In Flanders Fields

Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae was a Canadian, poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during the First World War, most noted for his poem "In Flander's Fields". This famous poem was inspired by the loss of a friend and former student – Lieutenant Alex Helmer, who had been killed during the Second Battle of Ypres. It is commonly believed that McCrae wrote "In Flanders Fields" on 3 May 1915, the day after presiding over the funeral and burial of Lieutenant Alex Helmer. The poem was written as he sat upon the back of a medical field ambulance near an advance dressing post at Essex Farm, just north of Ypres. The poppy, which was a central feature of the poem, grew in great numbers in the spoiled earth of the battlefields and cemeteries of Flanders. McCrae later discarded the poem, but it was saved by a fellow officer and sent in to Punch magazine, which published it later that year.

In 1918 McCrae himself died, having caught pneumonia and meningitis.

In 1855 Lord Macaulay, writing about the site of the Battle of Landen (in modern Belgium, not far from Ypres) in 1693, wrote "The next summer the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies. The traveller who, on the road from Saint Tron to Tirlemont, saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet spreading from Landen to Neerwinden, could hardly help fancying that the figurative prediction of the Hebrew prophet was literally accomplished, that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the slain."