From Flanders Fields: the 2nd Battle of Ypres
After two days of fighting in 1915, during the month-long 2nd Battle of Ypres, the 1st Canadian Division wrested control of the strategic Flemish town of Ypres in western Belgium from Germany. The battle marked Germany’s first mass use of poison gas on the Western Front, and the first defeat by a former European colony (Canada) of a European power (the German Empire) on European soil. It was a hard-won victory: 6,035 Canadians — one man in three — became casualties, and more than 2,000 died.
During the battle, a 42-year-old Canadian surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander McCrae, MD wrote a poem — In Flanders Fields — that almost immediately became the universal icon of the First World War, and turned the common poppy into a symbol of the self-sacrifice of soldiers in wartime.
