Of Poppies and Sunflowers

The Resonance of McRae's Poem in Early May

One hundred and ten years ago this past weekend – on May 3^rd, 1915 – Dr. Captain John McRae sat down to write a poem of great clarity and power.

He was near hardened bunkers sheltering a British Advanced Dressing Station. They still stand, timeworn but intact, on a rise between the Diksmuidseweg and the Ieper canal, near a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery known as Essex Farm, two and a half kilometres northwest of the city centre – ‘Ieper’ in Flemish, ‘Ypres’ in French – where major battles raged in 1914. 1915 and 1917.

The Ieper/Ypres Cloth Hall, rebuilt on remains of a thirteenth-century landmark set ablaze by German attacks in October 1914, is home to the In Flanders Fields Museum, named for McRae’s poem. The place where he composed it, after a bloody two-week, chlorine-gas-fuelled German assault, is known as Site John McRae.

(Site John McRae in Ieper/Ypres, Belgium)