They Shall Not Grow Old

“In Flanders’ Fields, the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,”

-0-

With a piercing shriek the whistle blew, the sound that haunted Sister Margret’s every moment. Waking or sleeping she could hear that deadly sound, and just behind it the screams. Roars of men thundering over the top, wails as bullets took them, cries of terror as their well-trained feet carried them forward, towards the only hope of survival.

She had never seen the front, not really. But she had seen enough.

The dead, staring eyes of men whose hearts still beat, shaken right out of their own heads. Mutilated limbs and bloodied faces aplenty; but to her the worst, the very worst, over and above even those who could not stop screaming, were the ones with blank faces. The frightened boys who had retreated so far into themselves that even once the shelling had stopped they would never find their way out again.

On a stool beside the bed of one, there had not been an attack in days so they had beds enough for the shell shocked, she read quietly from a book of poems. Some of the pages were stained a rusty brown, but she chose not to think about that. Chose to ignore the slight scent of mud that rose each time she turned one, instead reading on.

Maybe it would help, maybe this book of poems would help the poor lost soul beside her find his way home. Maybe… maybe it was only to assuage her own broken soul. Maybe there was nothing else to it but that.

Far too many men had laid on the pure white sheets as she confirmed their pulses had stopped. Too many thin, pinched faces had stared up at her as she pulled the sheet up to cover them. Too many arms or legs flopped out when the stretcher bearers came to carry them away. Too many…

All the farms and mills back home must be empty, she was convinced of that, glancing up from the pages to see if any expression crossed the young soldier’s face. He could not have been any older than sixteen. No older than little Edward… the thought came that she hadn’t received a letter from mother in weeks. Far longer than was normal.

Leaping to her feet, she hurried away from the boy with the empty, staring eyes. He did not react to her going, did not react to the bloodstained book falling from her hand to his chest. Simply stared at a spot on the ceiling. Stared through it at something only he could see, if he could be said to see anything at all.

Twelve days later, a thick letter arrived for Sister Margret. Inside she found the opened envelope of a second letter, and a scrap of paper blotted with the remains of long dried tears. Written across that scrap were the words “come home. Please.”

Shaking as badly as some of the soldiers fresh from the trenches, Sister Margret carefully unfolded the second letter. The one that had been included, envelope and all, within her own. It was addressed to her mother, written on the greyish paper used by every level of the Dominion Government, and it said all that needed saying.

Fresh tears fell on the smudged remains of Edward’s name.

-0-

“That mark our place and in the sky.

The larks still bravely singing fly.

Scarce heard amid the guns below”

-0-

He did not hear the mud squelch under his boots. He did not feel the freezing water as he sprinted towards the Hun, bayonet swaying before him, his own scream lost to his ears under the thunder of guns. He did not see or hear his comrades dying, crumpling as bullets caught them mid step, or vanishing into the mud.

Before his eyes a soldier vanished. Like something out of a magic act for children. A flash of light, a deafening roar, and the man in his khaki-green uniform was simply gone. Vanished, leaving only a faint mist on the air.

Pounding through the mist, his comrade forgotten as soon as vanished, he pushed onwards.

The only safety was the Hun trench, and a paltry safety that was, trading enemy machine guns and whizbangs for bayonets and clubs. But he could only run, the voice of his drill instructor in his ear, roaring above the thunder of the guns and screams of the dying, urging him on.

In a moment he was falling. Panic seized his thoughts by the throat and squeezed. Falling meant stopping, it meant a steady target, it meant drowning in the mud, it meant death. The expected pain in his leg or chest did not appear and he scrambled to his feet, mud mixing with the red on his face from the misted soldier he had run through before.

A scream tore its way free. Lost somewhere between a roar and a howl, it was lost to the thunder of the charge before his own ears could hear it. A hopeless, desperate sound, torn from thousands of throats across the miles-long stretch of the line.

Stopping dead, the ground before his feet suddenly falling away, he brought up his rifle and shot the stunned man in grey before him. The motion was automatic, thoughtless, the corpse forgotten in the instant he chambered his next round.

Boots thudded on the duck boards around him as he jumped into the trench. Other bodies, faceless men in khaki-green uniforms, walking corpses who had not yet realized they were dead.

