The setting for the poem is Flanders fields during World War I. There was actually no specific location called Flanders fields during the war. Instead, Flanders fields became a catch-all term for the battleground in Belgium (where Flanders is located) and France. John McCrae was stationed in the Flanders region of Belgium during the war, where he served as a Lieutenant-Colonel during the Second Battle of Ypres. This battle featured one of Germany's first chemical assaults on the Allied Powers, but the Canadian line – of which McCrae was a part – was able to hold them off for more than two weeks. McCrae wrote the poem after this battle and after attending the funeral of a friend who died during the attack. While McCrae himself had first-hand experience fighting in Flanders, the term Flanders fields becomes, in the poem, a general term for landscapes that have been transformed...