At exactly 5 o’clock, as the gas cloud was released, a Belgian woman gave birth to a baby boy in the cellar of a cottage on the Zonnebeekseweg, just 3 kilometres from the poisonous gas cloud and the battle that was going on as a result of it. A story about the birth of new human life happened during the surprise gas attack on the French lines by the German Army on 22 nd April 1915. Soldiers spoke of how birds, and most particularly the lark, could be heard twittering high in the sky even during the fury of an artillery bombardment.Īgainst the odds, new life did also occasionally come into being in the battle zones. However, sometimes the sights and sounds of nature could be seen and heard through the fog of battle. Of the trenches only broken, half-obliterated links are visible.” The woods and roads have vanished like chalk wiped from a blackboard of the villages nothing remains but gray smears where stone walls have tumbled together… On the brown band the indentations are so closely interlocked that they blend into a confused mass of troubled earth. Every sign of humanity has been swept away. Now there is only that sinister brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature.
“Immediately east and north of Verdun there lies a broad, brown band … Peaceful fields and farms and villages adorned that landscape a few months ago – when there was no Battle of Verdun.
He describes the front line as a “brown belt, a strip of murdered Nature”: He recorded a vivid description of the destroyed landscape below him as he flew over the 1916 battlefield of Verdun. James McConnell was an American pilot who had volunteered to fight in the war and was flying with the French Escadrille Lafayette. In most cases the only living things they would see during tours of duty in the front line were scavenging rats, mice and lice. Few elements of the natural world could survive except for the soldiers who had little choice but to live in an underground network of holes, tunnels and trenches. In the fighting zones the devastation caused to the landscape created a wasteland of churned up soil, smashed up woods, fields and streams. It was the inspiration and dedication of two women who promoted this same “Memorial Flower” as the means by which funds could be raised to support those in need of help, most especially servicemen and civilians suffering from physical and mental hardship as a result of war.Ĭolour and Life in a Devastated Landscape Yet the scope of the poppy and its connection with the memory of those who have died in war has been expanded to help the living too. This is the story of how the red field poppy came to be known as an internationally recognized symbol of Remembrance.įrom its association with poppies flowering in the spring of 1915 on the battlefields of Belgium, France and Gallipoli this vivid red flower has become synonymous with great loss of life in war.
0 kommentar(er)
