Eternal Sleep - WAR Flowers

I believe that grief is internal while mourning is public.

Poet, soldier and doctor, John McCrae ministered to thousands of casualties in a vast Canadian General Hospital in France. Exhausted, he succumbed to pneumonia in 1918. He was buried near the hospital where he had worked unselfishly to save the lives of many soldiers.

McCrae wrote these now famous words after the death of a close friend: “We shall not sleep though poppies grow, In Flanders fields…” It was an act of private grief that was made public, appearing in print for the first time in 1915 in Punch magazine. His poem lives on, helping to make the poppy an enduring symbol of remembrance.

– Viveka Melki

John McCrae (1872-1918)

John McCrae is the one combatant of the First World War who requires little presentation. He is immortalized in Canada and Commonwealth countries on November 11 of every year. His authorship of the 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” made him famous during his own lifetime. His evocation of the war is one of the most widely known and recited poems in the English language. The poem gave rise to the donning of the poppy as a solemn symbol every year and as a badge to those dedicated to keeping memory alive.

But while Canadians recognize McCrae’s words, they know little about his dual career as both a soldier and a surgeon. McCrae served as a soldier for much of his adult life, joining the cadet corps and the militia as a young man and taking leave from his medical studies to serve as an officer in the Royal Canadian Artillery during the South African War. When war broke out in Europe in 1914, he was on the staff at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal and a lecturer in medicine at McGill University. He went to France as a major and a military doctor.

McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields” after the death of a young friend and fellow officer, Alexis Helmer, in May, 1915 at the Second Battle of Ypres. It was published in Punch magazine in December that year. It became the best known of the war poems.

McCrae was appointed in May, 1915 chief medical officer of the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) in Boulogne, a vast facility with 1,560 beds. He spent the next two and a half years ministering to the wounded.

The daily work in the hospital was grinding and demoralizing. The machinery of war had reached new levels of sophistication. Shrapnel-emitting mortars and mustard gas meant that soldiers arriving in military hospitals were often severely maimed and debilitated. A surgeon’s intervention was often too little and too late. Their work was often limited to calming the wounded or offering morphine to lessen the pain before an inevitable death.

McCrae himself suffered from asthma and bronchitis. He finally succumbed to pneumonia. He was buried very near to the hospital where he worked with the full honours bestowed on one of the war’s most remarkable warriors and doctors.

Learn More about John McCrae:

McCrae is the subject of many biographies and testimonials. For a bibliography and a brief life, consult the biography in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mccrae_john_14E.html

Press on the pictures below to show content:

Optical crystal

“In the aftermath of battle two medics care for the wounded, while above poppies float
and fade into the night sky.”
– Mark Raynes Roberts

Olfactory memory

“The enigmatic odour of death. Iron, bitter, heavy, that incense cannot mask. Silence
is invasive.”
– Alexandra Bachand

John McCrae (1872-1918)

“John McCrae is the one combatant of the First World War who requires little presentation. His authorship of the 1915 poem “In Flanders Fields” made him famous during his own lifetime. His evocation of the war is one of the most widely known and recited poems in the English language.”
– Alexander Reford

Cantlie’s Letter

Conservation

See the letter

Cantlie's Letter

Repos éternel - lettre | Fleurs d'Armes - Une exposition artisitique itinérante | www.fleursdarmes.ca

Botanical Approach

Conservation issues for George Stephen Cantlie’s botanical specimens to be displayed in the WAR Flowers exhibit

Contractual expertise by Céline Arseneault, botanist and archivist (retired botanist and librarian at the Montréal Botanical Garden) May 2016

