Soldier, poet, author, artist, surgeon and the grandson of a Scottish immigrant, John McCrae, who was appropriately born on 30 November, St Andrews Day, graduated from the University of Toronto’s medical school. A year later, he was a lieutenant with the Royal Canadian Artillery in South Africa’s Boar War.
Despite all his achievements and accolades in academia and on the battlefields of South Africa and Europe, John McCrae would be most remembered for penning his famous poem: In Flanders Fields.
After his service in South Africa, McCrae was professor of pathology at the University of Vermont and lecture at Montreal’s McGill University. In 1905 he sailed to England and in short notice became a member of the Royal College of Physicians.
When Britain declared war on Germany 4 August 1914, Canada, a Dominion within the Empire, was automatically dragged into Europe’s mess. McCrae was called back into the Canadian army with the rank of Major and appointed medical officer of the 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery.
In 1915 he could be found at field hospital near the frontlines, trying to save the cannon fodder victims of a senseless slaughter that was to become known as the Second Battle of Ypres. During that blood bath McCrae’s friend, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed. On 3 May 1915, the day after his fellow militia officer was laid to rest in a makeshift grave, McCrae, according to witnesses, sat on the back of a field ambulance, and penned his remembrance poem.
Around him, across the ravaged fields of Belgium – along the edge of countless bomb creators, atop the hastily dug grave sites, and around the wooden crosses bearing the names of the fallen who now lay cold beneath the earth – poppies flourished.
On 28 January 1918, John McCrae died of pneumonia at the British General Hospital in Wimereux, France. He was buried the next day with full military honours at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Wimereux Cemetery. General Sir Arthur Currie and many of McCrae’s friends and staff gathered to mourn and pay tribute to a fellow soldier and renaissance man. McCrae’s charger, Bonfire, with McCrae’s boots reversed in the stirrups, preceded the gun carriage.
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