Gravel sent us the picture above from his friend in London of this “modern art” display in the UK and I guess it’s had a bigger impact than even the artist, Tom Piper, imagined, if we are to believe Stephen Pollard who writes in the UK’s Express;
In my near 50 years on the planet I can’t think of anything that has come close to the impact of the sea of poppies at the Tower of london.
Earlier this week I saw for myself the astonishing spectacle of another sea – the sea of men, women, boys and girls who have queued up in vast numbers to see the poppies with their own eyes.
But even the majority of us who have seen the poppies only on TV and in the newspapers are awed by the majesty and the beauty.
Tom Piper, the theatrical set designer behind the genius idea – it’s an over- used word but surely merited – has managed something astonishing. He has created an artwork that is both breathtakingly beautiful and redolent with meaning.
There are more pictures at the Tower of London’s website. The Telegraph says that workers are already dismantling the display. Of course, you probably know that the display was meant to mark the centenary of World War I.
Ok, I’ll say it. It looks like a river of blood. And around the Tower of London? Ugh.
Maybe you have to see it in person to appreciate its ‘beauty,’ but after seeing the picture…no thanks.
A river of blood would be accurate and appropriate for a display commemorating those who gave their lives in WWI, a war that pitted “new” technology against old battlefield methods. I see the beauty in the symbolism.
If it had been any WWI battlefield site, I would agree that the symbolism was poignant and appropriate. But, the Tower of London? Oh, blood flowed there, all right, but had absolutely nothing to do with WWI and everything to do with a tyrannical government. My thought is, ‘right symbolism, wrong spot.’
Yeah, Pinto, I was thinking the same thing.
Now, if it was in commemoration of the hundreds, if not thousands, who were unfairly executed by the British monarchy throughout the Medieval Ages, Renaissance, and on, I would think it’d be appropriate.
Quite frankly, if they wanted to do this really right, they should have found a section of trench line in France (almost all are overgrown, but there’s a few that have been left intact by residents as a memorial) and did the poppies there. Much more powerful.
Unless he’s blaming the British government for the tragic deaths of soldiers who were forced to use outmoded tactics, which is possible, and in which case the use of poppies at the Tower of London would be appropriate…
Really sad to remember that Napoleonic tactics had been proven obsolete in the face of advanced technology in the American Civil War. Fifty years later, when the stuff all that stuff that invalidated the old ways in the 1860s was itself obsolete, European armies still hadn’t figured it out.
The French, more so than any other European nation, clung to the belief that massed columns and reinforced lines of troops, advancing quickly against any enemy, would prove to be unstoppable.
Thus, they maintained regiments of dragoons, cuirassier, and lancers, almost unchanged in appearance and tactics since the days of the 1st Empire.
French blue coats, with scarlet trousers, cuirassiers with polished iron breastplates and helmets, dragoons and infantry with kepis. It was magnificent madness, and the Poiliu, the PBI, died in numbers not seen before under the artillery and machine guns of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians.
The Americans fared much better, though we still took plenty of casualties. After the civil war, Emory Upton had revised the US Manuals and gone from the 2-deep line to what was, in essence, a reinforced skirmish line as the main formation for US Infantry.
Plus, the Army and especially the Marines demanded much in marksmanship training, so much so that the Germans were stunned by the accuracy of American riflemen, at ranges they didn’t believe possible.
But the sea of poppies is a beautiful thing to my eyes. It conveys the cost of that war to the United Kingdom and it’s Commonwealth soldiers.
I’d love to see it as well. My Grandfather, Eugene Okeefe, was a machine gunner with the Australians in France during the Great War. There’s still a bit of a bond there, and it would be nice to visit the memorial and say a prayer for him there.
