In Flanders Fields

The National Post on Monday had an article giving some background to the writing of this poem, and looking at some newly discovered letters by MacRae.

'Yet the birds kept singing'
The letter that presaged In Flanders Fields: Newly found letter contains McCrae's vivid description of 2nd Battle of Ypres

Michael Bliss
National Post

Monday, November 11, 2002

Major John McCrae's letter of May 13, 1915, to doctor Charles Martin, published today in the National Post for the first time, is the soldier-poet's best and most concise account of the ghastly battle that gave rise to his immortal poem, In Flanders Fields.

I found a typescript of the letter this summer as part of a packet of war letters to and from McGill University medical men in Yale University's collection of the papers of Harvey Cushing, the pioneering American neurosurgeon. The McGill doctors seem to have been circulating the letters to keep some of their American friends and supporters abreast of the fighting and medical conditions in France. Neither McCrae's most recent biographer, Dianne Graves, nor the curator of the Guelph Museums (which include McCrae House), Bev Dietrich, had known of this letter, the original of which may not survive. McCrae's other accounts of the second Battle of Ypres are notes in his war diaries and several longer letters to his family.

Although McCrae describes 17 days in which "it was fight all the time," there was in fact a brief lull on May 2 during which one of McCrae's fallen comrades, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was buried. That night or the next morning McCrae was seen to be jotting down the lines that he later reworked into his most famous poem. His remark in the Martin letter that despite the endless shelling "the birds kept singing in the trees" obliquely echoes in his lines, "The larks, still bravely singing, fly/Scarce heard amid the guns below."

In Flanders Fields was published anonymously in the Dec. 8, 1915, edition of Punch, and immediately became famous.

After Second Ypres, McCrae served for more than three years with No. 3 Canadian General Hospital, a medical unit staffed by McGill University personnel. He died in France of pneumonia and meningitis on Jan. 28, 1918.

Harvey Cushing was a friend of the McCrae brothers, Tom and John, who came from Guelph, Ont., and both studied medicine at the University of Toronto and then worked as residents at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Cushing met them at Hopkins -- he lived with Tom for several years -- where they were all protegés and friends of the great Canadian physician William Osler. As well as the letter published here, Cushing's papers and war diaries shed more light on John McCrae and his war.

The younger McCrae -- "Jack" to his friends - spent a few months at Hopkins during his medical training, mostly in Toronto, in the late 1890s. He broke off his hospital work to enlist for service in the South African War in 1900 where he saw action as part of the Canadian volunteer contingent. He settled into practice and teaching in Montreal, published some of his verse, but immediately re-enlisted in a Canadian artillery unit on the outbreak of war in 1914. He went overseas with the first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and by April of 1915 had seen his first action as second in command of the First Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, at the battle of Neuve Chapelle.

Although the United States remained neutral in the conflict until 1917, Harvey Cushing served briefly in France that spring as head of a Harvard University medical unit at a volunteer American hospital in Paris. His papers contain another new McCrae letter, written directly to him on April 17, 1915:

My dear Harvey: Just a note to wish you the time of day. Tom wrote me that you were coming over.... I suppose Mrs. Cushing is not with you this time.

Things are quiet here.... We got over here the 14th of Febr. And for the six weeks on from Feb. 19 we were constantly in action, getting in on the flank of the big affair at Neuve Chapelle.

This is verily an awful affair. Did you see Irwin's statement that the fighting which ended in Nov near Ypres cost more casualties than the Civil War? I think nothing can bring home to one's mind so well the big scale as that statement.

... I hope to go where I am most needed. Up to the present I have been a kind of ass't adjutant as well as looking after the relatively few sick. Men & horses have kept in very good shape.

If you have time drop me a note.

A few days later the Americans in Paris began to hear rumours of a big German push in the Ypres salient. They could not believe the stories that the Germans were using some kind of asphyxiating gas -- and then the first coughing, gassed wounded started arriving. "There's devil's work going on around Ypres," Cushing wrote in his diary.

He pasted in a clipping about the gallant conduct of the Canadian artillery in the early days of the fighting, and noted, hopefully, "Trusting Jack McCrae was not in it." When he had the opportunity to observe the battle from a distant hill on May 5, Cushing still did not know of McCrae's involvement. Cushing's party of Americans was appalled at the condition of the gas victims and other casualties of the fighting: "we do not care to examine them in any detail -- it's too harrowing." Second Ypres was still raging as Cushing sailed for home in mid-May, his own ship zigzagging through water still littered with corpses from the torpedoing of the Lusitania.

