I quoted it once in a negro hut, hesitating before I
did so lest they should not appreciate it enough to make quoting it
excusable. But I took a chance.
When the service was over a long line of intelligent-looking negro boys
waited for me. I thought that they just wanted to shake hands, but
much to my astonishment most of them wanted to know if I would give
them a copy of that verse, and so I was kept busy for half an hour
writing off copies of that brief word of faith.
One never quite knows all that this verse means until he has been in
France and has seen the suffering, the heartache, the loneliness, the
mud, and dirt and hurt; the wounds and pain and death which are
everywhere.
Then he turns from all the suffering to find a blood-red poppy blooming
in the field behind him; or a million of them covering a green field
like a great blanket. These poppies are exactly like our golden
California poppies. Like them they grow in the fields and along the
hedges; even covering the unsightly railroad-tracks, as if they would
hide the ugly things of life.
I thought to myself: "They look as if they had once been our golden
California poppies, but that in these years of war every last one of
them had been dipped in the blood of those brave lads who have died for
us, and forever after shall they be crimson in memory of these who have
given so much for humanity.
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