IN FLANDERS FIELDS

My piece In Flanders Fields: an installation in 9 parts, is one artist’s attempt to add my “silent scream” to the chorus of those for whom war is anathema. It is a meditation on the fact that we– as whole countries, as societies, as small bands linked by shared hatreds and as human beings with our pitifully short lives given the privilege of inhabiting a magnificent planet–continue to engage in warfare mired in the delusion that we are thereby solving our human dilemmas. The famous poem from World War I, In Flanders Fields written in the midst of “seventeen days of Hades”* by Lieutenant Colonel John Mc Crae, forms the central image from which I draw my inspiration. Dead soldiers lie buried in a field of poppies. Larks fly overhead, singing, oblivious of gunfire. Soon enough the fields will harbor just beneath the surface, an array of human bones. The Lieutenant Colonel imagines the dead speaking. They implore us to “take up our quarrel with the foe” in order that they might sleep for all time. My piece takes issue with the poet, and with his assumption of the rightness of retribution and the implied glory of “winning”.

May we come to understand that the rageful mortification of human flesh known as War, is a shameful betrayal of who we are and all that we are.

Fran Bull
Vermont 2009

McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains to this day one of the most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.

(from a text written on the Arlington Cemetery web site: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm)