In Flanders Fields: An Echo

African American troops near Verdun 1918
(Library of Congress cph 3c16442) 

John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” was one of the most popular poems of the war and continues to be read, recited, and studied today. A recent student study guide argues that the poem is “adaptable to any number of circumstances beyond the occasion for which it was written,” because anyone who has been defeated or known others who have sacrificed for a cause “can relate to the speaker’s desire that the ‘torch’ will be carried on by someone else who finds the cause, or the defeated combatant, honorable.”*

In 1920, the Dunbar Entertainer published “In Flanders Fields: An Echo,” a poem that challenged Americans to uphold the light of justice and extinguish the burning crosses and flames of hatred that scarred the landscape of post-war America.

In Flanders Fields

An Echo

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row

   That mark the graves where black men lie;

   Their souls, long wafted to the sky,

Look down upon the earth below.

E’en while we mourn their loss, we see

Their brothers hanged upon a tree   
   By whom they saved. Their pain fraught cry

   Mounts up to those who stand on high

And watch the scarlet flowered sea

   In Flanders fields.

In Flanders fields they shall not sleep!

No! For their murdered kin they keep

   A vigil through the day and night,

   ‘Til God Himself shall snatch from sight

Such scenes as make our heroes weep

   In Flanders fields.

            —Orlando C. W. Taylor (1920, Dunbar Entertainer)

The Tuskegee Institute estimates that in the 86 years between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,743 people were lynched in the United States; 3,446 of them were African Americans. As African American troops returned home from the war that had “promised to make the world safe for democracy,” they confronted a new battle:

Many black veterans were denied the benefits and disability pay they’d been promised. In the first summer after the war, known as the Red Summer, anti-black riots erupted in more than twenty American cities, including Houston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. “This is the right time to show them what will and what will not be permitted, and thus save them much trouble in the future,” one Louisiana newspaper opined, in an editorial titled “Nip It In the Bud.” In the years after the war, at least thirteen black veterans were lynched. Countless more survived beatings, shootings, and whippings.***

The poem’s author, Orlanda Capitola Ward Taylor, was born in Texas in 1891 and witnessed a lynching as a young teen. An educator, journalist, and radio host, he is best known for co-founding in 1925 New Orleans' first African American newspaper, The Louisiana Weekly, and for his pioneering work in black radio broadcasting. He died in 1979.

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*Gale, Cengage Learning, A Study Guide for John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,”2016.

**Amanda Betts, In Flanders Fields: 100 Years Writing on War, Loss and Remembrance, Knopf, 2015.

*** Peter C. Baker, “The Tragic, Forgotten History of Black Military Veterans,” The New Yorker, 27 November 2016.

The Piper

Piper James Richardson, Canadian, V.C., by James P. Beadle

“In Flanders Fields,” written by Canadian physician John McCrae in May of 1915, was published in Punch magazine December 8, 1915.  The poem quickly became one of the most popular poems of the war, set to music, quoted by politicians, and used to inspire the purchase of war bonds. Joel Baetz  notes, “Within two years it had been reprinted so many times that McCrae, who was initially surprised and humbled by its publication, was uninterested in later iterations and annoyed by its continual misuse.”*

The poem also inspired many response poems, among them “The Piper,” written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables. The first Anne book was published in 1908, but Montgomery continued to write about the adventures of Anne and her family. In her 1921 novel, Rilla of Ingleside, Anne’s son Walter Blythe joins the Great War, enlisting with the Canadian forces. Before volunteering, Walter says to a friend, “Before this war is over … every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it … You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come—and he will pipe until every corner of the world has heard his awful and irresistible music. It will be years before the dance of death is over … And in those years millions of hearts will break.”**

While at the front, Walter writes a poem, a “short, poignant little thing” that gains immediate popularity, as described in the novel:

            Everywhere it was copied—in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies, in profound reviews and “agony columns,” in Red Cross appeals and Government recruiting propaganda. Mothers and sisters wept over it, young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the might conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses. A Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches had written the one great poem of the war. “The Piper,” by Pte. Walter Blythe, was a classic from its first printing.***

In the novel, when “The Piper” is read at public gatherings, crowds respond with cries of “We’ll follow—we’ll follow—we won’t break faith.”†  The novel’s poem was almost certainly inspired by McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.” But in Rilla of Ingleside, the poem itself is never included. It was only in 1942, in the midst of the Second World War, that Montgomery included "The Piper" in the manuscript for The Blythes Are Quoted, the last work she would write. At the start of that book, she explains, “In my books Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside, a poem is mentioned, “The Piper,” supposed to have been written and published by Walter Blythe before his death in the First World War. Although the poem had no real existence many people have written me, asking where they could get it. It has been written recently, but seems even more appropriate now than then.”

