By 1920 the French lecturer Anne Guérin was doing the same to aid war victims in France. Poppy Day, when the South African Legion holds a street collection to gather funds to assist in the welfare work among military veterans, takes place. Michael’s campaign to create a national symbol for remembrancea poppy in the colors of the Allied nations’ flags entwined around a victory torchdidn’t get very far at first. In 1918 the American academic Moina Michael, who cherished the poem, began to sell silk poppies in New York to raise money for disabled soldiers. The evolution of McCrae’s poppies into physical symbols of remembrance was driven by two pioneering women. The poet never saw its ultimate legacy, having died of pneumonia in France on January 28th 1918, aged 45. When McCrae’s poem appeared in London’s Punch magazine on December 8th 1915, it was initially harnessed as a propaganda tool for raising men, money and morale. Corn poppies (Papaver rhoeas) flourish on broken ground, whether tilled farmland, burial sites or bombed fields, which is how war-torn Flanders became carpeted with blood-red poppies. There is a botanical explanation for the proliferation of poppies in war zones - a phenomenon first noticed in the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-1815. White poppies stand for remembrance of all. Over a century later, more than 80 million commemorative poppies are distributed around Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ahead of Remembrance Day events each year in support of the Armed Forces. White poppies are worn in the run-up to Remembrance Day every year by thousands of people in the UK and beyond.
Moved by the sight of scarlet poppies growing on the grave of his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, he immortalised the poppy as a symbol of loss and hope. On May 3rd 1915, amid the carnage of the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae penned the opening lines of his acclaimed First World War poem In Flanders ’ Fields.
0 kommentar(er)
