of the shell and the reports of the guns in the battery just beside us.
I have a letter from him in which he 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. I have
a sketch of the scene, taken at the time, including his dressing station;
and during our operations at Passchendaele last November,
I found time to make a sketch of the scene of the crosses, row on row,
from which he derived his inspiration."

The last letter from the Front is dated June 1st, 1915. Upon that day
he was posted to No. 3 General Hospital at Boulogne, and placed in charge
of medicine with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel as of date 17th April, 1915.
Here he remained until the day of his death on January 28th, 1918.




III

The Brand of War



There are men who pass through such scenes unmoved. If they have eyes,
they do not see; and ears, they do not hear. But John McCrae
was profoundly moved, and bore in his body until the end
the signs of his experience. Before taking up his new duties
he made a visit to the hospitals in Paris to see if there was any new thing
that might be learned. A Nursing Sister in the American Ambulance
at Neuilly-sur-Seine met him in the wards. Although she had known him