In Flanders Fields

The last stanza of "In Flanders Fields", by Lt. Colonel John McCrae, medic, Royal Canadian Army, written at the Battle of Ypres, Belgium, 1915:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

McCrae died of pneumonia whilst still on active duty during the war, France, 1918. His poem, originally discarded, was picked up by another Canadian soldier, and subsequently became the best known poem of the Great War, now known as World War I.