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 as described by an author at
http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm:

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.