Marquil and Ellen, thanks for your thoughtful comments.
I agree that McCrea’s poem has a potentially discordant section.
But I think those troublesome lines are misunderstood by many today.
The poem works beautifully for me, at least, if it is re-cast as a cry that the cause must rise above squabbles of imperialist powers.
Many in the Great War thought (hoped) the incredible slaughter could be in the service of something that might justify the madness.
Since WW I seems to have solved nothing – and arguable caused WW II – we tend to roll our eyes at the phrase “war to end all war”.
But that was one way WW I was “sold”.
A tempting prospect, that.
One last harrowing, nightmare to be sure there would be no more.
H.G. Wells penned a number of articles that became a WW I-era book to that effect.
When John McCrae wrote this:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
I postulate that the forces that create war are the foe McCrae wanted defeated,least the numbing waste be for naught.
I’ll quote a section from the aforementioned Wells book found on an
Internet archive :
So that the harvest of this darkness comes now
almost as a relief, and it is a grim satisfaction in
our discomforts that we can at last look across
the roar and torment of battlefields to the
possibility of an organised peace.
For this is now a war for peace.
It aims straight at disarmament. It aims at a
settlement that shall stop this sort of thing for
ever. Every soldier who fights against Germany
now is a crusader against war. This, the greatest
of all wars, is not just another war it is the last
war !
————————————-
Alas, alas. It was not.