The setting of the Second Battle of Ypres: 1915, Ypres Salient, Belgium.
The stage was set. It was to be a culmination of incidences that led to a literary piece of an unquestionably haunting testimonial, one that has survived for over a century.
A eulogy that speaks volumes
In Flanders’ Field is a fifteen line poem that speaks volumes about the ravages of war. It was John McCrae’s eulogy to the victims of war, his emotional plea derived from the incomprehensible, all encompassed within verse:
“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”
McCrae was born in 1872 in Guelph, Ontario. He was a Lieutenant-Colonel, pathologist, army physician, and a poet credited for writing his most famous poem during World War I.
The Second Battle of Ypres: the Hiroshima of the Great War
In April 1915, McCrae joined 18,000 soldiers of the First Canadian Division in Ypres, Belgium. The countryside, known as Flanders Fields, is often referred to as the “Hiroshima of the Great War.”
Belgium was totally destroyed after four years of heavy bombardment when the Germans invaded the country in 1914. The Second Battle of Ypres was fought from April 22 to May 25, 1915. The Ypres Salient, a few kilometers encroaching German lines, was the only part of Belgium unconquered by the Germans.
On the front lines
McCrae, who had served in the Canadian Field Artillery in the South African War, accepted the position as a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres. He still considered himself a combatant officer, always carrying a revolver instead of the non-combatant’s Red Cross armband. He was on the front lines when German gas attacks were first used during the war and his unit took the brunt of the attacks.
McCrae found himself in the centre of the crisis, as there were soldiers with shrapnel wounds, lungs asphyxiated with poisonous gas, and those with missing limbs. At times, there was no body to recover.
The Second Battle of Ypres: an overwhelming experience
It became overwhelming for McCrae.The most devastating moment came when an artillery officer in his brigade, a close friend, and one of his former students, Lieutenant Alex Helmer, was killed by a shell burst near his gun position on May 2, 1915.
McCrae performed the funeral ceremony later that day since there was no chaplain available. Perhaps he began the draft of In Flanders Fields later that evening as a means of coming to terms with Helmer’s death. The question of when it was first written is undetermined. There are various accounts by individuals who were present with McCrae at the time.
One account states that he was in the back of an ambulance the next day looking at Helmer’s grave. Poppies were becoming abundant among the newly dug burial grounds. The reality of his friend’s death inspired the writing of the poem in twenty minutes.
A poem that became a sensation
Still, others state that McCrae continued to work on his poem after being assigned to another hospital unit in France. The Spectator in London rejected the poem. It was a satirical magazine in London, Punch, that printed it on December 8, 1915. In Flanders’ Fields became a sensation used to sell Victory Bonds and pharmaceutical supplies.
McCrae died on January 28, 1918 of pneumonia and meningitis. His body is buried in Wimereux cemetery in northern France.
An unsettling witness to the horrors of war as depicted through pencils and paper at perhaps the lowest point in McCrae’s life lives on to commemorate the reality of war. McCrae proved the power of verse.