Within months, red poppies, also made in France, arrived in Australia with returning soldiers. The Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, too, was torn up by artillery and gunfire and the furious digging of trenches and dugouts in 1915, the land fertilised by blood and bone. Credit: Australian War Memorial Are poppies just about the Western Front?įor Australians, the origin of poppies as remembrance is not entirely limited to the Western Front, where 46,000 Australian lives were lost during World War I. Members of the 2nd Australian Pioneer Battalion build a wagon track from planks at Chateau Wood in Belgium. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.”

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. The battlefields of the area – particularly around Ypres and Passchendaele, where a million combatants died between 19 – were simply called Flanders Fields by British, Commonwealth and later American soldiers. Vivid red poppies waved throughout the burial ground, now known as the Essex Farm Military Cemetery at Boezinge, a village in West Flanders Province near Ypres, Belgium. One account has him sitting on the rear step of an ambulance, gazing at his friend Helmer’s new grave.

The tortured dirt grew two notable crops: crosses above graves spreading to every horizon … and millions of poppies.Īnd so it was that in May 1915, John McCrae penned his poignant poem, published later that year in Punch magazine. And as the death toll of soldiers and civilians rose into the millions, along with horses and other beasts of burden, the dirt was soaked with the oldest of fertilisers, blood and bone.Īn Australian soldier tends a comrade in Chateau Wood on the Western Front in Belgium during World War I. Nitrogen, used to create the explosives that caused endless misery, coated the land. Armies dug great mazes of trenches, flinging seed-rich soil into the light.

Bombs and explosive artillery ploughed the ground. The war, in the darkest of paradoxes, had created ideal conditions for a vast garden of red blooms. Yet within a year of the war beginning, soldiers were writing home of a landscape ablaze with poppies. There were, it happens, relatively few poppies evident in northern France and Belgium, that area known as the Western Front, when World War I broke out in 1914. The seeds need the earth to be disturbed to allow light to give them life, and they require nitrogen and other nutrients to flourish. Seeds of the corn poppy (or Papaver rhoeas) can lie beneath soil for 100 years without germinating, according to Gary Krupnick, director of the plant conservation unit at the Smithsonian Institute’s National Museum of Natural History. What is the harrowing history behind the poppy? And why, at the stroke of 11am on November 11, do we observe a minute’s silence? That the blood-red poppies symbolise the unthinkable numbers of lives lost and the lakes of blood spilled on the battlefields of World War I and beyond is well known.īut the lesser-known and dreadful truth is that poppies flourished on those battlefields only because of the brutality of war. Perhaps you’ve bought one from a veteran, a soldier or a volunteer or perhaps you’ve walked by and wondered what they were all about. And as Remembrance Day approaches, members of the Returned Services League sell little red poppies in cities and towns throughout the nation. His words are now recited at Remembrance Day ceremonies in cities, towns and villages across what were once called the British Empire countries, including Australia. Soon after, Helmer’s close friend, military physician John McCrae, sat down and wrote what would become one of the most famous poems of World War I. On May 2, 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium, a German shell blew away the life of Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, of the 2nd Battery, 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size

Remembrance day poopy