The hobby of military scale modeling is more than a past-time, it is an expression of my interest and appreciation for the service of all who have worn the uniform and paid the price for our liberty and freedom.

Recently my Post of American Legion War Veterans was at a local shopping center giving the public information about Remembrance Day when one mother asked if I would tell her teenage daughter about the story of what happened in Flanders Fields 104 years ago.

I asked the young lady if she had studied World War history in school and she confirmed that she had heard of it... I thought how sad that a generation of young people are told there was a World War, but have no idea the price that was paid.

Early on the morning of May 3, 1915, John McCrae sat near his field dressing station, a crude bunker cut into the slopes of a bank near the Ypres-Yser Canal in Belgium. A Canadian military surgeon, he had been at the French line for 12 days under constant German bombardment, and the toll of dead and wounded was appalling.

The previous night he buried a good friend, Lt. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, blown to pieces by a direct hit from a German shell. Now, as he sat in the sunshine, he could hear the larks singing between the crash of the guns. He could see the rows of crosses in a nearby cemetery. The field where the cemetery lay was thick with scarlet poppies, their dormant seeds churned up by the guns, blooming despite-or because of-the carnage. McCrae took in the scene and quickly wrote a 15-line poem. Speaking as from the dead to the living, “In Flanders Fields” was to become the most famous poem of the Great War—perhaps of any war.

1,000,000 soldiers from 50 different countries were wounded, missing or killed in action at Flanders Fields from 1914 to 1918.