McCrae went where needed

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae from Canada. Who is he? He wrote a haunting poem in World War I still recited in Memorial Day ceremonies. It begins, “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses row on row….”

John was a bachelor, a renowned pathologist who had his own practice, as well as teaching in universities. He was the kind of guy everybody likes to be around. When Britain declared war on Germany he had this to say, “It is a terrible state of affairs, and I am going because I think every bachelor, especially if he has experience of war, ought to go. I am really rather afraid, but more afraid to stay home with my conscience.”

In April 1915 he found himself in the trenches in an area of Belgium called Flanders, where a fierce battle took place. The Germans unleashed chlorine gas. As a physician John cared for hundreds of injured soldiers every day. He wrote his mother, “We have been in the most bitter of fights. For seventeen days and nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even. 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.”

From this hell — and the day after his close friend was buried among the quick graves marked with simple crosses where wild poppies bloomed — John penned his poem, “In Flanders Fields.” His biographer writes, “After the Battle of Ypres he was never again the optimistic man with the infectious smile.”

This was a man who took his horse, Bonfire, to Belgium — and sent letters to his young nieces and nephews “written” by Bonfire with a hoof print signature. Who wrote in an earlier time about an ill child, saying, “A kitten … stays with him all the time, and sleeps most of the day in his straw hat. Tonight I saw the kitten curled up under the bedclothes. It seems as it were a gift of Providence that the little creature should attach itself to the child who needs it most.”

Though he did not lose his life in battle — he died at war’s end from pneumonia — it cost him to be there. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae went where he was needed most.