by Chris McNab
Returning to the military campaign, Britain’s armed services casualties during the conflict were significantly fewer than the First World War, although the figure of 383,000 is still chilling. During the six years of war, the armed services grew in size (via conscription), professionalism, technological might and influence. They fought in every conceivable theatre, environment and condition – the jungles of Burma, the deserts of North Africa, the icy landscapes of Norway, the mountains of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy, the bitter Arctic and Atlantic waters and the skies above Western Europe. Armour, artillery and air power became the war-winning instruments, while on the oceans the supremacy of the battleship was replaced by the aircraft carrier, a weapon system chiefly developed by the United States and Japan. There were also new types of soldier – each side developed units (such as the British Special Air Service) of what we would now refer to as ‘special forces’, men tasked with the most dangerous and secretive of assignments, generally well behind enemy lines.
Given the way the Second World War engulfed the planet in destruction, it seems almost churlish to speak of winners and losers. Yet the fact remains that not only did Britain, through the efforts of its armed forces, avoid the fate of occupation that visited much of the rest of Europe, it also played a critical role in liberating territories from Nazi and imperial Japanese control. At the same time, we must recognise that these ultimate goals would have been impossible without the vast military and industrial resources of the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1945 Britain was somewhat in the shadow of these emergent superpowers, but we nevertheless owe a debt of gratitude to the generation of those years, who in many ways literally made possible the freedoms we take for granted today.
MODERN WORLD, MODERN WARS
The post-Second World War era has been a turbulent time for the Britain’s armed forces. From 1945 to the present day there have been two competing demands. The first is economic pressure. The armed forces have been through numerous periods of cutbacks in both manpower and spending on resources and technology. Yet running against the grain of the cutbacks has been the fact that Britain’s armed forces have rarely seen a year when they were not in action. Some of these conflicts have been major, such as the Korean War (1950–53), the Falklands War (1982), the First Gulf War (1990–91), the Iraq War (2003-2011) and the war in Afghanistan (2001–present), the latter being the longest-running continuous conflict in British history. At the same time, British soldiers have served in numerous insurgency and peacekeeping conflicts, low-level but destructive wars that can see a soldier’s role fluctuate between ‘hearts-and-minds’ humanitarian work and outright combat with dizzying regularity. Such actions include the Malayan Emergency (1948-60), the campaign in Aden (1964-68), long and testing service in Northern Ireland (1969–98) and operations in the war-torn Balkans in the 1990s.
The nature of warfare since 1945 could not have seen more dramatic transformations. Almost every aspect of combat technology has been revolutionised by computerisation, so that today we are no longer amazed by pilotless unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), precision-guided munitions (PGMs) that can hit pin-point targets after miles of flight, and military surveillance satellites that can map the battlefield in real time from hundreds of kilometres above the surface of the earth. The emphasis on technological solutions to military problems, plus a deeper political aversion to casualties amongst many nations, has thankfully resulted in a definite limitation of battlefield death tolls. For example, most British infantry divisions fighting in Normandy in 1944 would have taken more casualties in a week than the entire British losses in the Afghanistan conflict.
Yet such comparisons rather miss the point. Britain’s soldiers, sailors and airmen have continued, and will continue, to make the ultimate sacrifice in war at home and aboard. For the dead and wounded, and their families, the impact is the same whether the casualties of an engagement number in the thousands or just a single individual is lost.
2. AN ACT OF REMEMBRANCE
TO TRACE THE history of the Remembrance Poppy, we have to journey back to a time and place stripped of almost all beauty and compassion. Belgian Flanders represented the northernmost point of the Western Front during the First World War, once the trenchlines had been inscribed in the earth by the end of 1914. Between 1914 and 1918, Flanders became one of the most devastated regions of the entire battlefield. The British held a salient – in effect a bulge in the frontline – that kept the city of Ypres in Allied hands and which also projected out into the German lines. Holding the salient was a nagging strategic and tactical headache for the British. The salient was overlooked by a series of German-occupied elevated ridgelines, on which they had well-sited observation posts for guiding artillery fire onto the British positions. Some military leaders argued that holding the salient was too costly, and that the British should fall back to straighten their frontline and make it more defendable. Yet the most senior levels of British command, including General Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, and Admiral Jellicoe, the First Sea Lord, argued vociferously that no more ground could be relinquished in Flanders. To do so would run the risk of the future German offensive striking through Ypres and taking valuable Channel ports (the Germans were already in possession of ports such as Ostend and Zeebrugge), which would in turn affect Allied logistics in the northern battlefront. At the same time, the Ypres salient provided a potential jumping-off point for future Allied offensives aimed at striking through the German ridgelines and swinging north to capture the German-occupied ports, which were used as bases for the predatory U-boats. For the Germans, the need to protect those ports, plus the political and strategic incentives to hang onto large portions of Belgium, meant that they had to contain the salient or even, ideally, snuff it out.
