When I was young, all the old men had spent 17 days in hades - or more

In Flanders Fields by John McRae (1972 - 1918)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The name of John McCrae (1872-1918) may seem out of place in the
distinguished company of World War I poets, but he is remembered
for what is probably the single best-known and popular poem from
the war, "In Flanders Fields." He was a Canadian physician and fought
on the Western Front in 1914, but was then transferred to the medical
corps and assigned to a hospital in France. He died of pneumonia while
on active duty in 1918. His volume of poetry, In Flanders Fields and
Other Poems, was published in 1919.

Excerpts from The Making of the poem by Rob Ruggenberg

One death particularly affected McCrae. A young friend and former student,
Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915.
Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that night in the little cemetery
called Essex Farm, just outside McCrae's dressing station. McCrae had performed
the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain, reciting from memory some
passages from the Church of England's 'Order of Burial of the Dead'. This had happened
in complete darkness, as for security reasons it was forbidden to make light.

The next evening, sitting on the rearstep of an ambulance parked near the dressing
station beside the Yser Canal, just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae
vented his anguish by composing a poem. The major was no stranger to writing, having
authored several medical texts besides dabbling in poetry.

In the cemetery McCrae could see the wild poppies that sprang up from the ditches and
the graves, and he spent twenty minutes of precious rest time scribbling fifteen lines
of verse in a notebook.

A young soldier watched him write it. Cyril Allinson, a twenty-two year old
sergeant-major, was delivering mail that day when he spotted McCrae.
The major looked up as Allinson approached, then went on writing while the
sergeant-major stood there quietly. "His face was very tired but calm as we
wrote," Allinson recalled. "He looked around from time to time, his eyes
straying to Helmer's grave."

When McCrae finished five minutes later, he took his mail from Allinson and,
without saying a word, handed his pad to the young NCO.
Allinson was moved by what he read:

"The poem was an exact description of the scene in front of us both.
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."

Allinson's account corresponds with the words of the commanding officer at the spot,
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Morrison. This is how Morrison described the scene:

"This poem was literally born of fire and blood during the hottest phase of the
second battle of Ypres. My headquarters were in a trench on the top of the bank of
the Ypres Canal, and John had his dressing station in a hole dug in the foot of the bank.
During periods in the battle men who were shot actually rolled down the bank into his
dressing station. Along from us a few hundred yards was the headquarters of a
regiment, and many times during the sixteen days of battle, he and I watched them
burying their dead whenever there was a lull. Thus the crosses, row on row, grew into
a good-sized cemetery. Just as he describes, we often heard in the mornings the larks
singing high in the air, between the crash of the shell and the reports of the guns
in the battery just beside us. I have a letter from him in which he mentions having
written the poem to pass away the time between the arrival of batches of wounded
and partly as an experiment with several varieties of poetic metre. "

The poem (initially called We shall not sleep) was very nearly not published.
Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but Morrison retrieved it and sent it
to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it and sent
the poem back, but Punch published it on the 8th of December 1915
(although the magazine misspelled his name as McCree and promoted him to Lt. Colonel.)

Excerpt from a letter written by John McCrae to his Mother in 1915 :

"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."