Remembrance Day

In Flanders Fields the poppies grow,
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 and sunset glow
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields . . .

Sunday is Remembrance Day – the day we honour all who have lost their lives in service of their country.

A national service of remembrance will be held at the Cenotaph in London with the traditional silence being observed at 11am. Our church will fall silent at the same time as we offer our own prayers for all victims of conflicts past and present.

In special commemoration, St. Mary’s is filled with red poppies, traditional emblems for Remembrance Day. A special artwork is being created Amanda Knight and Colin Platt to honour the poem written by John McCrae, a Canadian surgeon who had served in the Flanders battlefields of the First World War.

McCrae wrote his iconic poem as he sat in a field ambulance just north of Ypres on May 3, 1915.

His friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, had been killed the previous day. Helmer was hurriedly buried in a makeshift grave marked by a simple wooden cross. Macrae noticed that wild poppies were already beginning to bloom between this and other crosses.

The sight inspired him to write his poem and he sent a copy to The Spectator magazine in London. It was rejected but a journalist visiting the nearby hospital, took a copy away with him and presented it to Punch Magazine who printed it on December 9, 1915. Little more than two years later McCrae, stricken by pneumonia, died in a British hospital at Ypres.
The grave of Alexis Helmer was lost but his name is inscribed on the Menin Gate Memorial.

— Lynn Radnedge