100 years of the Poppy Appeal

By late 1914, poppies were flourishing on the churned-up battlefields of northern France and Flanders in Belgium. These resilient flowers, growing in the midst of chaos and destruction of World War One, inspired the Canadian surgeon John McCrae, who was serving in Ypres, to write his famous poem In Flanders Fields in 1915. An American professor, Moina Michael, was moved by the poem to campaign to make the poppy a lasting symbol of remembrance in the USA and the idea soon caught on in other countries.
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