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Thursday, November 12, 1998 War poem touches a chord with JennieI must have waited too long to return the call. Five rings, six rings, seven . . . A year ago today, Jennie McFarlane left a message on my machine: "No one seems to know that In Flanders Fields was put to music by our own Hamilton music director," she said. "When I think of Flanders Fields, I sing it. I'm nearly 92, and I was going to school when that poem first came out." I already had a Remembrance piece in the works when Jennie called last year. So I just filed her message away. And now I'm finally dialing that number. Eight rings, nine . . . And then, "Hello." Not a frail voice. A voice that sounds as though there's still some song in it. Jennie can still tell us her story. She offers to sing In Flanders Fields for me on the phone. But I want to witness her recital. So I visit Jennie, in the east end, in the white frame house where she's lived for the last 82 years. Born Jennie Milledge, on Feb. 12, 1906, she would have been eight when First World War began. She remembers a front page headline in The Spectator, in huge letters: All Europe Aflame. "I ran into the house and said, 'Mom, there's an awful fire in Europe'." Midway through that war -- which lasted from 1914 to 1918 -- Jennie started going to Queen Mary school, which had just opened. There, the teacher would hand out gray wool to the girls and they would take it home and knit socks for the soldiers. "I felt kind of good about it," says Jennie. News of that war came only via the printed word. And the words written by John McCrae touched the world. McCrae, born in Guelph, had seen service in every Canadian action in the spring of 1915. In the second battle of Ypres, he saw a close friend killed. They buried that friend near Poperinghe, Belgium, in a graveyard filled with white crosses and red poppies. It is said that McCrae looked at his friend's grave during a lull in the shelling, then climbed onto the back of an ambulance, tore a page from his dispatch book and in 20 minutes had written In Flanders Fields. He submitted it to Punch magazine, and the poem was reprinted everywhere. It soon found its way into the classrooms of Hamilton. Music in our schools then was only a vocal affair. The board had no budget for instruments for the children, though one square piano was purchased for each school. At Queen Mary, the children would get a visit from a man who Jennie remembers was known by the teachers as "Our Bruce." Our Bruce, tall, fair-haired, was Dr. Bruce Carey, who became the Hamilton board's Director of Music. Perhaps others turned In Flanders Fields into a song too, but it is Our Bruce who taught Jennie and her classmates how to sing the poem. He told them about the words on the board and why the soldier had written them. "He'd sing a line, then we'd sing the line," says Jennie. The poem does not go away. "At this time of year, it's in my head all the time," she says. "I sing it to myself." And in her livingroom, her home since that first big war, she sings it for me. The voice breaks twice, but the aim is true. This song is in her. Jennie tells you that she has been lucky in war. When the Second World War broke out, her husband stepped forward. Andrew, an accountant with Balfour's Wholesale Grocery, was also a regimental sergeant-major with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He, of course, would enlist. Jennie's father took her aside. "You know, Jen, he's going to join up to look after you, to look after all of us. Let him make his mind up. Don't try to stop him." Jennie says she knew her father was right. "Andrew was a logical one to go, but I wasn't happy about it." The colonel of Andrew's regiment, however, talked him out of it: "If you sign up, they'll just put you in a desk job. You'll do more good here, training soldiers." "We didn't have him home many nights," says Jennie. "He was at the armouries an awful lot. But I knew where he was and I knew he was safe." So life let her keep a husband. And her boys, Paul and Ross, got to keep a father. When each boy was a baby, that father would stand over the crib and say, "Isn't he lovely, Jen?" But Jennie aches for those hurt by the war. "It wasn't just the men who died. It was the families they left behind. Children growing up without their dads. People losing their sons, their brothers." McCrae's words still grip her hard. "Between the crosses, row on row. . . I think what I'd feel like if my husband had gone over there and one of those crosses was his. "Whenever I hear the poem, or when I sing it to myself, it fills me up. It makes me want to cry." John McCrae's work is just 97 words. Read them. Feel them. And if the spirit moves you, sing them out loud. 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. |
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