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Sense
of Place
Remembrance
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POPPIES
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Scarlet
poppies grow naturally in conditions of disturbed earth.
The significance of the poppy as a lasting memorial symbol
to the fallen was realised by the Canadian surgeon John McCrae
in his poem In Flanders Fields.
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In
1974 a BBC North crew accompanied some of the surviving Bradford
Pals on what was to be their last trip back to the Somme.
A Bradford
Pal remembers casualties at the Somme and being wounded himself:
We were supposed to go over at ten-past-eight.
We were the third wave, the second battalion Pals. The Leeds
Pals and the first Bradford Pals went over at ten-minutes-to-eight.
It was a massacre, they were just wiped out. No chance at all.
It was pure massacre and anybody who says it wasn't is just
telling a pack of lies. At 8 o'clock the whole brigade, the
whole lot, were wiped out in half-an-hour. By the afternoon
there were 63,000 casualties that day, and it all took place
in the first hour, just like that. I got wounded at about 10
o'clock and they told me to get out because I was only a walking
case. I did walk out. I bl**dy would have run out, and make
no mistake about that, I got out as quick as I could. We'd got
a one-eyed officer. He'd lost an eye at Ypres. He was going
in the wrong direction. I told him, 'You're going in the wrong
direction,' so he said, 'All right, if you think I am going
in the wrong direction, find some senior officers. Well, I was
searching on my belly and my knees and crawling, and eventually
found just one. I was taken him back the best way I could. He
got wounded. I was attending to him, patching his wound up in
the back, and I got wounded. Just like someone put a stick right
across my back. Ten o'clock as far as I was concerned, the battle
of the Somme was over.

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