To the Editor:
While not wanting to rehearse the history of the First World War, in a letter of Nov. 29, John Jorgenson took issue with an article in the Nov. 8 Advance that cited John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields and historian Paul Fussell’s critique of the third stanza, where Fussell argues that it was a propaganda against a negotiated peace. Jorgenson goes on to incriminate Fussell as a “depraved historian who never went to war nor could comprehend what life was like in muddy trenches with bullets being fired night and day.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
First, In Flanders Fields was indeed a work of propaganda, used by the Unionist party in the next Canadian federal election to encourage people to spend their last dollars on Union war bonds. It also caused riots across the country, and almost split it.
Second, the item was also a work of poetry in the tradition of late medieval and Victorian England, where the poppy was a badge of dead soldiers and popularized by writers as Lord Tennyson and Oscar Wilde whom McCrae had read. The poppy in these works was also a badge of homoerotic love.
Third, Fussell (who died last winter) was no ordinary historian. He was a great man whom I had the pleasure of meeting years ago, and who was a decorated war hero: He enlisted in 1943 at age 19, fought in the infantry on the fields of France, was wounded at Alsace, and decorated with the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. He dedicated his life to writing about the history of warfare because he had witnessed its tragedies firsthand. Writing in the era of the Vietnam War, his view that most wars were caused by politics and ideology for the glory of leaders still holds today (we could add race and religion). The impact of war on death — and physical and mental disability — upon the human race is a tragic fact of life, and Fussell devoted his career to exposing its causes and results.
Dr. Lou Knafla
Riverview