Man behind the world’s most famous war poem
Doctor and soldier John McCrae, who died 100 years ago, was inspired to write In Flanders Fields after losing one of his closest friends during the Second Battle of Ypres
TODAY IT is a pretty French seaside Channel resort with strong breezes that make it a haven for windsurfers. But behind the streets of Wimereux just north of Boulogne lies the grave of a Canadian military medic who died 100 years ago this Sunday – and whose poetry vividly captured the carnage of the Western Front.
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s words also help explain why every November we wear poppies in honour of the fallen.
Yet at this War Graves Commission cemetery there are no ranks of gleaming white memorials standing to attention. The headstones of the 2,847 war dead – including 170 Germans – lie flat, so unstable is the sandy soil.
But a clue to the importance of the medic – who survived the hell of Ypres only to be felled by pneumonia – is an engraving on the cemetery wall. It is a verse from McCrae’s most famous poem, which has become an anthem of wartime remembrance.
Devastated in 1915 by the loss of a close friend at the Second Battle of Ypres he wrote one of the most quoted poems in the English language – In Flanders Fields – where “the poppies blow between the crosses row on row”.
It was first published anonymously in Punch magazine in December 1915 but the author’s identity soon emerged, making him a household name as he continued to do his bit for King and Empire.
More than 100 years later the sentiments of McCrae’s poem still resonate. Bank of England governor Mark Carney – a fellow Canadian – says in his homeland children learn the poem. “It captures the sadness and the sacrifice of war, the friendship of war,” he said.
When McCrae died on January 28, 1918, while commanding No 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) at Boulogne, he was afforded an extraordinary funeral.
In winter sunshine his flagdraped coffin was borne on a gun carriage. Mourners included the commander of the Canadian Corps, General Sir Arthur Currie.
BRINGING up the rear was McCrae’s beloved charger Bonfire, who had come with him from Canada and on whom he used to gallop across the French countryside. His master’s boots were reversed in the stirrups, in the military tradition.
All were gathered to honour a soldier, poet and medic who embodied the spirit of duty.
Born in Guelph, Ontario, in 1872 to Scottish parents, McCrae was a professor of pathology travelling in Europe when war broke out.
He tried to join up in London but was turned down because at 41 he was too old. So he sent a message back to Canada and secured a position as surgeon to the 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. No starryeyed idealist, he had served with the Canadian Field Artillery in the Second Boer War. When he joined up along with 45,000 other Canadians in the war’s first weeks a letter to a friend revealed his sense of duty: “It is a terrible state of affairs and I am going because I think every bachelor, especially if he has experience of war, ought to go. I am really rather afraid but more afraid to stay at home with my conscience.”
By the spring of 1915 he was in the thick of the Second Battle of Ypres, treating wounded in a soggy bunker dug into the banks of the Yser Canal. Biographer John Prescott tells how in a letter home to his mother Janet, McCrae described it as a “nightmare”.
“For 17 days and nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for 60 seconds… And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.”
It was here on May 2 that his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed and buried in a makeshift grave with a wooden cross.
Wild poppies were already beginning to bloom between the many graves and, unable to save his friend or the others who had died, McCrae wanted to acknowledge their bravery with his own tribute. The next day he wrote In Flanders Fields, sitting on the back step of a field ambulance. It’s thought to be the second last poem he ever wrote. But this is not a war poem from the stable of Wilfred Owen whose subject was the “pity of war”.
To us it evokes the loss, the waste, with the poppies a symbol of the flower of youth destroyed by shrapnel and bullet and bayonet. But it is actually about not giving up, about making sure the sacrifices of the dead are not in vain.
“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.” The poem was an instant hit, capturing the mix of sorrow and resolution. When it appeared on billboards advertising the sale of Canada’s fundraising victory bonds it helped raise $400million – nearly treble the target.
McCrae was amused by his fame, by the misspelling of his name and the inaccurate reproduction of his poem. But his biographer said: “He was satisfied if the poem enabled men to see where their duty lay.”
He was an eminent medic who had studied and taught in Canada, America, Britain and Europe. His brother Thomas was also a successful doctor and both contributed to a top textbook on pathology.
SINGLE – the girl he had loved died – McCrae occasionally holidayed in Europe, working his passage there as ship’s surgeon. In 1910 his links to the empire’s elite were confirmed when he served as expedition physician as Canada’s Governor General, Lord Grey, journeyed by canoe from Norway House on Lake Winnipeg to Hudson’s Bay.
His sense of duty never left him though, even as the bloodbath of the war took its toll.
In June 1915 he was furious when ordered to move from the frontline in Ypres to the relative safety of the Boulogne Hospital – where ironically he was to die.
A friend reported he had told him “what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away from his beloved guns. His last words to me were, ‘Allinson, all the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war. What we need is more and more fighting men.’”
At Boulogne McCrae, an asthma sufferer, shunned the officers’ huts to live year-round in a tent like his comrades at the front – which may have made him more vulnerable to pneumonia. Five days before his death aged 45 he’d learned he had been appointed consulting physician to the First British Army, the first Canadian so honoured.
Now he lies in Wimereux, ignored by Brits racing south from the Channel ports. But 100 years after his death his poem lives on and means that he – and the men he cared for – will never be forgotten. His torch has been passed on.