We Shall Not Sleep...

Essex Farm Aid Station, Belgium (photo 2004)

I grew up with Lt-Col. John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields." There probably aren't too many Canadians who didn't. But it wasn't until yesterday's one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that ended the Great War that it occurred to me there was a second meaning in the final stanza of the poem:

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
      In Flanders fields.

I imagine the rest of you knew all about this, but it wasn't until yesterday that I realized that as a doctor McCrae would of course have understood the connection between poppies and sleep.

The photo shows the site of the aid station, in the Ieper (Ypres) sector, at which McCrae wrote the poem. The bunkers post-date the poem; when McCrae wrote (during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915) the aid station was mostly trenches and dugouts.