Not All Memorials are Monumental: A 1917 Captain’s Tale and a Red Poppy

Not all Memorials are Monumental, Paris 1917

August, 1917      Not All Memorials are Monumental– The Red Poppy

He called himself Andy. He was an American Army captain from southwestern Virginia on a journey in the French countryside. When he picked up his pen with its fine point on August 21, 1917, to write to Rose Sutton Parker, he had apparently just traveled into the country by auto from one of the finest hotels on the Left Bank. The Hotel Lutetia, completed in 1910, was the proud creation of architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Henri Tauzin. The Art Deco façade has now survived two world wars and its rooms have been home to dozens of artists, literary figures and refugees who fled from the Germans during World War II. https://www.hotellutetia.com/

Andy’s handwriting on the letter (transcribed below) is elegant and the stationary is as well. He wrote to Rose only using her name on the envelope. Perhaps he did not want to write “My dear Mrs. Parker,” as might have been expected. Rose was then, at thirty-four, separated from her husband, Lieutenant Hugh Almer Parker. She adored Europe and, between 1912 and 1917, spent much of her time in France, England and Spain. And through the decades she kept this letter until she died in 1958.

The captain enclosed a red poppy from the fields of France in his letter to Rose. I am deeply touched at the sight of this flower in perfect, if flattened, condition more than a century later.  We grapple now with new kinds of war, with illness, deprivation and violence that remains as shattering to the human spirit as World War I. Our current wars are so hard-edged and high-tech. There is no room for pressed flowers in news reports of these conflicts. This letter, like so many others written by hand in the last century, adds a touch of civility and humanity to the situation it describes. Andy is present on the narrow pages of his four- sided hotel stationary in a way that cannot be replicated on a computer. In a few decades, what will remain of the e-mail correspondence or text messages from our troops? We cannot e-mail or text a flower.

Two years after receiving this letter, Rose married another man, a Virginia gentleman and attorney Robert Randolph Hicks. A few years later, just before the Depression hit and decimated their savings, they created a small slice of Europe in the Virginia countryside that is now Poplar Springs Manor. The Hotel Lutetia, where a small, temporary bond was created between a black-eyed ebony- haired beauty and an Army captain, remains a four-star hotel to this day.

But who was Captain Andy—is that Andrew? — and where is his family now? Who is writing  poetry from our current steel-edged conflicts?  Robert Service, whose work he recommends to Rose, was a British- born Canadian poet whose brother died in France in August, 1916. I’m still looking for the Robert W. Service poem that mentions the poppies.

And I still remember my mother, Jane Hall ,reciting the Service poem, “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” which this eloquent, sensitive captain wanted his new friend, my great aunt and surrogate grandmother to read.* Though foxholes, rodents and vermin have been replaced by IED’s and high tech weapons, the poppy remains a symbol of  hope and remembrance to this day.

Red poppies sprang up all over the graves of fallen soldiers in World War I. They are memorialized in a famous poem called “ In Flanders Fields” (1915) from another Canadian poet, John McCrae. A remembrance poppy is still worn in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth in honor of military veterans who died in war.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45082/the-shooting-of-dan-mcgrew

*Rose and her husband adopted my mother and her brother when they became orphans in 1930.

 

A TRANSCRIPT OF THE LETTER FROM FRANCE August 1917

Envelope

Mrs. Rose Sutton Parker

100  Boulv.  Montparnasse

Paris, France

Hotel LUTETIA   Square du Bon Marche   43 Boul. S  43 Boul. Raspail  Paris

Aug [ust] 21, 1917

You should see your “cher capitaine” maintenant, seated at a rough table on a chair converted from a box and smelling the smell of stables, pigs et “tout les choses.” Really though this trip is the most wonderful experience of my young life. Sunday morning about ten we left the train and went by auto to the Headquarters 10th French Army. It was a trip of 40 kilometers through a country tres tres jolie. Rolling country, divided into many fields, large trees and excellent roads. The landscape in general is not unlike that of my own Southwest Virginia – you know I came from the mountains, not the flat cotton peanut part of the state – it was hard to realize that the peaceful country colored green and brown by God’s hand was three years ago laid waste by hands of hostile Huns and that only 20 kilo distant great guns were belching forth death and destruction with their tons of lead and iron.

My melancholy, serious thoughts did not last for long and soon I was dreaming just of the country without any thought whatever of people or things, other than very personal and intimate things. I thought about Italy and I dreamed a foolish wonderful dream of two people being sent to that country for special services. In my romantic hours I dream of being connected with plots, intrigues, and of combating secret agents. In the land of dreams I will live in a château and will profess adoration for a beautiful someone who has lots of information and I will buy the secrets of a nation with just smiles. This seems to be the most foolish letter I ever wrote and I write things that I never say. I’m a sort of modest person you know and can’t say very well the things I dream.

Sunday afternoon we went to the front, that is the artillery front, and stood by while cannon thundered and roared. Boom-szzz-a flash then a cloud of dirt and smoke and I wonder how many legs and arms were smashed and thrown up into the air. One of our aeroplanes would fly over and soon several black puffs would appear in the sky. No sound of powder or sight of fire but a realization that death was very near for someone. When a German plane came we could see our batteries fire and watch the explosion of our shelves.

We went to a ruined château that had one time been in “no man’s land.” It must have been a wonderful place before the war. There was an artificial lake that had been surrounded with statuary. Everything was broken and ruined. A marble woman lay on the bottom of the stone steps. Her head lay ten inches from her body, her right arm, shoulder and half her breast was gone. The break was very clean as if it had been cut away with a sharp sword. Her legs and lower trunk lay in the water and was covered with green stuff so I was foolish enough to imagine that her skin was gone in spots and that the green stuff was powder gangrene. People who live in the U.S. and people who live even in Paris don’t know what this war is. What had been a beautiful lawn in front of the house was torn to pieces with shell holes and though I didn’t see any, I imagined pieces of humanity covered and buried in the debris. Have you read the poem (Service’s) about the Red poppies of No Man’s land.  [?] I picked this one for you.

This place where I live was the house of the village butcher. I have a bed about 5 feet from the floor. The principal covering is a big red feather bed. We eat at the artillery Hdqrs. Mess 10th Army. I like the open country with the pretty fields and beautiful trees but I hate those dirty little towers.

Yesterday we saw some more anti-aviation batteries and inspected many dugouts. For the most part they are the same. Merely a hole in the ground with some straw. It will be hard for me to live in a hole with a great grey rat – or several – for a bedfellow. And the little grey bugs – a skunk is better than a man in the trenches because God gave him powers for combating such vermin.

You must read the poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” because he tells how dirty a man can get “all covered with hair” and “in a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt, he sat, and I saw him sway.” That means that the man was dirty but it might be called a “clean earthy dirt” while our soldiers are filthy with vermin.

Lady, pretty soon I’ll have you feeling crawling things and wanting a bath, so I shall stop. Really I have written a very long letter don’t you think?

We will probably return to Paris on Friday and I hope I can see you Saturday evening. We will be in Paris next Sunday.

Sincerely yours,

Andy   [post script] The flower seems to stick to the card