In Flanders Fields

“In Flanders Fields” was written in May 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian physician serving during the Second Battle of Ypres in the First World War. Composed after the burial of a friend amid the poppy-covered graves of Belgium, the poem gives voice to the dead themselves, speaking across the silence of the battlefield.

Published widely during the war, the poem was quickly embraced as a call to perseverance. Its direct appeal to the living helped sustain public resolve at a time of mounting casualties, and it was frequently used in recruitment and war-bond campaigns to reinforce the sense that the fallen had passed a solemn duty on to those still at home and at the front.