Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae National Historic Person of Canada, Guelph, Ontario
Posted by: 
colincan
N 43° 32.169 W 080° 14.684
17T E 561022 N 4820633
Lt.-Col. John McCrae MD is author of one of the world's most famous war poems, "In Flanders Fields". He wrote the poem in reaction to the horrors he experienced as a surgeon at the battlfront of the Ypres salient in Belgium during World War I.
Waymark Code: WM68X9
Location: Ontario, Canada
Date Posted: 04/25/2009
Views: 16
On November 11th each year armistice ceremonies around the English-speaking world invariably include the immortal words of Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae from his poem "In Flanders Fields". He wrote this poem after a stretch of seventeen straight days in 1915 operating on soldiers at the Belgian battlefront where the senselessness of the slaughter was evident. McCrae was born in Guelph, Ontario in 1872 and went on in his youth to study medicine at the University of Toronto. He subsequently practiced medicine in Montreal where he was associated with the Royal Victoria Hospital. He enlisted in the military at the start of World War I and was at one point a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery and in charge of a field hospital. The poem he wrote he rejected, but fortunately for posterity a friend retrieved it from the garbage can and submitted it to Punch magazine in England. Publication of the poem led to McCrae becoming a household name. He died in 1918 of pneumonia while serving at a Canadian run hospital in Boulogne-sur-mer, France. He is buried in nearby Wimereux. He was designated of national significance in 1946.
Sources: (
visit link) and the Wikipedia entry for John McCrae.
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