In Flanders Fields
Remembrance day
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army
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.
________________________________________
Au champ d’honneur, les coquelicots
Sont parsemés de lot en lot
Auprès des croix; et dans l’espace
Les alouettes devenues lasses
Mêlent leurs chants au sifflement
Des obusiers.
Nous sommes morts,
Nous qui songions la veille encor’
À nos parents, à nos amis,
C’est nous qui reposons ici,
Au champ d’honneur.
À vous jeunes désabusés,
À vous de porter l’oriflamme
Et de garder au fond de l’âme
Le goût de vivre en liberté.
Acceptez le défi, sinon
Les coquelicots se faneront
Au champ d’honneur.
(Adaptation signée Jean Pariseau)
Le commentaire de Francis:
Cette adaptation du poème soucieuse de conserver les rimes s’écarte beaucoup du sens de l’original qui présente une version beaucoup plus poignante et intimiste de la réalité quotidienne des soldats qui ont combattu à Ypres. En voici une traduction:
Dans les plaines de Flandres, les coquelicots s’agitent
entre les rangées de croix qui marquent notre place.
Dans le ciel, les alouettes, courageusement chantent encore
à peine audibles dans le fracas des canons.
Nous sommes les morts. Il y a peu de temps encore
nous vivions, goutions l’aurore, regardions le soleil couchant,
nous aimions, nous étions aimés;
et maintenant nous gisons dans les plaines de Flandres…
C’est à vous de poursuivre la lutte contre l’ennemi,
A vous que nos bras tremblants transmettent le flambeau,
A vous de le brandir très haut.
Si vous nous abandonnez, nous qui mourons,
nous ne dormirons pas, même si les coquelicots
continuent de fleurir dans les plaines de Flandres.
McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915. Here is the story of the making of that poem:
Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the South African War, it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime.
As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans — in the Ypres salient.
It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae later wrote of it:
“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.”
One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae’s dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.
The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l’Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.
In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly. “His face was very tired but calm as we wrote,” Allinson recalled. “He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer’s grave.”
When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:
“The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.”
In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.
Si sur les tombes britanniques fleurissent de discrets coquelicots de papier, tressés parfois en couronne, que l’on peut trouver sur toutes les stèles et cénotaphes, comme au coeur de la cathédrale d’Ypres, c’est à John Mc Crae que l’on doit cette image. La France a choisi le bleuet, les britanniques la fragile fleur des champs, le « poppy », dès 1921. Pourtant la « fleur du souvenir », que l’on arbore au « Poppy day », ne rappelle pas la couleur des uniformes de parade mais la vision du champ de bataille de l’Essex Farm à Boezinge, près d’Ypres.
Le poème “In Flanders Field” renvoie à tous les témoignages d’auteurs connus comme d’anonymes et est devenu bien vite le symbole de toute une génération fauchée dans la fleur de l’âge, à l’instar de Dorgelès ou de Genevoix.
Né au Canada en 1872, ce médecin et biologiste s’enrôle volontairement pour la guerre des Boers en Afrique du Sud puis fait de même pour intégrer le Corps Expéditionnaire canadien dès le début de la Grande guerre. Promu au grade de Lieutenant-Colonel du Corps médical canadien, il aurait écrit en mai 1915 ce poème au coeur de la mêlée des Flandres, à Boezinge. Muté à Boulogne, il décède à la fin de janvier 1918 à l’Hôpital militaire britannique de Wimereux.
