Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/331

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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 lift it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

'This poem,' writes General Morrison, 'was literally born of fire and blood during the hottest phase of the second battle of Ypres. My headquarters were in a trench at the top of the bank of the Ypres Canal, and John had his dressing station in a hole dug in the foot of the bank,' and there, as he himself said, he wrote the poem 'to pass away the time between the arrival of batches of wounded.' He sent it to Punch, enclosing a stamped envelope for its possible return; but Punch knew better than to return it, and swiftly after its appearance there it flashed like a running fire across the world; was reprinted in innumerable papers, recited from platforms and at recruiting meetings; and became 'the poem of the army' in Flanders,