 

Charlottetown War Memorial

The Piper

One day the Piper came down the Glen …
      Sweet and long and low played he!
The children followed from door to door,
No matter how those who loved might implore
      So wiling the song of his melody
As the song of a woodland rill.

Some day the Piper will come again
      To pipe to the sons of the maple tree!
You and I will follow from door to door,
Many of us will come back no more …
      What matter that if Freedom still
Be the crown of each native hill?

            —Lucy Maud Montgomery

In Rilla of Ingleside, Walter is killed in 1916 at the attack on Courcelette, but in his last letter to his sister Rilla, written the night before his death, he explains that he has seen a vision of the Piper:

            I was doing sentry-go and I saw him marching across No-man’s-land from our trenches to the German trenches—the same tall shadowy form, piping weirdly, —and behind him followed boys in khaki. Rilla, I tell you I saw him—it was no fancy—no illusion. I heard his music, and then —he was gone. But I had seen him—and I knew what it meant—I knew that I was among those who followed him.

                        “Rilla, the Piper will pipe me ‘west’ tomorrow. I feel sure of this. And Rilla, I’m not afraid. When you hear the news, remember that. I’ve won my own freedom here—freedom from all fear. I shall never be afraid of anything again—not of death—nor of life, if, after all, I am to go on living. And life, I think, would be the harder of the two to face, —for it could never be beautiful for me again. There would always be such horrible things to remember—things that would make life ugly and painful always for me. I could never forget them. But whether it’s life or death, I’m not afraid, Rilla-my-Rilla, and I am not sorry that I came. I’m satisfied. I’ll never write the poems I once dreamed of writing—but I’ve helped to make Canada safe for the poets of the future—ay, and the dreamers, too … ††

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Walter Blythe closes the letter to his sister, “And you will tell your children of the Idea we fought and died for—teach them it must be lived for as well as died for, else the price paid for it will have been given for nought. This will be part of your work, Rilla. And if you —all you girls back in the homeland—do it, then we who don’t come back will know that you have not ‘broken faith’ with us.”†††

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* Joel Baetz, Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2018.

** Lucy Maud Montgomery, Rilla of Ingleside, Frederick A. Stokes, 1921, pp. 44-45.

*** Rilla, pp. 226-227.

† Rilla, p. 242.

†† Rilla, pp. 257-258.

††† Rilla, p. 259.

Return O' the Year

First World War soldier Joseph Lee has been called Scotland’s Forgotten War Poet. Although he was nearly 40 years-old when war was declared, Lee joined to fight with the Royal Highlanders and King’s Royal Rifle Corps until he was captured as a German prisoner of war in 1917. “The Black Watch Poet of Dundee” was one of the more popular soldier-poets during the war, and Lee published two volumes of poetry, accompanied by his own illustrations. His sober meditation on the coming of the new year appears in his second volume, Work-a-day Warriors (1917).   

The Return O’ the Year

Year after year the grass,

   Year after year the grain,

But the sleeping dead in their lonely graves

   They never return again.

Year after year the bud,

   And the bird upon the tree,

But my fond love wha sleeps so sound,

   He never comes back to me.

Year after year the wind,

   Year after year the rain,

But the weary night and the dreary day

   Bring nought to me but pain.

The sun and the moon and the stars,

   And the clouds fade from the sky,

And the last leaves fall from the lifeless trees—

   It’s O, that I might die!

Year after year the grass,

   Year after year the grain,

But the dead who sleep in the weary graves

   They  never return again. 

            —Joseph Lee*

A reviewer from the Spectator said of Lee’s first war poetry collection, “Of the verse that has come straight from the trenches, the Ballads of Battle by Lance-Corporal Joseph Lee, of the Black Watch, are among the very best … The horror, the exultation, the weariness, and the humour of trench warfare are here ... Corporal Lee’s spirited sketches and portraits add greatly to the attractiveness of this little volume which is dedicated to the comrades in arms so faithfully and affectionately portrayed in his verse.”* 

Lee survived the war, returning to his work as a journalist. He died in Dundee in 1949.

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* All sketches are from Lee's collection Work-a-day Warriors.  

**”Books: War-Time Poems,” Supplement to the Spectator, 7 Oct. 1916, p. 391.