Essex Farm / Site John Mccrae

A total of 1,185 soldiers are buried at Essex Farm, including one of the youngest casualties of the war: Valentine Joe Strudwick was just 15 years old when he was killed. Next to the cemetery, you can still see the concrete bunkers in which a dressing station was housed. It was in one of these primitive “dug-outs” that the Canadian military doctor John McCrae wrote his world-famous poem “In Flanders Fields” at the beginning of May 1915.