"in Flanders Fields" - John Mccrae - 1915
Introduction
"In Flanders Fields" was one of the most famous and popular poems of the First World War. It was initially published anonymously in Punch magazine on December 6, 1915, though it was later revealed to have been written by John McCrae, a Canadian doctor and military officer. The piece begins by constructing contrasts between the violence and death of war and the natural beauty that persists despite battle; this contrast occurs most famously in the image of poppies growing over the graves of dead soldiers, but is also evident in the image of the lark (a songbird) in the sky above the trenches. The poem goes on to ask the reader to honor the dead and the sacrifices they have made by continuing the struggle. The poem was republished in 1919 as part of a posthumous collection of McCrae's works, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems.
World War I was unlike any previous war: the introduction of technologies of warfare, including the machine gun and chemical weapons, caused millions of deaths. The war was initially triggered by political tensions at the borders of eastern and western Europe, but in 1914 the war began in earnest, spreading quickly westward across France and the lowlands.
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