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.

(1872-1918), Canadian Army

John 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 Maj. John McCrae had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime.

As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, McCrae, who joined the McGill faculty in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto, had spent 17 days treating injured men -- Canadians, British, Indians, French, Germans -- in the Ypres Salient.

It had been an ordeal that he had thought hardly 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, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on May 2, 1915. Helmer was buried that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae 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 wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent 20 minutes of precious rest time scribbling 15 lines of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write. Cyril Allinson, a 22-year-old sergeant-major, was delivering mail when he noticed McCrae. The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the sergeant-major stood 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 very nearly was not published. Dissatisfied, 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 Dec. 8, 1915.

From the arlingtoncemetery.net website.