JOHN McCRAE.*

AMONG the war poems directly inspired by contact with its realities few have attained a wider circulation than " In Flanders Fields." The lines, first printed in Punch of December 8th, 1915, may be quoted for the benefit of those who have not read them, • In ,Flanders Pickle, and other Poems. By Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae, M.D. With an Essay in Character by Sir Andrew MarPhail. &ir 'York and London: G. P. Putnatq's Sons. 1$1.50 net.i as they form the keynote of Sir Andrew Macphail's admirable and affecting study of his friend and colleague :— " 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, Ay 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."

The lines "The Anxious Dead," which appeared in the Spectator of June 30th, 1917, are a variation on the same theme. " In Flanders Fields," to quote the words of Major-General Morrison, who commanded the Brigade to which hfcCrao was attached at the time,

" was literally born of fire and blood during the hottest phase of the second battle of Ypres. My headquarters were in a trench on the top of the bank of the Ypres canal ; and John had his dressing station in a hole dug in the fOot of the bank. During periods of the battle men who were shot actually rolled down the bank into his dressing station. Along from us a few hundred yards was the headquarters of a regiment, and many times during the sixteen days of the battle, he and I watched them burying their dead whenever there was a lull. Thus the crosses, row on row, grew into a good-sized cemetery. Just as he describes, we often heard the larks singing high in the air, between the crash of the shell and the reports of the guns in the battery just beside us. I have a letter from him in which ho mentions having written the poem to pass away the time between the arrival of batches of wounded, and partly as an experiment with several varieties of poetic metre."

The unit with which McCrae served was the most advanced of all the Allies' guns by a good deal, except one French battery, which stayed in a position yet more advanced for two days, and then had to be taken out. After " seventeen days of Hades," in which none of them had their clothes off, in which gun and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds, the Brigade was moved out on May 9th. On June 9th McCrae was posted to No. 3 General Hospital at Boulogne, and placed in charge of medicine with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. There he remained till his death from pneumonia on January 28th, 1918, only a few days after his appointment as Consulting Physician to the British armies in France. Thus, as Sir Andrew Macphail says, " John McCrae witnessed only once the raw earth of Flanders hide its shame in the warm scarlet glory of the poppy. Others have watched this resurrection of the flowers in four successive seasons, a fresh miracle every time it occurs. Also they have observed the rows of crosses lengthen, the torch thrown, caught and carried to victory. The dead may sleep. Wo have not broken faith with them. It is little wonder then that - In Flanders Fields' has become the poem of the army. The soldiers have learned it with their hearts, which is quite a different thing from committing it to memory. It circulates, as a song should circulate, by the living word of mouth, not by printed characters. That is the true test of poetry—its insistence on making itself learnt by heart. . . . If there was nothing remark- able about the publication of • In Flanders Fields ' there was something momentous in the moment of writing it. And yet it was a sure instinct which prompted the writer to send it to Punch. A rational man wishes to know the news of the world in which he lives ; and if he is interested in life, he is eager to know how men feel and comport themselves amongst the events which are passing. For this purpose Punch is the great news- paper of the world, and these lines describe better than any other how men felt in that great moment. It was in April, 1915. The enemy was in the full cry of victory. All that remained for him was to occupy Paris, as once he did before, and to seize the Channel ports. Then France, England, and the world were doomed."

John McCrae, born in 1872, eamo of Scots stock on both sides. His early years were spent on his father's farm in Guelph, Ontario. He gained a scholarship at the University of Ontario in 1888, joined the Faculty of Arts, took the honours course in natural sciences, graduating from the department of biology in 1894. Then, turning to medicine, he graduated again in 1898 with a gold medal and a scholarship in physiology and pathology. He was successively attached to the resident staff at a Children's Hospital at Mount Airy, Maryland, the Toronto General Hospital, and at Johns Hopkins University. Then he came to McGill University at Montreal as Fellow in Pathology, pathologist to the Montreal General Hospital, and later on as Lecturer in Medicine in the University. He became a F.R.C.P. (London) by examination, and won other distinctions. But though

