Thoughtful.........

.................Thursday. For the August Challenge

Which has been organised by Chantler63 (see Forums, Challenges for more information)


The Red Poppy – has become a symbol of war remembrance.
- The red or Flanders poppy has been linked with battlefield deaths since the time of the Great War (1914–18).
- The plant was one of the first to grow and bloom in the mud and soil of Flanders.
- The connection was made, most famously, by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae in his poem 'In Flanders fields'


McCrae was a Canadian medical officer who, in May 1915, had conducted the funeral service of a friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres (Ieper). Distressed at the death and suffering around him, McCrae scribbled the verse in his notebook. In a cemetery nearby, red poppies blew gently in the breeze – a symbol of regeneration and growth in a landscape of blood and destruction.

McCrae threw away the poem, but a fellow officer rescued it and sent it on to the English magazine Punch; 'In Flanders fields' was published on 8 December 1915. Three years later, on 28 January 1918, McCrae was dead. As he lay dying, he is reported to have said ‘Tell them this, if ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep.

To read the poem and further information, follow this link.