John McCrae writes "In Flanders Fields"

On 3 May 1915, in the second week of the fighting for the Ypres salient, Major John McCrae, the medical officer of the 1st Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, wrote a short poem, In Flanders Fields. He was 42 and had spent almost two weeks treating the wounded in a dugout cut into the canal bank north of Ypres, at a spot later known as Essex Farm. The Canadians, under gas and heavy artillery fire since 24 April, were suffering enormous losses there.

McCrae was born in 1872 in Guelph, Ontario. He was a physician, a veteran of the Boer War, in which he had served as an artillery officer, and the author of poems printed in Canadian magazines. In 1914, aged 41, he volunteered and sailed for Europe with the 1st Canadian Division as a medical officer with the rank of major.

On 2 May a German shell killed his friend, 22-year-old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, outright. His remains were gathered in a blanket and buried beside the dressing station. There was no chaplain, so McCrae read the burial service at the graveside himself. The next day, sitting, according to accounts, on the back step of an ambulance, he wrote a poem about the dead who had lived only a short while before and now lay beneath crosses among the poppies, and about the birds still singing above them amid the noise of the guns. Eyewitness accounts differ in detail. According to one, McCrae, dissatisfied, threw the sheet away and one of his comrades picked it up, but it is not known for certain who.

The poem ends with the dead calling on the living: “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.” It is not a lament against the war but an exhortation to fight on. McCrae revised the text over the following months. The London Spectator rejected it, and the satirical weekly Punch printed it anonymously on 8 December 1915.

The poem quickly became one of the best-known works of the war. It was used in recruiting campaigns and in the sale of war bonds. McCrae himself moved in June 1915 to a Canadian military hospital near Boulogne and died of pneumonia at Wimereux on 28 January 1918. After the war his poem gave rise to the custom of wearing the red poppy, which is still worn across the Commonwealth on Remembrance Day.