Conservation assessment

The dried flowers specimens had been conserved pressed in the original letters/papers/envelopes for nearly 100 years, with one exception where a later envelope included a flower.
Some flowers had pieces of fabrics or textiles attached to them.
Some flowers had rubbed off or left their print on the papers.
The flowers were dry, brittle and in some cases very fragile and broken in pieces (included in the paper/envelopes).
Some envelopes included more than one specimen and more than one plant species.
The flowers hold historical value but no biodiversity value like scientific herbarium pieces because they were not documented as such.
Botanical identification has been made in accordance with the letters’ indications (dates, locations) and material available (mostly flowers only, visual colours, few leaves) for tentative scientific genus identification.
The flowers have historical significance in the context of Cantlie’s archives, as a part of the correspondence addressed mainly to his daughter Celia (or exceptionally wife/other daughters). They are seen as item “objects” in the scope of the Rules for Archival Description by the Canadian Council of Archives:
http://www.cdncouncilarchives.ca /RAD/RAD_Chapter11_Dec2002.pdf
The primary purpose of the present assessment was to avoid altering the integrity of these objects.
The accompanying papers, letters and envelopes bring major significant value (dates, paper headings, postal stamps, annotations, writings, etc.) to the objects. See link above.

Original plan for the exhibit: Inclusion of flowers into resin pastilles

The original exhibit proposal included stand‐alone encasing flowers into transparent polymer‐type resin (“pastilles”), each one to be temporarily encased in a crystal sculpture for display purposes.

Conservation issues regarding acrylic resin encasing

Transparent acrylic‐type or polymer‐type resin can be used successfully for fresh botanical specimens, however:

Dried botanical specimens are organic and brittle.The brittleness accentuates with dryness, age and manipulation. Humidity and change of environment can cause rapid deterioration by moulds, dust mites or otherwise. Older pigments and botanical specimens themselves are also more fragile to heat and light. https://www.nps.gov/museum/publications/conserveogram/01‐03.pdf — http://conservation.myspecies.info/node/35
Encasing in acrylic‐type resin implies a heating process which creates static energy as well as thermal energy. Statics augments brittleness and specimens risk “exploding” into the resin.
Because of their historical value, there were no available sample specimens that could be used as an experiment to validate the previous statement.
At this point, where flowers have already been subjected to change of colours due to time, we can assume that polymer encasing would accelerate the discolouration.
No studies are available regarding the long‐term conservation (discolouration, deterioration) of the acrylic resin itself.
This type of encasing is not generally recommended for archival or historical conservation as it alters the specimens.
This type of encasing is NOT recommended in the conservation literature for older, organic material, such as botanical specimens and papyrus (references available on request).

For these reasons and in regard to further deterioration of the specimens, encasing in acrylic resin was not recommended for the Cantlie’s flowers.

Conservation issues regarding stand‐alone two‐glass panes encasing

Even pressed, the dried flowers have thickness, some more than others, and may not be encased easily in two panes of glass (or acrylic) with a frame moulding, particularly because of their brittleness and for practical and esthetic concerns (e.g type of transparent glue applied on the glass, type of moulding, etc.).

Mounting

As stated above, the dried flowers seen as objects have no significant historical value when separated from the archival fonds and their accompanying pieces.
Archival conversation aims to preserve all parts of an item (or a historical record) together.
Producing a series of botanical specimens in stand-alone frames would contradict archival conversation.
Float mounting thus included a non-acid paper in an off-white texture and colour.
Stable polymer archival glue was recommended by the Marie Victorin Herbarium of Université de Montréal to be used both on flowers, which we use also for the papers records.
High-standard museum-recommended frame acrylic, in a non glare acrylic glazing matte finish, was used instaid of glass after studying the travel requirements of the exhibit and to minimize reflection for glare-free viewing.
The pre-layouts were realized by Céline Arseneault and Viveka Melki in the Spring of 2016 and each layout was documented: botanical identification, measurements and text transcription of each record in a preliminary archival description of the Cantlie Fonds.
17 final layouts (including 19 pieces) werw then frames by the experienced framer at « Au Coin des Artistes » in Montreal under the supervision of Céline Arseneault for the purpose of conservation and to be included as the main raison d’être of the War Flowers exhibit.