On Canada Day last year, I stood in a remote spot in Belgium known as Essex Farm. It lies beside one of the numerous canals that drain the well-watered landscape.
In the First World War, we learn from our history books, 91原创s had been fighting for the liberties of the Belgian people. Almost a hundred years later, I was on a different mission: I had come to pay my respects to Dr. John McCrae, the lieutenant-colonel in the 91原创 Army Medical Corps who penned the famous poem In Flanders Fields.
McCrae wrote only two poems. You will not find him listed among the fabled war poets of the generation, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Edmund Blunden. Yet his verse about the horrific events that had occurred near Essex Farm sounds out, even today, like a clarion call of the dead. It has given the red poppy, like the poet, immortal status.
The poem was published in London鈥檚 Punch on Dec. 8, 1915. It became a legend in its own time. Simplicity was its virtue and clarity its strength. It was a call for remembrance even in the face of war. And three and a half years of fighting lay ahead before the armistice.
In May 1915, just after the 91原创 Division had taken such terrible casualties at the Second Battle of Ypres that had been their welcome to Flanders Fields, McCrae was tending to hundreds of wounded soldiers every day.
He wrote home to his mother after that battle to say that his general impression was one of a nightmare. The 91原创s had been in the most bitter of fights. The gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for a minute. And in the background was a constant view of the dead, the wounded and the maimed.
To this was added a terrible anxiety that the line held by his fellows in arms should give way. Had the enemy punched through that line, the road to the Channel ports would have been clear. The damage to the Allied cause, and to Belgium and France, would have been severe. We are now beginning to realize the psychological damage brought by war in the field. But McCrae had something more immediate on his mind.
The day before In Flanders Fields was written, McCrae had lost one of his closest friends, who was laid in a rudimentary grave and a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were blooming between the crosses. Today, that location is Essex Farm Cemetery, one of many Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries. There is a memorial to McCrae there.
Down a lane to the tow path and across a bridge over the canal stood the earthen dugout dressing station above which McCrae wrote his famous verse. Nearby, you can see a group of British concrete dugouts that provided shelter for the soldiers while the war raged without ceasing overhead. The din must have been terrible.
McCrae did not survive the war. He died of pneumonia in January 1918. He is buried near Boulogne-sur-Mer, and his famed horse Bonfire led the procession. The red poppy was adopted as the flower of remembrance for the war dead of Britain, Canada and other Commonwealth countries, as well as France and the U.S.
Later that same July, I visited McCrae鈥檚 birthplace, a limestone cottage in Guelph, Ont. There is a memorial cenotaph there, too, in the garden of remembrance. It is so far away from where, so many years ago now, 鈥淲e lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow/Loved, and were loved, and now we lie/In Flanders Fields.鈥�
Barry Gough is a local author and historian who leads the Vic High alumni association鈥檚 Great War Project to create a digital archive about the school鈥檚 past.
