Authors

Canadian · 1872–1918

John McCrae

John McCrae was a Canadian physician and soldier who wrote 'In Flanders Fields' (1915) — the most widely read poem of the First World War — in twenty minutes in a field dressing station after burying a friend killed at the Second Battle of Ypres. The poem's image of poppies growing between the crosses of the war dead transformed the poppy into the permanent symbol of remembrance. McCrae died of pneumonia and meningitis in France in 1918, four months before the Armistice.