with the idea of making and selling red silk poppies to raise money to support returning veterans.
She also started a campaign to create a national symbol of remembrance: a poppy in the colors of the Allied nations' flags entwined around a victory torch, but that did not get very far at first. But in mid-1920, she convinced Georgia's branch of the American Legion to adopt the poppy, minus the torch, as its symbol. Soon after, on 27 September 1920, when members of the National American Legion convened in Cleveland, they voted to use the poppy as the official U.S. national emblem of remembrance to memorialize the soldiers who fought and died during the war. In 1924, the distribution of poppies became a national program of The American Legion.
So, in the United States, it has become a tradition of wear a red poppy on Memorial Day to honor the men and women who have died fighting for our country.
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