Remembrance Day Post:
Born in Guelph, educated at the University of Toronto John McCrae was a doctor, and a soldier and a poet. Before volunteering for WW1, he expressed to a friend that he was afraid, but more so of his conscious if he stayed. Another friend gave him a horse named Bonfire and McCrae sent his nieces and nephews letters supposedly written by Bonfire and signed with a hoof print.
The context of WW1 speaks of the strength necessary keep this kind of thoughtfulness and humour. Trenches, foot rot, blood, mud, stench and separate grave yards for anonymous limbs - and John, up to his armpits in people, taking a turn manning guns and saying funerals.
In April 1915, McCrae was in the trenches in the area traditionally called Flanders during the Second Battle of Ypres. On April 22, chlorine gas was used against troops - and they kept fighting, holding the line relentlessly for another 16 days. McCrae tended hundreds of wounded every day, and described the battle in a letter to his mother:
“The general impression in my mind is of a nightmare. We have been in the most bitter of fights. For seventeen days and seventeen 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 sixty 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.”
On May 2, McCrae's friend and former student, 22-year old Alexis Helmer was killed. McCrae performed the funeral service and the next day he took a 20 min break to sit on the back step of an ambulance and write. Poppies grow best in violently treated earth, and they grew in abundance in the make shift cemetery amongst hand made crosses and freshly churned graves. Later that year, he would submit it to be published December 8, 1915. The style is that of a French Rondeau, a precise prescription of syllable, line count and rhyme that is a challenge to arrange in a succinct and meaningful way. In Flanders Fields immediately gained popularity amongst the soldiers in the trenches as an evocative summation of their view of the war.
Soon after writing "In Flanders Fields", McCrae was transferred to No. 3 (McGill) Canadian General Hospital in France where he was Chief of Medical Services. The hospital was housed in huge tents at Dannes-Cammiers until cold wet weather forced a move to the site of the ruins of the Jesuit College at Boulogne. When the hospital opened its doors in February 1916, it was a 1,560-bed facility covering 26 acres. Here the wounded were brought from the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Vimy Ridge, the third Battle of Ypres and from Arras and Passchendaele.
McCrae developed pneumonia while still on active duty and he died at Wimereux, France on January 28 1918. He was buried with military honours in a funeral procession attended by 75 nursing sisters and Bonfire, his master's boots backwards in military tradition.

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 falling 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