Features of Remembrance Day

The Red Poppy

The Flanders poppy has been a part of Armistice or Remembrance Day ritual since the early 1920s and is also increasingly being used as part of ANZAC Day observances. During the First World War, the red poppies were seen to be among the first living plants that sprouted from the devastation of the battlefields of northern France and Belgium. Soldiers' folklore had it that the poppies were vivid red from having been nurtured in ground drenched with the blood of their comrades. In English literature of the nineteenth century poppies had symbolised sleep or a state of oblivion; this symbolism was carried into the literature of the First World War but a new, more powerful symbolism was now attached to the poppy - that of the sacrifice of shed blood. The poppy soon became widely accepted throughout the allied nations as the flower of remembrance to be worn on Armistice Day. The Australian Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League (the forerunner to the RSL) first sold poppies for Armistice Day 1921. For this drive, the league imported one million silk poppies, made in French orphanages. Each poppy was sold for a shilling: five pence was donated to a charity for French children, six pence went to the league's own welfare work and one penny went to the League's national coffers. Today, the RSL sells poppies for Remembrance Day to raise funds for welfare work, although they have long since ceased to import them from France.

In Flanders’ Fields

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who was Professor of Medicine at McGill University in Canada before WWI (joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto), first described the red poppy, the Flanders’ poppy, as the flower of remembrance. Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the Boer War as a gunner, he went to France in WWI as a medical officer with the first Canadian contingent. It was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams and the blood here and the then Major John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major McCrae, had spent seventeen days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient. It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. Major McCrae later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days………………..Seventeen days of Hades!
At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done "

One death particularly affected Major McCrae. A young friend and former student, LT Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May. LT Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain. The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. At the second battle of Ypres in 1915, when in charge of a small first-aid post, he wrote in pencil on a page from his despatch book a poem that has come to be known as "Flanders’ Field" which described the poppies that marked the graves of soldiers killed fighting for their country. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it (written May 3, 1915 after the battle at Ypres). Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two-year-old sergeant major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as he wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying to Helmer's grave." When he finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read. “The poem was exactly a description of the scene in front of us both”. The word blow was not used in the first line though it was used later when the poem appeared in Punch newspaper in London. But it was used in the second last line. He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.”

Rouse and Reveille

Since Roman times, bugles or horns had been used as signals to command soldiers on the battlefield and regulate soldiers' days in barracks. "Reveille" was a bright cheerful call to rouse soldiers from their slumber, ready for duty. It symbolises an awakening in a better world for the dead and rouses the living, their respects paid to the memory of their comrades, back to duty. "Rouse" is a shorter bugle call which, as its name suggests, was also used to call soldiers to their duties. It is "Rouse", due to its much shorter length, which is most commonly used in conjunction with the "Last Post" at remembrance services and funerals. The exception is the Dawn Service when "Reveille" is played.