A better poem for November
In The Great War and Modern Memory, his celebrated study of the traumatized literature that sprang from the horrors of trench warfare, U.S. soldier-critic Paul Fussell paused to “break a butterfly on the wheel” — his victim being the most famous of all Canadian poems, the very one that schoolchildren solemnly recite every November, that is engraved on the $10 bill and countless monuments across the country, that has given us a symbol as sacred as the maple leaf, and is entrusted like no other verse to express the highest, gravest sentiments of the nation.
“Words like ‘vicious’ and ‘stupid’ would not seem to go too far” in describing the pro-war propaganda of John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” Fussell wrote. Like the handful of other critics who have dared to make the same point, Fussell was struck by the contrast between the poem’s evocative beginning and the harsh “recruiting poster rhetoric” of its final stanza, spoken in the voice of the Dead:
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. . .
Modern Canadians prefer to gloss over that verse, just as modern believers wink at the nasty bits in ancient scriptures. But for McCrae and the military authorities of the day, it was the whole point. The poem was unabashed propaganda, a call to arms used by both the Canadian government and the poet to recruit more soldiers to the killing ground.
It worked: Fussell blames In Flanders Fields for helping extend the war at a time when the Allies were considering a Ger- man offer to begin peace negotiations. By accepting peace, McCrae argued in what appears to be a direct response, we render meaningless the sacrifice of those already dead. To make peace is to “break faith.”
Thus every November millions of Canadian schoolchildren recite a solemn vow to continue killing Germans.
Economists will recognize McCrae’s argument as a classic example of the seductive sunk-cost fallacy, except the costs of the First World War were measured in lives. More than 60,000 Canadian soldiers ultimately died to settle an imperial quarrel in which they had no stake.
The First World War is often said to have been a crucible of Canadian identity. But unlike the obviously righteous Second World War, in memory it remains a fathomless moral abyss.
Canadian scholar Nancy Holmes was more generous than Fussell in her essay on “In Flanders Fields,” admiring the poem’s evocative first lines while reviling the last six. She sees McCrae’s mid-poem breakdown as a typical expression of our abiding colonial mentality — “one that is informed by good intentions but that is disfigured by an unusual susceptibility to the vested interests of power.”
For lessons about the First World War, all honours go to the British poets whose bleak truth-telling helped to shorten rather than prolong the conflict. But strangely enough, there was a Canadian soldier-poet also recuperating from severe “shell shock” beside Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen in the Craiglock- hart War Hospital, the unlikely literary milieu made famous in novelist Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.
Like Owen a protege and friend of Sassoon, Frank “Toronto” Prewett is as obscure as McCrae is famous. He crawled out of the trenches wracked in mind and body, his literary promise both ignited and ruined by the war. But there is nothing disfigured about the scant verse he did produce. It is brutally honest about the savage futility of war. Remembrance Day could only gain meaning if every recitation of “In Flanders Fields” was followed by a reading of Prewett’s “The Somme Valley, 1917,” which stands as a grimly ironic reply to his compatriot’s call to arms — and could well have been intended as such. It even has McCrae’s larks and foe:
Comrade, why do you weep? Is it sorrow for a friend Who fell, rifle in hand, His last stand at an end?
The thunder-lipped grey guns Lament him, fierce and slow, Where he found his dreamless bed, Head to head with a foe.
The sweet lark beats on high For the peace of those who sleep In the quiet embrace of earth: Comrade, why do you weep?
Prewett’s almost cruelly insistent question is of course the very one McCrae avoids, substituting reflexive militarism for an answer he dare not confront. It is also the same question we pose to our children in a national catechism every November. They deserve a better answer.
All honours go to the British poets whose bleak truth-telling helped to shorten the conflict