Canadian doctor’s poem inspired symbol of remembrance

Article content

YPRES, Belgium — The soil in fields around Ypres was quite literally soaked in blood between 1914 and 1918.

Article content

About a million soldiers from more than 50 countries were wounded, went missing or were killed in Flanders Fields during the First World War.

More than 66,000 Canadians lost their lives and more than 172,000 were wounded during those four hellish years. Some 30,000 Canadians were killed in Belgium alone.

Those numbers are difficult to fathom in today’s world, especially when you consider Canada’s population was only about eight million at the time.

(To put that in perspective, consider that Canada’s population was four times greater when the war in Afghanistan began in 2002, some 40,000 Canadians served in that region, and by the time the conflict ended 12 years later, 159 military members had been killed and about 2,070 were wounded – 635 of those listed as wounded in action.)

Article content

Article content

One of the Canadians killed in action early in the First World War inspired Lt.-Col. John McCrae – a Canadian doctor and teacher born in Guelph, Ont. – to write his memorial poem In Flanders Fields, which led to the poppy becoming an enduring symbol of remembrance worldwide.

McCrae was 41 when he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and volunteered to join a fighting unit as a gunner and medical officer.

His close friend, Quebec native Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed on May 2, 1915, during the second Battle of Ypres while serving with the Canadian Field Artillery.

As the story goes, McCrae performed the 22-year-old’s burial service himself and noticed how poppies grew rapidly around the soldiers’ graves at Ypres. So, he began writing In Flanders Fields the next day while sitting in the back of an ambulance at an advanced dressing station outside Ypres.

Article content

“He was very upset and he wrote the first lines of In Flanders Fields,” local guide Erwin Ureel explained Saturday at Essex Farm Cemetery on the outskirts of Ypres, now commonly known as the John McCrae Memorial Site because it is where the poem was penned.

“He improved the text later on,” Ureel said. “And in December of that year, it was published in a British magazine … and then it became very famous.”

However, he said it was not the quality of the poetry that captured the hearts and minds of people around the globe as much as it was what he wrote and the moment it was written.

Ureel said the war was not going well for the British Empire in 1915 and the poem was published “at a moment when people needed something uplifting and the force needed soldiers.”

Article content

“Most people know the first lines of the poem, ‘In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow,’ and the larks are singing, it sounds very friendly,” he said. “Some people think it’s not a war poem, and I say, ‘No, no, you haven’t read it properly.’”

“It’s of course the last verse which is most important, ‘Take up our quarrel with the foe.’ This is a recruiting poem. And that’s of course why it became so popular at the moment,” Ureel said.

He’s also suspicious of the notion that McCrae saw poppies in Belgium at a time of year when the flowers would be just starting to bloom.

Article content

“John McCrae must have known poppies in Canada, I guess,” Ureel speculates.

“You can have a few poppies here (at that time), but certainly not massive at this moment,” he said. “So, I think he probably saw them, recognized them, knew what our poppy fields would look like (when they are in full bloom), and then elaborated from that in his poem.”

There are numerous war memorials and cemeteries, like Essex Farm, scattered throughout the countryside in Flanders Fields – the biggest being Tyne Cot cemetery where 11,956 British Commonwealth war dead are laid to rest, including 1,011 Canadians, most of whom fell at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.

There were more than 450,000 British Commonwealth and German casualties suffered at Passchaendale over a swath of land eight kilometres long and five kilometres wide.

Article content

During a previous visit to Belgium, a battlefield guide told me that equates to five soldiers per square metre, and about one of every five would have been killed while the others were injured.

More than 4,000 Canadians laid down their lives at Passchaendale.

It’s truly haunting to stare out over the farmers’ fields in the area knowing there are still missing soldiers waiting to be found in the ground.

“Every year we find dozens of soldiers, often when there is road work being done or something,” Ureel said, explaining when war dead are discovered their remains are buried at the nearest cemetery related to their country of origin.

When we pin a blood-red poppy on our lapel for Remembrance Day in memory of the lives lost or forever altered during military service – a tribute inspired by the horrors of the First World War – we would all be wise to also remember Winston Churchill’s famous words in 1948, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Lest we forget.

– The Toronto Sun’s Chris Doucette, a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces who served in the Royal Canadian Regiment, is in Belgium and will be visiting memorial sites and attending ceremonies leading up to Remembrance Day.

[email protected]

@sundoucette

Article content