Ypres and Flanders, therefore, were to be the locations of no fewer than five major offensive battles during the war years. (Between these battles there was an ongoing and almost continuous exchange of artillery fire over the frontlines, killing and wounding men on a daily basis and reducing the once-beautiful city of Ypres to a gutted ruin.) Some of the battles were true landmarks in military history. The Second Battle of Ypres (often given in the shorthand ‘Second Ypres’), was a powerful German effort to eradicate the salient, made more insidious by including the first major use of poison gas in warfare. The German forces unleashed chlorine gas in huge quantities, laying it onto the prevailing winds from 5,730 canisters emplaced near the frontline. Despite the fact that poison gas was strictly forbidden by Article 23 of the Hague Convention, from this point on it became a fixed element in the arsenals of both sides, delivered either by canister or (later and more commonly) by artillery shell. The offensive did not achieve its ultimate goal of taking Ypres, but the perimeter of the salient did shrink further, perilously close to the city.
WESTERN FRONT 1914–18
DULCE ET DECORUM EST
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime …
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes wri
thing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wilfred Owen, 1917
Another notable offensive, this time British, was ‘Third Ypres’, also known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Conducted between 31 July and 10 November 1917, it was the attempt to break out of the salient, take the strategic ridgelines and push through the German positions to threaten the U-boat bases further north. (The offensive also served to keep pressure on the German Army at a time when the French Army was struggling with mutiny and disarray after the failed ‘Nivelle Offensive’ earlier in the year.) Third Ypres was meant to be a bold and decisive offensive, but in the event it became one of the most disastrous episodes in military history. As noted in the previous chapter, the landscape during the battle became as much as a threat as the bullets and shells, and men fought through appalling physical conditions to take landmarks that were often little more than patches of rubble surrounded by oceans of mud.
GROSS TONNAGE OF BRITISH VESSELS LOST TO U-BOATS, 1914–18
FRONTLINE VOICES: THE BATTLE OF PASSCHENDAELE
The journalist Philip Gibbs, present on the Passchendaele battlefield, attempted to describe the landscape of death they faced:
Every man of ours who fought on the way to Passchendaele agreed that those battles in Flanders were the most awful, the most bloody, and the most hellish. The condition of the ground, out from Ypres and beyond the Menin Gate, was partly the cause of the misery and the filth. Heavy rains fell, and made one great bog in which every shell crater was a deep pool. There were thousands of shell craters. Our guns had made them, and German gunfire, slashing our troops, made thousands more, linking them together so that they were like lakes in some places, filled with slimy water and dead bodies. Our infantry had to advance heavily laden with their kit, and with arms and hand-grenades and entrenching tools – like pack animals – along slimy duckboards on which it was hard to keep a footing, especially at night when the battalions were moved under cover of darkness.
You live for days in the closest contact with your comrades in a contracted space. You cannot move, and are unable to think clearly. Never did I realize how difficult it can be to lead a human life. There is nameless agony in it.
Philip Gibbs,
Adventures in Journalism, 1923
The Battle of Passchendaele resonates in the imagination even today, as it presents a picture of normally picturesque Flanders transformed into a hell on earth. Yet as many soldiers noticed, in Flanders and in other regions of the blasted frontline, nature had still not given up on the land.
