![]() For this drive, the league imported one million silk poppies, made in French orphanages. The Australian Returned Soldiers and Sailors Imperial League (the forerunner to the RSL) first sold poppies for Armistice Day in 1921. The poppy soon became widely accepted throughout the allied nations as the flower of remembrance to be worn on Armistice Day. Anna Guérin, the French YMCA secretary, took the idea further by selling poppies to raise money for widows, orphans, and needy veterans and their families. At a meeting of YMCA secretaries from other countries, held in November 1918, she talked about the poem and her poppies. ![]() She was so moved by it that she wrote a poem in reply and decided to wear a red poppy always as a way of keeping faith, as McCrae had urged in his poem. Moina Michael, who worked for the American YMCA, read McCrae's poem just before the Armistice. In English literature of the nineteenth century, poppies had symbolised sleep or a state of oblivion in the literature of the First World War a new, more powerful symbolism was attached to the poppy – the sacrifice of shed blood. The sight of poppies on the battlefield at Ypres in 1915 moved Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae to write the poem In Flanders fields (see The recitation). In soldiers' folklore, the vivid red of the poppy came from the blood of their comrades soaking the ground. During the First World War, red poppies were among the first plants to spring up in the devastated battlefields of northern France and Belgium. The Flanders poppy has long been a part of Remembrance Day, the ritual that marks the Armistice of 11 November 1918, and is also increasingly being used as part of Anzac Day observances.
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