This page was made in dedication to my father's uncle John, who died at age 17 in France, during the "Great War", WW1. Also in rememberance of my father, John Alexander Lamb, (1921-1994) who serviced planes for the second World War, and later helped train young NATO pilots to keep the hard won peace.
Canadian poet John McCrae was a medical officer in both the Boer War and World War I. A year into the latter war there was published in Punch magazine, on December 8, 1915, the sole work by which he would be remembered. This sonnet commemorates the deaths of thousands of young men who died in Flanders during the grueling battles there. It created a great sensation, and was used widely as a recruiting tool, inspiring other young men to join the Army. Legend has it that he was inspired by seeing the blood-red poppies blooming in the fields where many friends had died. In 1918 McCrae died at the age of 40, in the way most men died during that war, not from a bullet or bomb, but from disease: pneumonia, in his case.
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 at Ypres in the spring of 1915.
Why are poppies the main focus of the poem? The answer is simple, poppies only flower in disturbed soil. Their seeds can lie on the ground for years and years, and only when someone turns up the ground, will they sprout. All along the Western Front between 1914 and 1918, despite the ruin wrought by shells, the poppies of Flanders bloomed across the devastated landscape. They reminded some who saw them of the return of life to the earth, despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of dead who lay buried on the battlefields.
There was much rooted up soil on the battlefield of the Western Front, in fact the whole front consisted of churned up soil. So in May 1915, when McCrae wrote his poem, all around him poppies blossomed profusely.
This poem is the most famous one of the Great War - often only the first two verses are cited or printed. This is not just because of the lack of quality in the third verse, but also because this last verse speaks of an unending quarrel with the foe. And if one thing became clear during the Great War it was this: there was no quarrel between the soldiers (except maybe in the heat of a fight). The quarrel existed only in the minds of some politicians and highranking officers (who mostly never experienced the horror of the battlefield).
Here is the full version of McCrae's great poem, taken from his own handwritten copy. But first, here is the story of how he wrote it - and how the recent death of a dear friend moved him:
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 conflict.
It had been an ordeal that he could never have imagined. 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 Yser Canal, 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 trying his hand at 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 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:
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.
John McCrae (1872-1918)
