Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was born on November 30, 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, Canada and is responsible for writing the poem “In Flanders Fields”.

After attending a funeral of a close friend on May 5, 1915, McCrae was inspired to write this poem. McCrae had spotted wild poppies growing in between the graves, he’s the use of the word “poppies” in the poem. McCrae was unsatisfied with the poem he had written, and got rid of it. In December of the same year, the poem was in the Punch magazine in London, England after being retrived by other soldiers.

McCrae served in both the Second Boer War, and the First World War. He requested a postponement from McGill University in Montréal, Quebec in 1899 to go to South Africa to fight the Boers, and was commissioned to the Guelph Contingent, D Battery, Canadian Field Artillery. At the rank of Major, he would resign in 1904, only to rejoin in 1914.


John McCrae describes the conflict in a letter to his mother, 1915:
“The general impression in my mind is of a nightmare. We have been in the most bitter of fights. For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds ..... And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way.”


After writing In Flanders Fields, McCrae was transferred to the McGill General Hospital in France, where he would be Chief of Medical Services. This hospital tended to the wounded from many different battles, such as:

Battle of Vimy Ridge
Battle of Passnchendael
Third Battle of the Ypres
Battle of the Somme

On January 28, 1918, McCrae died of meningitis and pneumonia at the No. 14 British General Hospital for Officers. The day on which he fell ill, he had been appointed Consulting Physician of the First British Army.

A close friend of his described the funeral:
“The day of the funeral was a beautiful spring day; none of us wore overcoats. You know the haze that comes over the hills at Wimereux. I felt so thankful that the poet of 'In Flanders Fields' was lying out there in the bright sunshine in the open space he loved so well....”

The poem “In Flanders Fields” is used today as a poem to remember and honour the fallen of past and present conflicts.