In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

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.

McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" remains to this day one of the
most memorable war poems ever written. It is a lasting legacy of
the terrible battle in the Ypres salient in the spring of 1915.
Here is the story of the making of that poem:

Although he had been a doctor for years and had served in the
South African War, it was impossible to get used to the
suffering, the screams, and the blood here, and Major John McCrae
had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last him a
lifetime.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, Major
McCrae, who had joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after
graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent seventeen
days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French,
and Germans -- in the Ypres salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had hardly thought possible. McCrae
later wrote of it:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of
that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the
first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days
there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have
been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former
student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a
shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later
that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing
station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the
absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the
dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred
yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a
poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored
several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that
sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent
twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of
verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-
two year old sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he
spotted McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then
went on writing while the sergeant-major stood there quietly.
"His face was very tired but calm as we wrote," Allinson
recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes straying
to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from
Allinson and, without saying a word, handed his pad to the young
NCO. Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front
of us both. He used the word blow in that line because the
poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east
wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be
published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the
scene."

In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it,
McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it
and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London,
rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915.


In Flanders Fields

Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Da...our nation's service.

Remembrance Day - Nov 11th Veteran's Day.