POPLARS

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 819, 13 November 1929, Page 14

POPLARS

AND ARMISTICE DAY Rosemary means ‘‘Remembrance,'* and to some that dainty dainty flower brings thoughts of war. but for me the memories crowd and humble when I see stately poplars standing In straight loveliness, clear against the sky. I think of those who went away, and I wonder if sometimes, “between fire/' those young people saw the beauty in the curved branches of the poplars: I wonder if they watched the leaves, wet with rain, trembling in the wind and sending showers of silver drops to the land below; I wonder if they ever paused in their busy, terrible days to listen to the gongs the leaves made

when the wind whispered through them ... I wonder all these things, and 1 know that out there in France, where the poppies blow in scarlet waves over the green mounds, the poplars are still singing—tall slim poplars, wet with rain, with leaves a-tremble in the wind—and they 6ing • strange things—not songs of sadness , or of victory, but little whispering ' songs of understanding. I love poplars; they are so much : more beautiful than other tree«, and they seem to belong to France. And on this eleventh day, at the eleventh hour, in the eleventh month of the eleventh year. I shall think of those i people “out there” with poplars making music above them. —Extract from a letter from Flying • Cloud (Leslie du Faur), written on 1 Armistice Day. > English is to be made a compulsory • subject in the schools of Czechoi Slovakia. i