Remember our soldiers, poets on Memorial Day

John McCrae was born in 1872 in Guelph, Ontario, into a military family. He had a staunch Scottish Presbyterian upbringing and as a child was warm and sensitive, with a love of people, animals and poetry.

He won a scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor’s degree, and in 1898 he received his degree in medicine from the same university. While immersed in his studies, he also wrote poetry that was published in several prominent magazines.

McCrae fell in love with the sister of one of his college friends. When she died shortly after they met, he was devastated and never married. He enrolled in the military and rose to the rank of lieutenant while still in school.

In 1899 Britain became involved in the Boer War in South Africa, and McCrae led the artillery unit from his home town. He returned to Canada as a major, and though still patriotic, he was horrified by the abominable medical care offered to the sick and injured soldiers.

McCrae went on to become a noted pathologist. But on August 4, 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany, and the good doctor was called up again.

He wrote, “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 at home with my conscience.”

He took his horse, Bonfire, with him, and loved to send letters home to his nieces and nephews written in Bonfire’s voice and signed with a hoof print. This was nearly the only levity he was to know. By 1915, McCrae was in Ypres, in a part of Belgium known as Flanders.

For 16 days Canadian soldiers held the line against bombardment and gassing, and McCrae treated hundreds of dying men. In this horrific battle, one of his closest friends was killed. The friend was buried in a makeshift grave with a simple wooden cross. It was surrounded by hundreds of similar crosses, and poppies were beginning to bloom between the graves.

Through this nightmarish time, McCrae continued to write poems and letters home. Some were published while the war was still being fought. He had been transferred to the McGill Canadian General Hospital in France as chief of medical services. The gentle, caring doctor was so distressed at being safely housed behind the trenches that he insisted on living in a tent and not in the relatively cushy officers huts.

He died of pneumonia and meningitis at the beginning of 1918. He was buried with full military honors just north of Boulogne, not far from Flanders. He was best known then, and today, for the poem that was published in Punch magazine after his close friend had died.