Reply #9: Your post brought a tear to my eye

[marzipanni]

and I wanted to find out more about "In Flanders Fields". It was written by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, of the Canadian Army, in the spring of 1915. He was a surgeon, who was on the faculty at McGill before going to treat wounded soldiers in Belgium.

<snip>
"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station beside the Canal de l'Yser, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the nearby cemetery, McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up in the ditches in that part of Europe, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines of verse in a notebook.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Later he tossed it aside, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. Punch published it on December 8, 1915.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm

On January 28, 1918, while still commanding No 3 Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne, McCrae died of pneumonia.