Remembrance Day yesterday and I dipped back into Sagittarius Rising. One of the most compelling passages for me was Lewis' account of seeing poppies with his friend and observer "Pip."
"Yet (Oh, the catch at the heart!), among the devastated cottages, the tumbled, twisted trees, the desecrated cemeteries, opening, candid, to the blue heaven, the poppies were growing! Clumps of crimson poppies, thrusting out from the lips of the craters, straggling in drifts between the hummocks, undaunted by the desolation, heedless of human fury and stupidity, Flanders poppies, basking in the sun! As we stood gazing, a lark rose up from among them and mounted, shrilling over the diapason of the guns.
We listened, watching, and then, I remember, trudged slowly on down the road without a word. That morning seems stranger than most to me now, for Pip is dead, twenty years dead, and I can still hear the lark over the guns, the flop and shuffle of our rubber-soled flying boots on the dusty road; I can remember, set it down, that here on this page it may remain a moment longer than his brief mortality. For what? To make an epitaph, a little literary tombstone, for a young forgotten man."
Pip was killed with a pilot named Kidd flying thru a British artillery barrage.
I always wondered about the man's identity and slogging about on the net found this:
http://medicalgentlemen.co.uk/aboutbow/world-war-1