In Flanders Fields
In Flanders Fields, one of history’s most famous wartime poems, written in 1915 during the First World War by Canadian officer and surgeon John McCrae. It helped popularize the red poppy as a symbol of remembrance.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was the first Canadian to be appointed consulting surgeon to the British Army. Before WW1, he served in the Boer War as an artillery subaltern and in 1914 reenlisted as a Medical Officer and Major of the 1st Brigade CFA, just as the war began. A year later, he was treating the wounded in Ypres when one of his friends was killed. This event provided the grim inspiration for one of the greatest pieces of war poetry ever consigned to paper.
McCrae knew the poem was special, he even tried to get it published in The Spectator, but it was rejected. In the end, it was printed anonymously on 8 December 1915 after being passed on to Punch Magazine by a young journalist who’d visited McCrae’s hospital. Two years later, McCrae, his name now reunited with his poem, was virtually a household name. The following year, on January 28, 1918, McCrae died of pneumonia aged 45 while serving as a Doctor at Boulogne No.3 General Hospital.
Sources:
1.) https://www.history.co.uk/articles/a-short-history-of-in-flanders-field
2.) https://www.britannica.com/topic/In-Flanders-Fields
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