One of them had a bag of grenades, and then it was gone, thrown down a set of crude steps before exploding. There might have been screams, but no one could hear them. There was a ringing in the soldier’s ears as he turned, rifle up, hoping that the enemy would simply cut their losses and run. Hoping that –

He slumped against the wall of the trench, a politely confused look on his face, wondering where the pale, thin boy before him had come from. He must have been a boy, that face could not have had to shave often enough to be a man, what was he doing on the front? And why… but his uniform…

Feeling the pain then, from his chest, he looked down and saw the boy’s fingers still wrapped around the hilt of a sword bayonet. It was almost funny, coming through Hell to be killed by a pocket kni-

-0-

“We are the dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow.”

-0-

In a dead sprint, John Rawlings saw the crew pulling away the wheel blocks as he came up to his plane. The siren wailed behind him, muffled once he pulled the fur-lined cap over his head.

“Contact!”

The crewman heaved on the propeller and the engine caught.

Rolling forward, Rawlings glanced at the tiny photograph next to his altimeter. Evelyn’s beautiful face smiled out at him, promising him that she would wait until the war was over. Pressing his gloved fingers to his lips, then to Evelyn’s photograph, he revved the engine and picked up speed down the grassy runway.

With a pull on the stick, his flaps dipped, and he soared into the clear blue sky.

Despite the summer sun, the wind that whipped his cheeks was cold. It almost reminded him of the late autumn wind off Lake Ontario when he was growing up. Not quite freezing but dipping near enough as made no significant difference.

Below him, he watched as the horrid scar of the front crept steadily closer. Already he could hear the thunder of the guns as the Expeditionary Force tried to dislodge the German positions. For a moment, he felt some regret for the luxury of the country chateau he and his squad mates lived in. Hot food ready made for them, dry bedding, and running water. Palaces compared to the dugouts in the trenches.

What was it that Leon had said after their first day training? “This beats the Hell outta the infantry.” Well, Rawlings had to assume he was right. The man had made it through Vimy, so he would know all about the lives of the infantry. He could take the cold and the eye strain if it meant he wasn’t trapped in the mud with artillery trying to land on his head.

Out of the corner of his eye, Rawlings saw a hand signal from Leon. Turning his head, he signaled back for the other pilot to say again. He only pointed up, towards the sun. Every pilot knew what that meant. Touching Evelyn’s photograph again, Rawlings fell into combat formation and angled himself to intercept the coming storm.

His twin machine guns rattled, shells flying past him as he roared towards the German planes. Fear pulsed somewhere just outside of knowing. He was a double ace, if there were two things he could do they were fly and shoot.

It was the enemy who should fear him.

Flames engulfed the triplane in front of him, but he was already hauling on the stick to swing around and rejoin the fight. About half of the Hun triplanes were out of the fray, with one having landed safely on the open field beneath them. That pilot had fired his plane and taken off running for a nearby treeline but Rawlings ignored him. The second a plane was out of action, it no longer existed in his mind. There was only the now.

Glancing skyward, he pulled back on the stick, lining himself up just right so that he could strafe the underside of an enemy bird. His machine guns rattled, spitting death at the unexpecting pilot as he lined up a killing blow at Leon’s plane. Swerving out of the way as the plane spun towards the ground, Rawlings saw the bloody mess of a pilot as he slumped over the controls.

Another one down. He would be a triple ace soon, if he kept this going.

Cold fear traced a finger across his neck sending a shudder straight down his spine. As though he moved in slow motion, he turned his head and saw the nose of a German plane. Behind the propeller, a familiar face waved sadly at him with one hand in the instant before the guns opened up.

Bullets tore into Rawlings’ engine, setting the whole thing aflame. Power cut, the propellor failed and his plane started to dip towards the ground.

Still in a daze, Rawlings turned again to look at the other plane. The German’s sad face flashed at him again. They had seen each other a dozen times, perhaps. Always broken apart before they had to cross proverbial blades. Rawlings had thought he would be the one to break their impasse. But it turned out the other way.

He could feel the heat from the blazing engine. It was slowly igniting the fine blue wool of his trousers. Soon he would feel the bite of the flames too.

Hand trembling, he pulled his revolver from its holster and pressed the muzzle to his temple. A whispered prayer for himself, and for Evelyn’s forgiveness. He took her photo from where it was stuck to his instruments and kissed it.

This was better than crashing and burning, wasn’t it?

-0-

“Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

in Flanders Fields”

-0-

Thunder rumbled in the distance as a chill wind blew across the deck of the Resilient. It cut through Brackenreid’s watch coat like a hot knife through butter. Breathing into his cupped hands and rubbing them vigorously together, he wished for a hot knife. At that point any warmth at all would be a godsend.

Shocking no one, especially not a young man who had grown up on St. John’s docks, the North Sea was bitterly cold. Arctic winds howled south, carrying occasional flurries of snow with them and breaking great icebergs off from whatever frozen Hell those ship killers came from.

