November in Canada marks the Royal Canadian Legion’s Poppy Campaign, with volunteers and retailers making the vivid lapel pins available by donation across the country. Such poppies first appeared in Canada in 1922 and, until 1996, were produced by disabled veterans who were able to derive modest incomes from the work while also contributing to Canadians’ sense of remembrance. Today, those loonies, toonies and larger demoninations we tuck into a collection box in exchange for a lapel pin continue to be directed to veterans, through services provided by the Legion.

Those of us who grew up in Canada learned and recited, as school children, the poetry of a Canadian physician who served in both the Boer War and The Great War that subsequently became known as World War I. A pathologist, professor and poet who graduated from the University of Toronto and interned at John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, John McRae elected to serve as a gunner and medical officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

While we, and people in other countries, pause to pay respect on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month of the year,  it was on a Spring day – May 3, 1915 – that Lieutenant Colonel John McRae articulated his experience in this floral-strewn hell. McRae wrote of his time at Ypres, “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.”  Under cover of darkness on May 2, 1915, McRae had presided over the burial of Alexis Helmer, a friend and former student, who died during the Second Battle of Ypres.

Word is that, perched in the rear of an ambulance just north of Ypres, Belgium the day following Helmer’s burial, McRae wrote In Flanders Fields in the space of roughly a quarter of an hour. In the months ahead, the poem made its way to the UK, where it was initially published on December 8, 1915 in Punch magazine. Following publication, In Flanders Fields gained rapid exposure and immense favour. McRae died of pneumonia less than four years later, when he was 45 years young and serving in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. This month, almost a century after McRae penned his poem, we will pause to remember.

John McRae, in a photo published to a number of sites associated with his poetry

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

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.

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.