Canada suffered 6,000 casualties at Second Ypres, our country's introduction to a war that Robert Borden, the prime minister, privately labelled "the suicide of civilization."

Although Jack McCrae survived with only other people's blood on his uniform (his horse, Bonfire, also made it through, despite shrapnel wounds), his close friends, including the Oslers, with whom he would stay in England on leave, noticed a shocking change of character. McCrae was nearly broken. When Cushing, back in France serving with the American forces, saw him in December, 1917, he noted that McCrae "does not appear to me at all like the 'In Flanders Fields' person of former days. Silent, asthmatic, and moody."

A month later, in his war diary, Cushing described "The Death of a Soldier-Poet":

Jan. 28, 1918: I saw poor Jack McCrae ... last night -- the last time. A bright flame rapidly burning out. He died early this morning.... Never strong, he gave his all with the Canadian Artillery during the prolonged second battle of Ypres and after at which time he wrote his imperishable verses. Since those frightful days he has never been his old gay and companionable self, but has rather sought solitude. A soldier from top to toe -- how he would have hated to die in bed....

They will bury him tomorrow. Some of the older members of the McGill Unit who still remain here were scouring the fields this afternoon to try and find some chance winter poppies to put on his grave -- to remind him of Flanders, where he would have preferred to lie....

Jan. 29: We saw him buried this afternoon at the cemetery on the hillside at Wimereux with military honors -- a tribute to Canada as well as to him.... A company of North Staffords and many Royal Army Medical Corps orderlies and Canadian sisters headed the procession -- then 'Bonfire' ... with his master's boots reversed over the saddle -- then the rest of us.... the Staffords, from their reversed arms, fix bayonets, and instead of firing over the grave, as in time of peace, stand at salute during the Last Post with its final wailing note which brings a lump to our throats -- and so we leave him.

- - -

The best book about McCrae is A Crown of Life: The World of John McCrae, by Dianne Graves, published in the United Kingdom and Canada in 1997. An edited edition of Harvey Cushing's war diaries, From a Surgeon's Journal: 1915-1918, was published in 1936. The Cushing papers are available to researchers at Yale and on microfilm.

THE LETTER:

The letter from Major John McCrae, author of In Flanders Fields, is written to Dr. Charles Martin. It was found in a packet labelled "some McGill letters."

N. France,

May 13, 1915

My dear Charley:

Thank you for your kind and interesting letter which reached me a few days ago. We have just got through the terrible battle of Ypres, which was not the brief affair you might judge from the papers.

We were going in on April 22, and were 3 miles behind the French line at the spot where and the time when it broke. We stood by in the mele-and confusion all night from 6 p.m. and at 3.30 a.m. were sent in on the gallop to a spot on the canal north of the town, and there we stayed 17 days and nights: all the time we never even had our boots off; it was fight all the time. We were far up to the front, and to that we owe our effectiveness, as well as our losses which could not but be heavy.

The artillery fire was constant, heavy and from all sorts of guns. We were said to have 2 army corps reinforcements on our front - and it felt like it. The men behaved magnificently: and the labor was terribly hard. In one 30 hours we fired 3600 rounds: and at one time our brigade had only seven guns able to fire; two of these smoked at every joint and were too hot to touch with the unprotected hand. Throughout three nights they shelled us continuously: and the firing never ceased one consecutive minute, night or day; and yet the birds kept singing in the trees - what trees were not cut down by shells.

We were so close up to the trenches (for guns) that the rifle bullets came over us in clouds. We got the gas again and again. Of the 17 days the first 8 we were with the French army, - and all the time had French troops on our front: the anxiety was terrible, for we never knew if the French would hold on or give. Our part of the battle was to hold the German lines and allow the subsequent French and British advance to the south. And day after day it was firing to support French attack, or repel German attack. And we sometimes had 3 of these latter in a day. We got into them well again and again.

We lost very heavily (for artillery) but we have justified our existence. Of the 'horrors of war' we saw them an 'undred fold - at close quarters. From some of my uniform I can't get the bloodstains clear yet.

My good old friend 'Bonfire' got two light shrapnel wounds, but is quite fit again. It has been a terrible time, but we have been very mercifully preserved so far. My love to your family -

Yours very truly.

JACK.

Michael Bliss, Professor of History/History of Medicine at the University of Toronto and author of William Osler: A Life in Medicine, is writing a new biography of Harvey Cushing.

© Copyright 2002 National Post

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