McCrae, << muh KRAY, >> John (1872-1918), was a Canadian physician, soldier, and poet. He contributed verses to Canadian periodicals before World War I (1914-1918). But he did not become famous until 1915 when he published “In Flanders Fields” in Punch, an English magazine. His poems were published after his death under the title In Flanders Fields, and Other Poems (1919). The second stanza of his famous poem is:
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.
Reprinted by permission of Punch
McCrae was born on Nov. 30, 1872, in Guelph, Ontario. After serving in the Canadian Army in South Africa in 1899 and 1900, he became a pathologist at McGill University and at Montreal General Hospital. As the chief medical officer at a hospital in Boulogne, France, in World War I, he saw the suffering and death he wrote about. He died of pneumonia on Jan. 28, 1918, before the war ended.