medicine was the main concern of his life, and though he studied and practised it for twenty years with great assiduity and success, he " never developed, or degenerated, into the type of the pure scientist. For the laboratory he had neither the mind nor the hands." He studied " not medicine alone, but all the subjects ancillary to the science, and came to the task with a mind braced by a sound and generous education." He never

refused any work that was given him to do. Writing on the close of the Second Battle of Ypres, all he says of his own share is : " I have done what fell to hand." He was of no party ;

but the friend of all men and the confidant of many ; and he never neglected the opportunity of consorting with those who write and paint. The lore and art of angling, acquired in an

early visit to Scotland, never left him. Furthermore, either in ease or in posse, he had "always been going to the wars." By

his father—who when over seventy years of age raised and trained a field battery in Guelph and brought it overseas, and who had for many years commanded a field battery in the Canadian Militia—he had been early nourished in the history of the Highland regiments. At fourteen he joined the Guelph Highland Cadets and rose to the rank of First Lieutenant. Subsequently he transferred to the artillery, and served with distinction as a combatant officer in the South African War, rising to the rank of Major. In Flanders, though he was attached as Medical Officer to the 1st Brigade of Artillery, he could not forget that he was no longer a. gunner, and " in those tumultuous days he was often to be found in the observation post rather than in his dressing station." He went to the war without illusions, and after his service at the front his old gaiety never returned. He had been profoundly moved, and " bore in his body until the

end the signs of his experience." Yet in August, 1915, he wrote from his hospital post : " I expect to wish often that I had stuck to the artillery." He was at all times mindful of the noble message from his mother to -which he refers in a letter after the worst of the ordeal was over :- " On the eve of the battle of Ypres I was indebted to you for a letter which said, ' take good care of my son Jack ; but I would not have you unmindful that, sometimes, when we save we lose.' I have that last happy phrase to thank. Often when I had to go out over the areas that were being shelled, it came into my mind."

Nothing better explains the affection in which John McCrae was held than the passages describing his love of children and animals. " Through all his life, and through all hie letters, dogs and children followed him as shadows follow men. To walk in the streets with him was a slow procession. Every dog and every child one met must be spoken to, and each made answer." The letters to his nephews and nieces are full of delightful stories of his horse Bonfire and his dog Bonneau, and many of them are written in the person of the former and signed with a horseshoe—" Bonfire

his mark." B011110811 accompanied him round the wards ; Bonfire was full of tricks, and when his master sat down within his

reach would pick off his cap ; he also " made a great hit with the Sisters, because he licks their hands just like a dog." And the picture of little Mike, four months old, who had lost an eye and had a leg broken, but " is a very good little boy all the same " ; of Sir Bertrand Dawson's spaniel Sue, and " poor old Windy," the regimental dog of the let Battalion of the Lincoln, who came to the hospital to be healed of his second wound, will move the hearts of all dog-lovers.

McCrae's health was failing when he came to Boulogne. All his life he had suffered from asthma, and he felt the cold terribly. But he did his work, and did it well. He died after a few days'

illness, and was buried with full honours in the cemetery at Wimereux " on this sunny slope, facing the sunset and the sea,"

as one of the nurses put it, adding : " The nurses lamented that he became unconscious so quickly that they could not tell him how much they cared. To the funeral all came as we did, because we loved him so." Many fine tributes were paid to John McCrae by his colleagues and friends. But after quoting their testimony Sir Andrew Macphail, with a sure instinct, finds the best memorial in McCrae's own words, in which he set forth the ideal of the noble profession he adorned—an ideal which he came so near realizing :-

" To his own students John McCrae once quoted the legend from a picture, to him ' the most suggestive picture in the world ' What I spent I had ; what I saved I lost ; what I gave I have ; and he added : ' It will be in your power every day to store up for yourselves treasures that will come back to you in the consciousness of duty well done, of kind acts performed, things that, having -given away freely, you yet possess. It has often seemed to me that when in the Judgment those surprised faces look up, and say : Lord, when saw we Thee anhtmgered, and fed Thee.; or thirsty, and gave Thee drink ; a stranger, and took Thee in naked, and clothed Thee ; and there meets them that warrant-royal of all charity : Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me, there will be amongst those awed ones many a practitioner of medicine.' "