Being in Fl anders Fields

It’s Wednesday morning, as peaceful as the day is long. The growl of a tractor plowing nearby fields lays down a bass accompaniment to the ‘mooing’ of a pair of Jersey cows who stroll over to greet us, to the winds whispering in the trees rising up from the bank of the adjacent canal, to the chorus of bird calls.

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Not far from this spot in the Flanders countryside, sometime during the night of May 3, 1915, Canadian soldier Alexis Helmer was blown to pieces.

We are the dead.

The morning sun gilds those trees overlooking the canal, it shimmers on the water’s wind-riffled surface. Just beyond the tiny meadow where the cows graze, a gentle grass-covered hill is surmounted by an obelisk-shaped monument that frowns down upon a cemetery populated by more than a thousand graves.

Row on row

No one knows the exact location of Helmer’s grave. But one thing is certain. He was remembered. Here, at Essex Farm, was born the poem, “In Flanders Fields”. When you enter from the road, the cemetery – identified by a tall white cross imprinted with a bronze sword – is on the right. Make a left after roughly 50 metres and you will encounter concrete bunkers covered with earth, gouged from the bank of the canal. The concrete you see today came later. On May 3, 1915 the makeshift “hospital” was mere earth and sandbags. Here a Canadian surgeon named John McCrae performed first aid, applied dressings, decided that there was no hope for some coming into his care. On the morning after Helmer died, McCrae took pen to paper on this very spot, exhausted after nearly two weeks of constant German shelling, shattered by the death of his friend. From atop the hill rising from the canal bank, past the cows, past the graves, you can see, in the distance, farmhouses and barns, all topped with orange terracotta tile roofs. Foreground is a meadow of daisies, blowing in the morning breeze. Middle ground is the cemetery. The graves here inspired McCrae – these are the resting places he described in his poem, though after the war the Commonwealth Graves Commission designed a simple uniform headstone to replace those erstwhile wooden crosses.

Loved and were loved, and now we lie, in Flanders fields.

I march along these rows and stop periodically, saddened by the stories told in stone, burdened by the sorrow of those graves – so many – that hold no identified body. I stop for a very long time at one grave I find here. The memory of that grave haunts me for days after. Here lies Rifleman Joe Strudwick. Fifteen years young. Before we leave this place of remembering I climb the hill once more. I stand beside that lonely monument, I gaze at the graves below, I peruse an idyllic landscape, noting great swathes of crimson flowers contrasting with green meadows, blood-red blossoms that seem to dance in the morning breeze.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow