John McCrae

John McCrae was a Canadian army doctor at the Second Battle of Ypres in May 1915 when his close friend Alexis Helmer was killed by a shell. The next day, sitting near the burial ground where poppies were already blooming between the crosses, he wrote "In Flanders Fields."

By one account he was dissatisfied and threw the draft away; fellow officers rescued it, and Punch published it anonymously that December. It became the most famous poem of the First World War and made the poppy the lasting emblem of remembrance.

McCrae never saw the peace. He died of pneumonia at a field hospital in France in January 1918.