If Ye Break Faith – We Shall Not Sleep (Buy Victory Bonds)

Why it works

Canada's 1918 Victory Loan poster turned a war poem into a sales line. The army doctor John McCrae had written "In Flanders Fields" in 1915, ending with the dead warning the living that if they break faith, "we shall not sleep". Frank Lucien Nicolet's poster shows a lone Canadian soldier, helmet in hand and head bowed over a wooden grave cross in a field of red poppies, with McCrae's words above and a plain instruction below: "Buy Victory Bonds". By then McCrae himself had died while serving on the Western Front. It is studied as a vivid case of borrowed cultural capital, using a poem its audience already knew, and one Canadians still recite on Remembrance Day, to make a financial request feel like a debt owed to the fallen. The Canadian War Museum notes that Victory Bond publicity used tens of thousands of posters and drew on well-known poems, and that Canadians bought more than $2 billion of domestic war bonds. A French-language version was also issued.