Mack Hall, HSG Mhall46184@aol.com
Keeping the Faith on Remembrance Day
"I will never stand for a national anthem again. I will turn my back and I will raise a fist."
- S.E.A.L. / Not-a-S.E.A.L Viet-Nam-Veteran / Not-a-Viet-Nam-Veteran Jesse Ventura, nee’ James Janos, on having a bad day at an airport
In the spring of 1915 a 45-year-old physician buried a young friend outside a dressing station along a canal in Belgium. Major McCrae was too old to be serving in the mud of Ypres, he was asthmatic, and this was his second war, but he never broke faith with Canada or with the wounded lads who needed him.
Major McCrae read the Anglican burial service – “in the sure and certain hope of the Resurrection” - over Lieutenant Alexis Helmer because the chaplain was elsewhere in the field.
The next day, while taking a break from surgery and rounds, Major McCrae strolled outside the tents (donated by the people of Bhopal) and sat on the tailgate of an ambulance alongside a canal. He looked out across the wreckage and the mud, and considered the only brightly-colored things in that blighted landscape of disaster. He took out a notebook, and wrote “In Flanders fields the poppies blow…”
John McCrae’s life was one of purpose, work, learning, and service. He was born in Ontario in 1872, and joined his home town militia at age 16. While working his way through college he was commissioned in the Toronto militia, The Queen’s Own Rifles, and at 22 was the commanding officer.
Commanding officer. At 22. He was not sitting in a Tim Horton’s or a Starbuck’s wearing knee-pants and a child’s cap while whining into a cell ‘phone about how unfair life was, even though he suffered asthma and had to, well, work.
John McCrae served with an artillery unit in the Boer War in South Africa, and then worked as a physician and professor of medicine in the United States and in Canada.
Long before the Guns of August (cf. Barbara Tuchman), John McCrae, from the little town of Guelph, Ontario lived a life of such adventure that even Teddy Roosevelt might have envied him:
Militia (we would call it the National Guard) as a private soldier, as an officer, and later as commanding officer
High school teacher - mathematics and English Literature
Artilleryman
Poet (as in published, not the perpetrator of undisciplined whines on MyBookFaceSpaceMeMeMe)
Physician – surgeon, pathologist, epidemiologist, pediatrician
Professor of medicine
Author of several medical textbooks
Explorer
Horseman
In 1914, Dr. John McCrae, a successful physician and author in his mid-forties, a veteran who’d done his bit in South Africa at the turn of the century, a man of uncertain health, didn’t have to go anywhere. He could have stayed in private practice, written more books, and admired the flowers in his own garden in Canada instead of the blood-poppies in Belgium.
But he went. And he wrote:
In Flanders fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
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.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
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
In Flanders fields.
The words may sound shallow to some who have been poisoned with decades of fashionable cynicism, but they were not to Major McCrae. He was not a computerized cartoon or a muscled oaf posturing for the television. Indeed, his photograph is of a quite ordinary-looking man in a rather untidy uniform featuring but one modest ribbon. He was real. And he was there.
In January of 1916, only eight months later, Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae, suffering from cold, exhaustion, overwork, and the horrors of two wars, died of pneumonia in the hospital he commanded in France.
John McCrae did not break faith with his country.
He did not break faith with his patients – English, Canadian, French, Belgian, and Indian soldiers. He did not break faith even with the wounded German boys who were brought in to his care.
John McCrae did not break faith. He did not turn his back.
Something to remember on Remembrance Day.
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