Every year, in the last days of October, a small red flower appears on coats and lapels across Canada. It is only a poppy. It weighs almost nothing. And yet it may be the most powerful symbol this country wears, because behind that small flower stands one of the saddest and most beautiful stories to come out of war.

Here is how the poppy became the symbol of fallen soldiers.

A flower that grows where the earth is torn

The story begins in Flanders, a region of Belgium where some of the heaviest fighting of the First World War took place. The common corn poppy is a stubborn flower. Its seeds can lie sleeping in the soil for decades, waiting for the earth to be disturbed. The shelling of the war did exactly that. Guns churned the ground over and over, bringing the buried seeds to the surface, and lime from the shattered buildings mixed into the soil and fed them.

So in the middle of mud, wire, and ruin, the poppies bloomed. Soldiers wrote home about fields ablaze with red, and the flowers grew thickest of all among the fresh graves of their friends. A flower of life, growing out of the ground of death. Nobody who saw it ever forgot it.

A Canadian doctor and a poem

In May 1915, during the Second Battle of Ypres, a Canadian doctor from Guelph, Ontario was serving with the artillery in Flanders. His name was Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. The day after he buried his friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, McCrae sat looking over a field where poppies grew between the crosses marking the graves, and he wrote the words that would carry the poppy around the world.

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row"

The poem In Flanders Fields was published in London in December 1915, and it became the most famous poem of the war. It gave the fallen a voice, and it gave the world an image it could hold onto. The poppy was no longer just a flower on a battlefield. It was the colour of the sacrifice itself.

Two women carried the poppy to the world

A poem can move hearts, but it took two determined women to turn the poppy into a symbol worn by nations.

In 1918, Moina Michael, an American professor volunteering in New York, read McCrae and his poem and answered it with a poem of her own, We Shall Keep the Faith. She vowed to always wear a red poppy in memory of the dead, and she began selling silk poppies to raise money for veterans in need.

Anna Guérin of France took the idea further. She had poppies made by widows and orphans in the ruined regions of France and travelled from country to country asking veterans groups to adopt the flower. In July 1921 she came to Canada, the homeland of John McCrae, and the Great War Veterans Association, the forerunner of the Royal Canadian Legion, adopted the poppy as its flower of remembrance. On November 11, 1921, poppies were distributed in Canada for the first time, and Canada became the first dominion in the Commonwealth to hold a poppy campaign. Britain adopted the poppy the same year, and from there the small red flower spread across the Commonwealth and beyond.

What the poppy means today

In Canada the poppy is worn from the last Friday of October until Remembrance Day on November 11, on the left side, over the heart. The money raised by the Poppy Campaign goes to the Poppy Fund, which supports veterans and their families with housing, food, medical equipment, and help in times of hardship. So the poppy does double duty. It remembers the ones who never came home, and it takes care of the ones who did.

That is why a flower became the symbol. It grew where they fell. A Canadian gave it words. Two women gave it to the world. And every November, when we pin it over our hearts, we repeat the promise at the heart of McCrae and his poem.

We will remember them. Lest We Forget. 🌺

Sami Chowdhury | TorontoBased.com