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.
   — Major John McCrae (1872-1918)
The poem “Flanders Fields” was written in 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian doctor, the day after the funeral of a friend and former student, Alexis Helmer. McCrae fought on the Western Front in 1914, but was reassigned to a French hospital. His asthma exacerbated by poison gas exposure, he died of pneumonia and meningitis while on active duty in 1918.
He practiced at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal before he shipped out. When you go through the main doors into the hospital’s enormous entrance hall, there’s a photograph of McCrae in uniform and under that in another frame is the heavily folded original version of the poem.
Both are extremely moving, for different reasons. Although he was a young man, the war aged McCrae terribly. He looked far, far older than his years. And the poem? Well, seeing it all wrinkled like that, you realize that he probably just wrote it for himself, to vent anguish, and then folded it up and jammed it in a pocket.
Amazing that it ever went out into the world.
The link to the name gives some of the info behind the writing and publication of the poem. It is, indeed, an odd turn of circumstances that the poem has become so widely known, and certainl not the original intent of the author.