Legionnaires were out amongst the town in front of the Middleburg Safeway offering Poppies to be worn in remembrance of Remembrance Day. $225 was collected, going to our Veteran Welfare fund. Our friends from Leesburg VFW Post 1177 helped with the event.
After the Battle at Ypres in the Flanders section of Belgium next to the border with French Flanders, an American cemetery was established with shallow graves. The graves were covered with lime to keep varmints from digging up the fallen. It was noticed that that red poppies were able to grow in this alkaline soil, a stark contract to the white of the lime.
The tradition to wear poppies as the symbol of Remembrance Day began in France by French resident, Anna Guérin and was soon adopted by England. Remembrance Day is celebrated in some of the U.K.’s Commonwealth member states, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
The first American person to suggest the wearing of poppies to honor the fallen Soldiers of WWI was Moina Belle Michael, of Atlanta, Georgia, a teacher, who came to be known as “The Poppy Lady.” On September 29, 1920, she was able to convince the National American Legion convention to use the “Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy” as America’s emblem of Remembrance.
The scourge of wartime death was memorialized in a poem written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae entitled, “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.
