“On Field of Honor”: how a patriotic poem became an anti-war anthem

Lieutenant-Colonel John D. McCrae, medical officer of the Canadian Field Artillery, had just presided over the funeral of a young comrade on the battlefield.

Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, 22, was killed by an explosive cannon shell during the catastrophic Second Battle of Ypres. It was May 1915, less than a year after the start of the First World War, and the Canadian Expeditionary Force was fighting in the Flanders region of Belgium, where the German army was on the Western Front for the first time deploying poison gas.