He shuddered, straining his eyes against the dark. The merchant navy wasn’t a perfect job, but he supposed it helped ease his mother’s mind somewhat. Much as the army needed men in France and in Flanders, the ships needed men to carry the cargo over there. Not everyone could be part of pushing the Germans back behind their own borders.

Although, enough of his friends had enlisted in the Newfoundland Regiment that he felt a coward for not going with them. Taking up arms to defend the Empire was every subject’s duty. The old lion needed help and he was just the right sort of man to provide it.

But there was his dear mother to think of. As the only son, it was up to him to look after her since his father had died in the mines up in Labrador. That meant he couldn’t risk his neck on the front, but he could still help the war effort and he would. By crossing the Atlantic with holds packed to bursting with food and weapons for the army, he was doing his part.

He had to be. If not, then what was the point of it all?

Vaguely, still scanning the blackness for anything dangerous, he tried to count just how many times he had made that crossing since the war began. Too many times, was probably about as close to the truth as he could get. The war would never end, or so it seemed. Barely in port long enough to load the next cargo of rifles, machine guns, shells, bandages, and food, before ploughing back to England. Even the explosion in Halifax had barely put a delay on shipping.

Wood from the west of Canada, grain from the Prairies, finished goods from Ontario and Quebec, fish from the Maritimes, the war machine needed every scrap of it. Not to mention the men. Hundreds of thousands, shipped over seas and few enough being shipped back.

Maybe it was better that he was where he was. Safe as… well, safe as could be.

The newspapers had talked about how the Royal Navy had bottled up the Kreigsmarine after the Battle of Jutland. But that hadn’t stopped the Hun from causing havoc in the Atlantic. Enormous convoys of ships, protected by newly christened submarine hunters plied their slow way to England while wolves circled beneath the waves.

Bastards. Word around the docks claimed that close to half of the British Merchant Navy was on the ocean floor now thanks to them. And now the Resilient had to wait on the slowest convoy members to avoid outrunning Navy protection. It all stuck in his teeth.

Light split the darkness, blinding Brackenreid for a moment. And in that moment, the world ended.

Heat lanced across the deck, searing his skin an instant before two explosions nearly deafened him. Beneath his feet, the deck lurched, sending him crashing into the guard rail.

Shaking his head, he cleared the last of the spots from his eyes and threw a terrified look over his shoulder. With a scream the bones of the ship strained to the breaking point. As though from far away, he heard the abandon ship siren. Everywhere, sailors were pouring out onto the deck and thundering towards the lifeboats.

He tried to follow, but the ship was rocked by another torpedo hit. Out in the darkness, explosions lit the surface of the churning ocean as depth charges from the escort ships detonated, trying to flush the wolfpack out from hiding. Brackenreid didn’t care about that, didn’t care about the Germans, the Navy, or even the King. He fought back to his feet and struggled along the deck towards the nearest lifeboat.

Mother, little Kitty and Sarah. They were the only things in his mind as he helped his shipmates heave the boom over the side and start loading sailors in before lowering it. He needed to survive, he needed to –

Below deck, the fires from the torpedoes found the artillery shells bound for Flanders. Licking them with greedy tongues, they ate through the wooden crates and feasted on the straw packing. First one, then all of the shells exploded at once, cracking the ship apart.

The world shifted, another roar deafening young Brackenreid as gravity changed directions and dragged him down, down, down. Sliding along the deck, desperately trying to grab hold of something, anything, he forced himself not to look down. Not to see the oily black water.

It was cold as his boots crashed into it.

So very cold.

-0-

“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.”

-0-

Despite the frost that iced every roof and tree branch, steam rose from the shirtless men as they heaved shovelfuls of earth out of the ground. Sometimes they would sing as they worked, an easy way to keep the rhythm. A good way to break the tension of what they knew they were doing. What exactly those holes were for.

But this was not one of those mornings.

Just days before, there had been an attack. One of the officers had been heard muttering that ten thousand men had died to move the Field Marshal’s liquor cabinet ten feet closer to Berlin. A worthy sacrifice, according to the War Office. Or so the soldiers with shovels in hand thought, given that their tactics had barely changed since the first trenches were dug and the artillery sighted in.

The War to End All Wars, is what some people called it. The War to End the World, the rest of them thought. But the war could not last forever. Anemic boys now manned the German trenches, youths with the look of starvation about their gaunt cheeks when the dead were collected. It broke hearts just to see them there.

