Partnership Educators,
Early on the morning of May 3, 1915, John sat wearily near his field dressing station, a crude bunker cut into the slopes of a bank near the Ypres-Yser Canal in Belgium. A Canadian military surgeon, he had been at the French line for 12 days under incessant German bombardment, and the toll of dead and wounded had been appalling.
From his position on the road along the canal running into Ypres, he sat and wondered. The previous night he had buried a good friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa. Now, as he sat in the early morning sunshine, he could hear the larks singing between the crash of the guns. He could see the rows of crosses in a nearby cemetery.
The field where the cemetery lay was thick with scarlet poppies, their dormant seeds churned up by the guns, blooming despite—or because of—the carnage. John took in the scene and quickly wrote a 15-line poem. Speaking from the dead to the living, “In Flanders Fields” was to become the most famous poem of the Great War—perhaps of any war and the author was John McCrae.
We observe Memorial Day each May in which we honor and mourn members of the military who have passed away while serving in the United States Armed Forces. On this day, we pay tribute to those who gave their lives while protecting and serving the union. The idea of Memorial Day began by General John Logan as a way to honor the fallen after the Civil War and I have previously written about that. I have seen many people wear Poppies to honor America's war dead and that dates back to the poem written by John McCrae in 1915. John was honoring the dead but was also seeing the beauty of the new growth after such a terrible onslaught of destruction.
Cynthia Ozick, an American writer said, "We take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude." Find some time this weekend to silently thank those that lived and died for our freedom and take in the beauty that is our country that we are privileged to live in. Notice the beauty as John McCrae did all around us and let's be thankful for the folks that we have the privilege to work with every day. I am grateful for your work this year and I look forward to future greatness for you all.
Have a great three-day weekend,
Rob