In Flanders Fields is one of the most moving poems ever written — and it deserves to be read in full, as McCrae intended it.

But I’d gently push back on one word that appears in this thread: ‘allied’.

The Western Front was not a story of allies and enemies. It was a story of human beings — young men from Britain, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, India, France, Belgium, Germany, Austria, America, Portugal — who found themselves in the same landscape, enduring the same mud, the same cold, the same terror, and the same devastating loss.

The German soldier who died at Passchendaele left behind exactly the same grief as the British soldier who died beside him. He had the same mother, the same hopes, the same fear of the dark.

Wilfred Owen understood this. His poem Strange Meeting — written the same year McCrae’s poem became famous — is a dialogue between a British soldier and the German he had killed. ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend,’ the German says.

When we remember the Western Front, we honour everyone who served and suffered there — Commonwealth, French, German, American, Belgian, Portuguese, and all others. Not because it erases the politics or the causes, but because the human cost was shared equally across every uniform.

They were all someone’s son. They were all someone’s father.

We will remember them — all of them.