2017 Poppy Appeal For “Red Poppy Day” — The “In Flanders Fields” Video By The British Legion.

by Anura Guruge

Start here for a large COMPENDIUM of “Red Poppy” information
— history, significance, traditions & photos.

Must Watch.

Very Moving.

For those unfamiliar with this
holiday & tradition.

Poppy Day,
also known as Remembrance Day
& Armistice Day,
is Veteran’s Day in the
British Commonwealth.

It is always observed on November 11, without exception since that was Armistice Day — the day, in 1918, the armistice [i.e., truce] was signed the Allies [i.e., US the good guys] and Germany, at Compiègne, France, to bring to an end World War I [1914 to 1918], which involved over 70 million troops and had killed more than 9 million combatants.

The armistice was signed, symbolically, on the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month‘, 11 a.m., on 11/11, 1918 in a railway carriage in the woods of Compiègne, in northern France. [Yes, I have visited Compiègne and seen the railway carriage].

The poppies symbolize those that grew in profusion across some of the worst battlefields. [Think of French Claude Monet’s ‘Poppies Blooming’ painted in 1873.]

A Canadian physician, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who was serving in WW I,wrote a poem, in 1915, called ‘In Flanders Fields‘, after attending the funeral of a fellow soldier [‘Flanders‘ being a region in northern Europe in which there was heavy fighting]. The first verse of it went:

 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.

The original poem. Click to ENLARGE.

by Anura Guruge