Papaver rhoeas is known by many other common names – corn poppy, corn rose, field poppy, red poppy and red weed. The last name on the list here is revealing, for although this member of the poppy family produces a beautiful vivid red flower, it is nonetheless classified as a weed. It grows in the most ravaged and inhospitable of land (indeed it thrives best in soil that has been disturbed), hence it managed to add a haunting dash of colour to the shell-thrashed landscape of Flanders in the late spring, summer and early autumn each year. Another of its common names is the Flanders Poppy.
To see such beautiful flowers growing across fields that were already sown with the bodies of thousands of dead men must have left an impression on the minds of all who witnessed it, the flowers delivering a curiously mixed evocation of the red blood of the fallen yet the regeneration of new life. One man who was certainly captured by the vision was the Canadian soldier Lieutenant-Colonel John Alexander McCrae.
‘IN FLANDERS FIELDS’
McCrae was born on 30 November 1872, and went on to combine strong careers in both medicine and soldiering. He served as an artilleryman during the Boer War, after which he worked as a physician and pathologist at several hospitals, including the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Infectious Diseases. He also co-authored a medical textbook: A Text-Book of Pathology for Students of Medicine, published in 1912. A man with an adventurous mindset, McCrae became a field surgeon with the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) and British forces on the Western Front in the First World War. During this service, he managed a field hospital taking in casualties from the Second Battle of Ypres, a job requiring the utmost strength of character to endure mentally. In a letter to his mother he remembered:
For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds … And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.
McCrae also suffered personal loss during the battle – his friend and his former student Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed in action. McCrae conducted the burial service himself, but during this time he also noticed the red poppies growing obstinately through-out the Flanders landscape. Being a man of literary talents, the poppies and his dead friend began to stir a poetic vision that would move generations to come.
The origins of McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ are uncertain, in terms of when and where he first composed it, but he became convinced of its merit and spent several months working it into shape. He eventually submitted it to The Spectator magazine, but it was rejected. Yet his next submission, to the redoubtable Punch, was accepted, and it was published on 8 December 1915. Here is the poem in full:
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.
The poem manages to walk that fine line between patriotism and grief, mourning and resilience. The opening image, of the poppies scattered amongst the graves, seems to hold out promise of some beauty in a dark world, although the statement ‘We are the Dead’ at the beginning of the second stanza has a disturbing, blunt effect. By the end of poem, the poppy and the dead are inextricably intertwined, as if the flower makes visible the absence of the fallen.
‘In Flanders Fields’ had an enormous effect on the reading public. It was translated into dozens of languages and achieved global distribution. The poem was applied in political campaigns in Canada, and was given out as encouragement to British and, later, US soldiers fighting on the Western Front. It was also utilised persuasively in campaigns to get the public to purchase war bonds. More importantly, such was the power of the poem that it endured the war years to become a staple classic of the particular genre known as ‘war poetry’. (As the author was writing this book, even his teenage daughter instantly recognised the poem when she caught a glance of it on the screen.)
Not everyone has been impressed with ‘In Flanders Fields’. The patriotism it contains, especially in the last stanza, often strikes as jingoism to the modern ear, a tool for recruiting more men and sending them to the grinding mill of the Western Front. Yet for the purposes of our narrative here, one effect is key – it began the development of the Remembrance Poppy.
MOINA MICHAEL AND THE CREATION OF THE POPPY
Born in Goo
d Hope, Georgia, USA, on 15 August 1869, Moina Belle Michael may seem an unlikely figure to intersect with our narrative of the Remembrance Poppy. She was a highly educated woman, and by the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 she was a professor at the University of Georgia.
Michael was also a passionate humanitarian, and as the war progressed she devoted more of her time to working for the Young Women’s Christian Association, helping to ready workers for overseas service. In her autobiography, The Miracle Flower: The Story of the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy (1941), Michael explained how, when in New York City on 9 November 1918, with the Armistice just two days away, she came across McCrae’s poem (then titled ‘We Shall Not Sleep’) in the Ladies’ Home Journal. As she recounts, the emotional effect of the poem upon her was considerable:
BRITISH CASUALTIES ON THE WESTERN FRONT, JULY–DECEMBER 1916
I read the poem, which I had read many times previously, and studied its graphic picturization. The last verse transfixed me — ‘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’.
This was for me a full spiritual experience. It seemed as though the silent voices again were vocal, whispering, in sighs of anxiety unto anguish, ‘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’.
