John Mccrae Essay

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John A. McCrae John McCrae was a Canadian poet John McCrae. He served in the Canadian forces as a medical officer in both the Boer War and World War I. A year after the beginning of World War One, he published a poem in the famous “Punch Magazine”, the only work, by which he would become famous. McCrae was born in McCrae House in Ontario, the grandson of Scottish immigrants. He attended to the well-known Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute and soon became a member of the Guelph militia regiment. McCrae worked on his Baccalaurea in the University of Toronto in 1892–93. He was a member of the Toronto militia, The Queen's Own Rifles of Canada, while studying at the University, during which time he was promoted to Captain and commanded the company. Among his papers in the John McCrae House in Guelph is a letter McCrae wrote on July 18, 1893 to Laura Kains while he trained as an artilleryman at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario. "...I have a man servant .. Quite a nice place it is, in fact... My windows look right out across the bay, and are just near the water’s edge; there is a good deal of shipping at present in the port; and the river looks very pretty." He returned to the University of Toronto to finish off his B.A. and John McCrae later studied medicine on a scholarship at the University of Toronto. While attending the university he joined the Zeta Psi Fraternity and published his first poems. While in medical school, he tutored other students to help pay his tuition. Two of his students were among the first women doctors in Ontario. When the United Kingdom first declared war on Germany at the start of World War I, Canada, as a colony of the British Empire, declared war too. McCrae served as a field surgeon in the Canadian artillery battalions and was in charge of a field hospital during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915.
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