The back of the Canadian $10 note bears the motto "In Service of Peace", and below it, a poem.

Although Lieut. Col. John McRae had been a doctor for years, and had served in the South African War, he could never dull himself to the suffering, the screams, and the blood, and had seen and heard enough in his dressing station to last a lifetime. As a surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade, he spent seventeen days treating injured men — Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans — in the Ypres salient, one of the more horrific battlefields of WW I.

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of that seventeen days… Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

A young friend and former student, Lieut. Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. Lieutenant Helmer was buried later that day in the little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of the chaplain. The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance just a few hundred yards north of Ypres, McCrae vented his anguish by composing a poem.

Doctor McRae died in the year 1918 at the age of 46.

How does an Eagle holding arrows compare to a human lament?  Do we trust in God, yet trust far more in ourselves? What if the vision of our country were to be in Service of Peace, as one imagines the Tibetan population led by the Dalai Lama must be… what if our Vision were strong enough to hold back our fear?

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row,
that mark our place;

                                            and in the sky
the larks, still bravely singing, fly
scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead.
                                      Short days ago
we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
loved and were loved, and now we lie
in Flanders fields.

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.