THE RED POPPY FOR MEMORIAL DAY

“Poppies in the wheat fields and the pleasant hills of France
Reddening in the summer breeze that bid them not and dance.”

So sang the soldier poet of the A.E.F.F. that blazing summer of 1918 when an unleashed American army was writing the Oureq and Vesle into our history. He sang of the poppies because it was through machine gun raked fields of them that the doughboys were charging; he sang of them because the doughboys were wearing them in their helmets as they roared ahead.Not all of us were along the Oureq and the Vesle that summer, taking German strong points with poppies in our helmets, but every American can wear his poppy this Memorial Day, when the poppy, as the officIal memorial flower of the American Legion, will blossom in hundreds of thousands of loyal lapels. The American who wears the poppy on Memorial Day is showing that he has not forgotten; for he wears it to remember–

“Poppies in the wheat fields;
how still beside them lie
Scattered forms that stir not
when the star shells burst on high;
Bently bending o’er them beneath the moon’s soft glance
“Poppies in the Wheat fields;
how still ransomed hills of France.”

The Red Poppy is the Official Memorial Flower.