This article was originally written by Nathan Pynn for SWNS — the U.K.’s largest independent news agency, providing globally relevant original, verified, and engaging content to the world’s leading media outlets.
Just months before the end of World War I, an American infantry soldier named Harold Alfred Stivers pressed a symbolic surprise into a silk postcard for his fiancée: a poppy picked from Belgium’s Flanders Fields, the notorious Western Front battlegrounds. This week, more than a century later, the still-intact flower went under the hammer in England as part of a medals, militaria, and firearms auction. The poppy didn’t sell, but its story is still worth telling.
Stivers, who was from New Jersey, trained as a bookkeeper before he was drafted into the army and set sail for France on May 19, 1918, at 29 years old. Records show he served as a cook infantryman for Company A of the 311th Infantry, part of the 78th Division, also known as the “Lightning Division.” Its soldiers experienced intense fighting in France, including the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives, which pushed back German forces.
“While Harold joined the war relatively late, his experience would have been horrific,” Hansons Auctioneers’ militaria expert, Matt Crowson, said in a press release. “In major offensives, burial details could not always keep up. Soldiers advancing through the battlefield sometimes encountered bodies — French, German, or American — lying where they had fallen. This was one of the most psychologically difficult parts of the war. Many soldiers wrote that the sight of the dead affected them more than gunfire.”
Poppies, however, flourished in the Western Front battlefields, famously inspiring Lt. Col. John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.” In 1921, the bright red flower was adopted by the Royal British Legion as the official symbol of remembrance.
“Nothing is more evocative of the brutal and bloody fighting of World War I trenches as a poppy. To think this flower grew in the soil of that infamous battlefield is nothing short of miraculous,” Crowson said, adding: “[Stivers] was operating in or near Flanders, one of the bleakest landscapes of the war — flat, waterlogged, and churned into mud by years of shellfire. And yet also the landscape which produced this everlasting symbol of remembrance.”
The flower went up for auction with several other of Stivers’ war mementos, including service papers, train tickets, aerial photographs of trench systems, an Army Corps Districts 1918 printed map, and a small, silk, 48-star U.S. bunting style flag. The archive also contains German gas mask lenses, dog tags, and a piece of French army insignia taken from a coat found on a body in Meuse-Argonne.
On June 18, 1918, Stivers sent the pressed poppy to Marie Madeline Fries — whom he would go on to marry in 1920. Following the armistice in November 1918, Stivers and his unit were billeted in the small French town of Flavigny.
“Some of the letters and correspondence point towards a close relationship with the residents in the town,” Crowson noted. And indeed, the collection also includes warm letters from the French family Stivers was billeted with, as well as a photograph of Stivers in military uniform and an autopen-signed letter from King George V at Windsor Castle, welcoming U.S. soldiers who were enroute to the front in France.
In 1942, at the age of 53, Stivers received a World War II draft registration card, according to published records — but no further evidence of any service can be found. He died in March 1959 in Loch Arbour, New Jersey, at the age of 69.
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