“While the tradition of wearing a Remembrance Day poppy is strong in Canada, and other parts of the Commonwealth, its origins are actually in the United States. Inspired by Canadian John McCrae’s famous poem In Flanders Fields and its poppy imagery, an American professor, Moina Michael, penned a poem in response in 1918 entitled We Shall Keep the Faith. While teaching disabled soldiers after the war, she came up with the idea of wearing poppies as symbols of remembrance.” (Source: Canadian website, The Great War 1914-1918)
http://ww1.canada.com/
Talk about one person, with a good idea, making a difference! Professor Moina Michael was teaching at the University of Georgia when the US entered the Great War. She took a leave of absence to help train young women for overseas work with the YMCA. When the war ended, she returned to the Georgia where she taught a class of disabled Veterans. She wanted to do more, seeing their deserved need, and came up with selling paper poppies for their benefit. By 1944, the year Professor Michael died, sales of poppies had reached more than 200 million! In 1948, a US postage stamp was issued in her honor. Its face shows her profile, with the words, “Founder of Memorial Poppy.”
How many know her today? I’ll be damned if I did.
I have spent much of the past 90 minutes or so reading what I could find about Moina Michael on the net. If you have a child or grandchild in need of a subject for school paper on great American women or just great Americans, you could do a lot worse than suggest Professor Michael. Here’s the poem of hers that responded to In Flanders Field and was the impetus for the poppy as a symbol of remembrance of the Fallen.
Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.
We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.
And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead.
Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
It’s supposed to be a river of blood representing the nearly 900,000 British dead in WW1….
Of course the tower of london is well known for killing Brits in fashions no less gruesome than the Germans…
It’s an odd bit of art to be sure, but our cousins across the pond have always been a little off.
It’s supposed to look like that.
The name of the exhibit is “Blood Swept Lands, and Seas of Red”.
From the Tower website; “…888,246 ceramic poppies, each poppy representing a British fatality during the First World War.”
Considering what it comemorates I think it’s brilliantly done.
We fail to remember just how bloody World War I was. Here are the casualty counts of a few of World War I’s major battles:
Passchendaele:
Allied: between 200,000 and 448,614
German: between 217,000 and 410,000
Verdun:
Allied: between 317,000 and 542,000, with approx 156,000 KIA
German: between 281,000 and 434,000, with approx 143,000 KIA
Battle of the Frontiers:
Allied: approximately 363,000
German: approximately 305,500
First Battle of Ypres:
Allied: 163,000
German: 46,765
First Battle of the Marne (1914):
Allied: 263,000
German: 256,000
Masurian Lakes (both battles, 1914 and 1915):
German: 26,200
Russian: 325,000
Gallopoli Campaign:
Allied: approx 252,000
Turkish: between 218,000 and 251,000
Great Retreat (Russia, Jun-Sep 1915)
German: 200,000
Russian: between 2,000,000 and 2,386,000
Perhaps a sea of blood-red poppies is indeed apropos.
I had two distant cousins killed within 24 hours of each other in that war. Both were Australian, one a captain, the other an EM. My maternal grandfather fought in that war, too, a member of the then-new Rainbow Division. He was gassed and later died from its effects, at age 27. I’ve mentioned this previously, and I will again. Numbers are numbers but when there’s a name, there go you and there go I.
I saw that on the telly, and the room quickly got dusty. Even though the Tower of a London has its own separate symbolism, I thought the entire display very appropriate.
“In Flander’s Fields the poppies grow,
between the crosses row on row…”
Both great-grandfathers on my Mother’s side, fought in WW1. I never met one of them, but I remember my Opa Fritz was a real quiet, kind and gentle man. I remember watching my great grand-mother dig a big chunk of wood out of his hand that had been in there since the war. This was around 1962-3. I was 4 years old, and amazed that a piece of wood could be inside someone’s hand. He never talked about his experiences other than to tell me about digging turtles out of frozen ponds to eat. My grandmother told me he spent most of the war on the Eastern front. My father’s grand-father also fought in that war. He served as a cavalry troop on the same side. I never met him either. I guess when one is on the losing side, there is not a lot to brag about.