John McCrae

John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields in twenty minutes at a dressing station and it became the most quoted poem of the First World War. He was an Ontario doctor who had already served in the Boer War, a pathologist and lecturer at McGill, and he went to France in 1914 as a medical officer with the Canadian artillery rather than take a hospital posting, saying he had been a gunner before he was a physician. He wrote the poem on 3 May 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres, the day after a friend and former student, Alexis Helmer, was killed by a shell and buried in a grave McCrae marked himself. He is said to have discarded the draft, and to have had it retrieved by another officer. Punch published it anonymously that December. Its three stanzas move from the poppies and the larks to the dead speaking, and then to a demand that the reader take up the quarrel with the foe, which is why it was used immediately for recruiting and war bonds and why it has been argued about ever since by people who want it to be an elegy rather than an exhortation. The poppy as a remembrance emblem comes directly from it. He spent three more years running a hospital at Boulogne, was appointed consulting physician to the British armies in France, and died of pneumonia and meningitis in January 1918, before the war ended. He was buried at Wimereux with full military honours and his horse led behind the coffin. The poem is on the Canadian ten-dollar note. It is also the reason Remembrance Day in the Commonwealth is a poppy rather than a wreath, and the American Legion adopted the emblem in 1920 after an American teacher, Moina Michael, read the poem and began wearing one.

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