Parting Shot

This Ontario doctor patched up soldiers during the Boer War, and he volunteered again at the age of 41 when World War I began. On May 2, 1915, his friend Alexis Helmer was killed in the Belgian mud by an artillery shell. The next day, Lt-Colonel John McCrae transformed his grief into fifteen immortal lines that taught a shattered nation to remember. Death took McCrae before the war ended, but his poem gave Canada the symbol of its covenant with its dead: red poppies. “In Flanders fields, the poppies grow, Between the crosses, row on row…”