COLUMN: Don’t Mind the Mess – Remember me

It’s May 3, 1915. Weary from an endless round of patients, you’ve put your scalpel and mask down for a moment to take a short break.

But instead of stepping out of some antiseptic office to breathe in the fresh spring air, you find yourself seated on the back of a filthy ambulance, surrounded by a surreal landscape that can only be described as miles and miles of mud.

How did I get here? you wonder. A University of Toronto graduate. A successful surgeon. Yet, here you are, John McCrae, a tired 43-year-old treating injured soldiers at a dressing station near Ypres, Belgium.

You’ve just survived two of the ugliest weeks the war to end all wars has seen so far. You recall them like some sleep-deprived, crazy person haunted by the remnants of a nightmare. Some of the men curse God or their country. Others cry in their sleep. But you express your anguish the way you always have – the only way you know how – by writing about it.

Opening your ever-present notebook, you scribble: “I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days…. Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done.”

But it’s not just the suffering, screams and blood that have driven you to seek a few solitary moments outside the dressing tent. It’s that mound of dirt near your feet. Underneath it lies the body of your dearest friend. Last week, you were laughing together. Last night, you buried him.

Your heart seems to have burst like the shell that took his life.

How do you tell his family in Ottawa that their son will never come home again?

You stare at the blazing red flower at the foot of the grave, shocked at its audacity to thrive in this barren environment.

You’ve heard that poppy seeds can live for years, just waiting for the soil to be churned, blossoming not in spite of the abuse, but because of it. A tiny metaphor of the human spirit.

Inspired, you open the dog-eared pages of your notebook and, within five minutes, jot down 15 lines of poetry that will go down in history: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow, between the crosses row on row…”

A young sergeant delivering mail politely waits for you to finish, moved by the emotion on your face. As he gives you your mail, you hand him the notebook to read.

“The poem was exactly an exact description of the scene in front of us both,” the young man will later say.

“He used the word blow in that line because the poppies actually were being blown that morning by a gentle east wind. It never occurred to me at that time that it would ever be published. It seemed to me just an exact description of the scene.”

In fact, it is very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, you toss the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieves it and sends it to newspapers in England. Punch published it on December 8, 1915.

Three years later, you succumb to pneumonia. You never live to see those sad, simple words you scrawled so hastily become a requiem for millions.

Today, your poem is the voice for a sea of crosses that will forever whisper, “Remember me.”