In a Field of Poppies

In Flander's Field

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.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

This poem was one of the most memorable war poems ever written. The author, Dr. McCrae, became a surgeon in 1900 after graduating from the University of Toronto. Then for 17 days he treated injured men. He said that it was impossible to get used to the suffering, the screams, and the blood.

McCrae later wrote, "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 shell burst on May 2, 1915 killed a young friend and former student, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa. He 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 McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. In the nearby cemetery, which we see in many of the Memorial Day photos, he saw the wild poppies. He spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

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 he 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 him. Allinson said, "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 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 December 8, 1915.

Today’s gift was to give a donation to the VFW to support all that have served and memorialized by a young doctor sitting beside a field of poppies.

In Giving and Remembering,

Robin