How easily we glide along
route A16 across the Somme,
with Mozart on the radio
and Paris in an hour or so.
How blood sinks down in boredom’s fold
and lungs inhale unchanging air
while eyes find rest on salients slow
where cornfield armies scarcely stir.
How soon the unhindered miles go by,
through fenceless fields and gentle wolds,
where larks still bravely singing fly
scarce heard amid the roar below
of convoys moving east and west
in files and columns, quick and slow,
none breaking ranks or needing rest
between emplacements row on row
that take their toll in cents per mile
for passage in such easy style,
with Mozart on the radio
and Paris in an hour or so.
Autoroute de la Somme carries echoes of well known poems of the first World War, including In Flanders Fields by the Canadian poet John McCrae.
Video of John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields read by fellow-Canadian Leonard Cohen.
John McRae, who died in the great flu pandemic of 1918, was a Canadian physician who volunteered for a front-line posting. As gunner and medical officer in the second Battle of Ypres, he endured the first chlorine gas attack and helped hold the Canadian line for more than two weeks, an experience he described in a letter home: “For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds ….. And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.”
At Ypres, a close friend was killed and McRae conducted the funeral service. Afterwards, sitting in the back of an ambulance, he pulled out a scrap of paper and wrote In Flanders Fields, choosing the form of a two-rhyme rondeau and taking as his starting point the poppies that had sprung up all around on the graves of the dead, as poppies always do on disturbed ground. By all accounts he was dissatisfied with the poem and threw it away, only for it to be recovered by a fellow soldier. Quoted and memorised by thousands from that day to this, McRae’s discarded effort gave to the world its symbol of remembrance.
Introduction to the poetry of 1914-18, prepared for the Oxford Poetry Group in 2014.