We Will Remember Them

This morning, the Year 4 Forest School children have been making crosses to mark Armistice Day.

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Two Minute Silence is observed on Armistice Day, the day which marks the end of the First World War.

On Remembrance Sunday, it is customary for friends and families of fallen service personnel to place wooden crosses and poppy wreaths on their graves or at a cenotaph (which literally means Empty Tomb in Greek – is a tomb or monument erected to honour a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere) or Field of Remembrance. During the period of Remembrance, people also wear red poppies.

 The story of the poppy*

During the First World War (1914–1918) much of the fighting took place in Western Europe. Previously beautiful countryside was blasted, bombed and fought over, again and again. The landscape swiftly turned to fields of mud, bleak and barren scenes where little or nothing could grow.

Bright red Flanders poppies (Papaver rhoeas) however, were delicate but resilient flowers and grew in their thousands, flourishing even in the middle of chaos and destruction. In the spring of 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, a Canadian doctor, Lt Col John McCrae was inspired by the sight of poppies to write a now famous poem called “In Flanders Fields”.

Poppies for Remembrance

The first poppies came from France. McCrae’s poem in turn inspired an American academic, Moina Michael to make handmade red silk poppies which were then brought to England by a French lady, Anna Guerin. The (Royal) British Legion, formed in 1921, ordered 9 million of the poppies which they sold on 11 November that year. The poppies sold out almost immediately and that first ever ‘Poppy Appeal’ raised over £106,000, a huge amount of money at the time.

The following year, Major George Howson, who had received the Military Cross for his role in the First World War, set up a factory off the Old Kent Road in London where five disabled ex-Servicemen began making poppies. 3 years later the Poppy Factory moved to its current site in Richmond, Surrey and today produces millions of poppies each year.

*www.britishlegion.org.uk

To make their crosses, the children used loppers and secateurs to cut lengths of wood to size. Next, they used a fixed blade knife to whittle the end of one of the sticks to a point. Then they used a clove hitch and square lashing to tie the two sticks together with wool. Finally they attached a poppy to the centre of the cross.

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