It had profound effects around the world, not the least being the remaking of at least nine new countries, the emergence of Communism, and the rise of the United States as a great power. The war continued to reverberate long after the guns fell silent. Courtesy of the Canadian War Museum Christopher Furlong/Getty Images It became, and remains, a poem about remembrance and commemoration, with the dead no longer demanding that the living keep up the fight, but that the living remember and honour the fallen.Īt top, a First World War-era poster illustrated by Frank Lucien Nicolet uses part of McCrae's poem to sell war bonds at bottom, a rainbow forms behind the 'Brooding Soldier' statue in Saint Julien, Belgium, in 2014. After the war, it took on new significance, its meaning shifting with the times. The success of McCrae’s poem saw it conscripted into use to recruit more soldiers through live readings and propaganda posters that invoked blood-red poppies.

And yet its opening lines, “In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row,” offered an evocation of loss, with the poppies representing the fallen. Its evocative words came from the dead who urged the living to keep up the fight against the Germans – “To you from failing hands we throw / The torch be yours to hold it high…” It was a call to battle and further sacrifice in the pursuit of victory. After the poem’s publication later in the year, it rapidly became a worldwide phenomena. He also penned his famous poem, In Flanders Fields, amid the death and horror of that battle. In nearly two weeks of non-stop surgery, he wrote last letters to loved ones, fully expecting to be killed. At the Battle of Second Ypres in April, 1915, the trial-by-fire engagement where the Canadians faced the first German unleashing of chlorine gas that burned out lungs, McCrae worked as a battlefield surgeon. One of the many Canadian doctors serving in uniform was a gifted physician and poet from Montreal, John McCrae. The link between the poppy and remembrance began with a martial poem. And yet the trauma imprinted itself on these men and women in uniform who sought to save their wounded comrades, and all bore a heavy emotional load.Īn illustrated broadsheet of John McCrae's poem In Flanders Fields, from 1918.

The carnage was most evident at the medical aid stations and field hospitals where doctors and nurses worked on the mangled bodies of soldiers who had been shredded by steel, scalded by poison gas, or whose bodies were being consumed by infection in the age before antibiotics.Ībout half of all Canadian doctors served overseas during the war, and their skill and ability to learn in the cauldron of battle led to a survival rate of more than 90 per cent of all patients who made it to a medical unit. The cost of victory was terrible, with some 66,000 Canadians killed and another 172,000 suffering physical wounds. Led by Canadian-born Sir Arthur Currie from mid-1917, the Corps was the instrument of Canada’s contribution to victory and a symbol that a new country was emerging from the horror of war.

It was a total war that thrust Canada on to the world stage, and where its primary fighting force, the Canadian Corps, delivered victories at Vimy, Hill 70, Passchendaele, Amiens, Arras, Cambrai, and Mons. That Armageddon of destruction, where industrialized fighting from 1914 to 1918 caused over nine million soldiers’ deaths in battle, more than 21 million more wounded, and destroyed empires, continues to cast a long shadow.įor Canada, a country of not yet eight million, more than 620,000 men served in uniform, alongside 3,000 nurses. The poppy emerged as a symbol from the killing fields of the Western Front during the First World War. George Metcalf Archival Collection / Canadian War Museum A Canadian soldier tends to the makeshift grave of a comrade killed near Vimy Ridge in 1917.

Silk remembrance poppy