With a shout someone called a halt to the digging and the soldiers in the pit all leaned on their shovels as a measuring stick was brought down and held against the wall. There were twenty of them in there, stripped to the waists with steam gently curling off their skin into the crisp autumn air.

“Deep enough, lads,” shouted the Sergeant Major. “Everyone out. We’ll be back in an hour to bury the poor sods.”

Burying them. Each body would have a priest throw some holy water over him along with a few words in prayer before being lowered into the ground. Names and ranks would be added to the seemingly endless lists that the high command wanted, but some would be lost. Misspelled or not found on the corpses, it didn’t matter. No one knew how many of the missing were already buried.

Looking out across the field as he lit a cigarette, Private Legault of Montreal Quebec was taken aback by the poppies. He had seen them before, when they first arrived, and then again before the digging. Millions of them, scattered across a verdant field that stretched to the horizon. It was a beautiful sight. Red flowers glittering as the last of the morning dew burned away in shafts of sunlight that broke through the dense clouds.

Odds were it would rain soon, it seemed there was always rain on this blasted continent. Not like at home, when they would have stretches of polite dryness. He struggled with who he hated more, the Germans for starting this war, the British for dragging Canada and thus himself into it, or the French for failing to fight back the Hun.

As a conscientious objector, he was not forced to carry arms into combat. But into combat he was forced to go. Straight into the teeth of machine gun nests, chlorine gas, bayonets, and shells from artillery too far away to see what they were shooting at.

Stretcher bearers were afforded more respect and greater protections than the average soldier. They braved No Man’s Land with only their canvas stretcher to keep them safe and they stormed positions are regularly as anyone else.

“Ce sont les plus courageux d'entre nous,” he had heard more than one officer say.

But was that true? If he refused to go, they would shoot him as a traitor and a coward. So, he ran with his comrades away from certain death and into the jaws of death potential. Was that courage? He didn’t know. Would it not have been more courageous to die for his beliefs, standing tall before the firing squad?

He shook his head, refusing to listen to the sounds of the priest as he went about his grim task, or the sounds of the soldiers who moved the dead into their final resting place.

“Salut Stephan, ça va,” said Jean-Luc, sitting beside him and dragging deeply on his own cigarette. “Dieu. C’est belle, no?”

“Oui, ça va.”

Behind them, the soldiers moving the bodies started to sing. And the two friends turned to watch them work, but it was a difficult site to look at for too long. Body after body was carefully lifted and placed before disappearing under the lip of the pit they had dug.

Looking back out over the field of poppies, trying to tune out the macabre song behind them, trying to ignore the fact that they would soon take up their shovels again to bury the dead, Stephan Legault tried to enjoy the view.

A view untouched by the ravages of war. A field of red flowers glittering in the morning light without the fresh corpses of his countrymen under it. A field without crosses.

“Il y a très belle ici.”

-0-

“We shall not sleep, though poppies grow.

In Flanders Fields.”

Fin.

-0-

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month 1918, the guns of the Great War fell silent.

The lines of poetry scattered throughout this piece combine to form “In Flanders Fields” written by Canadian Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae (1872-1918). Originally discarded by Lt. Col. McCrae, this poem was saved by a friend of his and submitted to a magazine.

World War One is one of the deadliest and most destructive wars in human history. Total military dead numbered around 9.7 million divided as 5.7 million for the Allied Powers and 4 million for the Central Powers. Total military wounded was around 21 million. And the total civilian death toll from causes including disease, starvation, military action, and cold, is nearly 7 million.

For the Dominion of Canada, as we were then known, out of a population of nearly 8 million, more than 650,000 men served in uniform during the First World War. Of those approximately 66,000 died and 172,000 were wounded. Hundreds of thousands of the rest returned home with serious psychological damage that went undiagnosed and untreated for the rest of their lives.

Remembrance Day is always a strange time for Canada as a country. It holds an odd place in our national consciousness. On the one hand, it is a day to remember the sacred dead and honour their sacrifice, on the other hand it is a reminder that the First World War did not need to be fought. It is a day where we remember the birth of our nationhood with the Battle of Vimy Ridge, and a day we struggle with our culture and social philosophy as peacekeepers. (Canada invented U.N. Peacekeeping under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson.)

Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed. And I hope this Remembrance Day you take a moment to reflect on the history that has build out world. To honour those who sacrificed for us, people they will never meet. And to remember the millions of people as young as 16 who went into the trenches and never came out again.

So, I’ll leave you with a saying that was often said during our Remembrance Day ceremonies in school:

Lest we forget.