When World War One ended in 1918, the Fields of Flanders in the Low Countries of Europe had been running red with blood in the greatest collective slaughter Mankind had ever seen up until then.

Trenches criss-crossed the fields, lined with sandbags and sometimes in winter with the frozen bodies of the fallen, no place to bury them in that frozen earth, so they were laid like railway sleepers in the trenches for soldiers to walk on and, as Rudyard Kipling wrote, “the bodies creaked” as you stepped on them.

Poppy-seeds, lying dormant in the fertile earth for years, were turned out into the Springtime sun by constant churning-up of the good earth in bombardments of millions upon millions of heavy artillery-shells and the earthworks of armies.

They sprouted and grew in wild profusion, over devastated, blasted fields, among splintered and shredded trees that had once stood tall, like the young lads of so many nations who had come so far to die there, in and over and through the barbed-wire fencing enclosing that awful strip of desolation called no-man's land between the contending sides, they found footholds and niches to grow between protecting sandbags where bullets had come to roost, they softened the linings of the trenches of the dead with their quiet whisperings, soothing lost souls to their final rest, as no opium won from them could soothe survivors and the bereaved.

They appeared to many like Mother Nature's own heart-rent tears for the blood of the fallen of so many nations, in the delivering into death of Man's finest crop of youth, cut down before their time like blossoms stripped from trees in Spring, their running blood mingling with the scarlet stains of grief the Earth Herself was now scattering so liberally over their remains.

In the South Africa of my youth, every year, on the 11th of November, Armistice Day of World War One, at 11a.m. in the morning, sirens would sound across the country and people would stop whatever they were doing, even children in school, and stand for a minute's silence with bowed heads and shut eyes in remembrance of those fallen in that 'War to End All Wars', as some still called it.

Veterans' organisations like the MOTHS (Memorable Order of Tin Hats) would sell paper poppies with little gun-blued tin centres, in aid of their disabled and crippled. It is difficult to forget something so poignant in the soul of a people.

I now live in Switzerland. Just the other day I noticed field upon field blooming with orange-red poppies. Poppies are not indigenous to Switzerland, at least, not in such great numbers at any time of year. In Greece in the Spring, you see them everywhere, red, orange, white. But not in Switzerland, not like this year.

And they were not alone : they were nodding up to their little waists in greening fields of wheat. I noticed they were only in the wheat fields. Not in the barley, not in the millet, not in the rape-seed-oil fields that had mostly already come and gone. They stood only in the wheat. Strangely too, there was what appeared to be an almost deliberate scattering of small patches of them all along the length of the verges of the country roads. Why ? How did this suddenly happen, that Switzerland was beginning to look like Greece in Spring ?

I pondered on this : Could this be some sort of natural omen of events to occur in the near future ? I remembered the “Summer from Hell”, as the Web-speech analysis programs of Clif High had prophesied a couple years back, that had, at the time indicated by his predictions, not turned up, but could it still come true, only delayed by a year or two ? Wheat ripens to its fullest in late Summer and Autumn. Would this then perhaps happen during that coming period this year ?

One reads about all sorts of strange omens of things to come, that one can only properly wonder at later, after the events themselves have taken place and, in retrospect, make clear the meaning of the omens that presaged them.

One such strange story I remember was told me by my parents, who were living on the Natal Lower South Coast of South Africa at the time, a story of Armistice Day of World War Two, August 14, 1945, the day Japan finally surrendered. It was Springtime, and on that day millions of white butterflies, of a kind they had never seen before, suddenly appeared, seemingly out of no-where, bejewelling the emerald-green subtropical jungle with their snowy splendour. My parents were very moved. It seemed surreal, supernatural, a miracle sent by Mother Nature to celebrate the final quieting of Death and the renewal of hope and life.

Then again, I remember a story by Laurens van der Post, South African author, who noted that when World War One broke out in Europe in 1914, the birds in the interior of the country suddenly changed their habitual song to a new one. Black people, by nature and environment aware and acutely observant of natural processes and their interconnectedness, immediately knew something immensely evil had occurred. They needed no radio or telegraph to tell them. Whites only learned of it later when messages finally reached them.

So I pondered ... was this a natural warning, a foreboding, an omen ? .. or ...

... linked to the fact that a lot of events before and since 11th September 2001 had been revealed to those in the know ahead of time, secret societies showing them to their members in symbolically-encoded form and sometimes quite explicitly, the most-notorious, perhaps, being the so-called “Illuminati Cards”, a deck of playing-cards depicting coming events in graphic form.

This was also shown in the complex correct folding of the newly-issued US $20 bill, which allegedly shows a very good facsimile of the Twin Towers burning ...

So if these coming events might be foreseen, or even more likely planned in some psychopathic agenda for fun and profit, as most wars always have been, could this be a secret signal to lodge members, that there would be a war coming this Summer and Fall, perhaps even that prophesied “Summer From Hell” ?

Poppies growing in the wheat were most likely caused by wheat seed being adulterated with poppy seed ... but was this perhaps done deliberately ? Had someone gained secret access to the stores of suppliers and distributors, or were they the ones doing it in full knowledge of what they were doing and why, and, more importantly, had the farmers all bought their seed-grain from the same supplier ? I called friends at either end of the country. They had noticed it where they lived, too, their fields also were red with gaily-bobbing poppies.

Now those strewn along the roadsides were a different matter, because they were too scattered to be the spots at which someone unpacked a bag of poppy-seeds next to his car and let some fall where he stood while scattering the bulk into the fields : poppy-seeds are very light and a lot were growing way out in the middle of fields, so unless he walked way out into the fields and trampled some of the wheat in the process, it seemed a tedious amount of trouble to go to for an opium-head Johnny Appleseed intent on spreading his message across a country : whereas contaminating the wheat-seed stock was a relatively simple thing to do.

There remained the possibility that as the farmer turned his tractor at the end of a row with the seed-sowing attachment behind, as the rotors started up they scattered a thicker amount at the edge of the fields, but the patches were mainly on the main roads' verges and not at the fields' far ends, where he would have turned around again, so that idea was out. That left someone deliberately not only contaminating the seed-stock, but someone else also driving along country roads with perhaps some sort of blower, spreading seeds to the wind as he went.

Now I myself know that is is darned-near impossible to get poppies to sprout when you want them to : Around 15 years ago, the local town council of my village had the picturesque old graveyard across the road stripped of its marble and wrought-ironwork by a company that probably promptly ground off the dedications and re-sold the marble and crosses. I was appalled, something like this should never be done no matter what, the dead have a right to rest in peace. Also some perhaps not as restful as most might wish, had no more crosses (ahem !) to help them rest, and that was an ominous sign, if ever someone with an open mind looks into a matter considered popular superstition, which it need not be.

So I got over a pound weight of different poppy seeds and spread them by dark of night all over the old graveyard, hoping hard to bung those decision-makers one in the eye for their insensitivity, and not one poppy came up that I ever saw.

So just WHAT is the story behind this sudden influx of poppies ? -- an accident in seed-packaging, or perhaps another weirdo like myself with anarchist leanings ... or perhaps really a secret message ... predicting a ... Summer From Hell ?
In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lt-Col. John McCrae, M.D., 1915
November 30, 1872 ­ January 28, 1918