LIEUTENANT COLONEL JOHN MCCRAE
To this day, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” remains one of the most moving war poems ever penned. Major McCrae, a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, spent seventeen days treating injured men in the Ypres Salient.
McCrae later reflected on his service, writing, “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.”
McCrae was especially moved by one death. On May 2, 1915, a shell burst killed a young friend and former student, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, and McCrae performed the funeral ceremony for him.
The next day McCrae released his sorrows by writing this poem. In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies scattered throughout the fields and it inspired the serene words of this poem.
The poem was almost not published. McCrae didn’t like his work and threw the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. Punch published it on December 8, 1915.
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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.