![]() “In Flanders Fields” was published in the British magazine Punch in 1915. Had a soldier not picked it up out of the mud, it might have been forever lost to time. When he finished, McCrae is said to have tossed it to the ground at his feet. As the story goes, McCrae was sitting on the back of a field ambulance overlooking a mass field of graves when he noticed red poppies growing and began to write: Alexis Helmer, with whom he had previously served. One of the soldiers killed in the battle was McCrae’s friend Lt. “In all that time when 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.” “For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots, even, except occasionally,” he wrote in a letter to his mother. In the spring of 1915, The Second Battle of Ypres raged on for more than a month. McCrae was the first medical officer for the 1st Canadian Field Artillery, treating the wounded in a tiny bunker he had dug out of the ground. John McCrae was a veteran of the Boer War, and he volunteered at age 41 to serve again in Europe. The soldiers wrote poems, too, but none so famous as the one penned by a Canadian doctor after a particularly grueling stretch of days treating the wounded and dying. But the following year, soldiers’ letters home began to describe the phenomenon. Sadly, so did the bodies of countless fallen soldiers.Īt the start of the war, in 1914, no one really noticed them growing. Lime from ravaged buildings and nitrogen from bombs fertilized them. Trench warfare and artillery battles in the fields around the Flanders region of Belgium, on the Western Front of World War I, churned the earth mercilessly, bringing the red poppies’ seeds to the surface. Common poppies, or Papaver rhoeas, hold a powerful secret: These annual red wildflowers can lay dormant in the ground for 80 years or more, only germinating when the soil is disturbed and the seeds exposed to light.
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