| John McCrae was a member of the Canadian Medical Corps. He was an artillery veteran of the Boer War in South Africa and was described as a person with the eye of a gunner, the hand of a surgeon, and the soul of a poet when he went into the line at Ypres on the 22nd of April 1915. Lieutenant-Colonel McCrae came away from Ypres with 13 lines scrawled on a scrap of paper. The lines were a poem which started: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow..." The poem speaks of Flanders fields, but the subject is universal - soldiers fear that in death they will be forgotten, that their death will have been in vain. Remembrance, as symbolized by the poppy, is the eternal answer which alleviates that fear. Sadly, Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae died of pneumonia at Wimereux near Boulogne, France on the 28th of January 1918 when he was 45 years old. |
