Guelph, Ontario, Thursday, June 25, 2015
Thank you all for being here.
For a number of reasons, this is a remarkable occasion.
It’s remarkable that we gather to dedicate this statue one hundred years after John McCrae wrote “In Flanders Fields.”
It’s remarkable that a poem written near the front lines on a scrap of paper should have survived the First World War, when its author and millions of others didn’t.
It’s remarkable that John McCrae, a native son of Guelph, should be remembered today for a single, 15-line rondeau, rather than for his skills as a doctor.
He was a very good doctor, in fact.
It’s not widely known that, prior to the war, McCrae interned with Dr. William Osler, the renowned Canadian who has been called “the father of modern medicine.”
In fact, McCrae’s teacher and mentor, Dr. John Adami of McGill University, called McCrae “the most talented physician of his generation.”
Think about that for a moment. The most talented physician of his generation.
John McCrae’s talents as a physician were certainly in high demand on the battlefields of Belgium and France.
Much as I love “In Flanders Fields” for its poignant message of remembrance, I regret he had occasion to write it.
Just imagine what he might have achieved were he to have lived in a time of peace.
Think of him as a family doctor or a specialist practising here in Guelph, rather than dealing with carnage and untold suffering in a muddy trench near Ypres.
Just imagine what he could have accomplished in the medical field in peacetime, were he not serving in Flanders fields in wartime.
Alas, what could have been was not to be.
Today, thanks to his famous poem, the poppy is a worldwide symbol of remembrance. But John McCrae himself is symbolic of something else entirely: the terrible waste of human life and potential that was the First World War. He died of pneumonia before the war ended, exhausted, aged 45.
Some people might think writing poetry in the midst of a world war to be a hopeless, futile act.
But I think it’s an entirely understandable response to the horrors of war.
Let’s look at the word “poem” itself. It’s derived from the Greek word for “to make.”
So, if a poem is “a thing made,” the First World War was surely its opposite.
It unmade.
Human lives, families, cities and towns, whole countries and an entire civilization were brought to ruin by what became known as “the war to end all wars.”
One of our duties in remembering those who served is to remember that war is never glorious—not even when rendered into verse.
War means we’ve failed to resolve our differences by other means.
And when we fail, real people pay a terrible price. Real people like John McCrae.
That’s why those who survived the First World War said “never again.”
Lest we forget.
Last fall, I had the privilege of visiting the site in Belgium where John McCrae served and is presumed to have written “In Flanders Fields.” I imagined what went through his mind as he scribbled down those 15 lines in the space of a few minutes.
It is a solemn site, and I’m proud to see him memorialized in Canada by this statue and the same bronze in Ottawa. I offer my thanks to all of you who were involved in the effort.
Let us remember him.
