Courage came to you with your boyhood's grace
Of ardent life and limb.
Each day new dangers steeled you to the test,
To ride, to climb, to swim.
Your hot blood taught you carelessness of death
With every breath.
So when you went to play another game
You could not but be brave:
An Empire's team, a rougher football field,
The end--perhaps your grave.
What matter? On the winning of a goal
You staked your soul.
Yes, you wore courage as you wore your youth
With carelessness and joy.
But in what Spartan school of discipline
Did you get patience, boy?
How did you learn to bear this long-drawn pain
And not complain?
Restless with throbbing hopes, with thwarted aims,
Impulsive as a colt,
How do you lie here month by weary month
Helpless and not revolt?
What joy can these monotonous days afford
Here in a ward?
Yet you are merry as the birds in spring,
Or feign the gaiety,
Lest those who dress and tend your wound each day
Should guess the agony.
Lest they should suffer--this the only fear
You let draw near.
Graybeard philosophy has sought in books
And argument this truth,
That man is greater than his pain, but you
Have learnt it in your youth.
You know the wisdom taught by Calvary
At twenty-three.
Death would have found you brave, but braver still
You face each lagging day,
A merry Stoic, patient, chivalrous,
Divinely kind and gay.
You bear your knowledge lightly, graduate
Of unkind Fate.
Careless philosopher, the first to laugh,
The latest to complain,
Unmindful that you teach, you taught me this
In your long fight with pain:
Since God made man so good--here stands my creed--
God's good indeed.
W. M. LETTS
_By permission of the Author
From "Hallow E'en and Other Verses"--
John Murray, London_
SPEECH DELIVERED BY LIEUT.-GEN. SIR A. W. CURRIE IN LONDON BEFORE
AUGUST OFFENSIVE, 1918
Just before the Canadian entrance into the great offensive
of August, 1918, General Sir Arthur W. Currie, during a
short visit to London, delivered the following message from
the Canadian Army Corps under his command:
The situation is a serious one, and it is better for all peoples to
know the fact. Germany has struck four mighty blows with success on
each occasion, and it is just a question of how many of these blows
we can stand. Personally, I think that the factor that can be turned
in our favour is this: If we stop and fight the Boche, we will kill
a sufficient number to make him silly, while America develops enough
strength to turn the man power in our favour. The British soldier
realizes that he is a better man than the Boche, and he believes that
the German army can be beaten. Our men do not regard the Boche as a
superman; and, remembering the crimes they have committed, we shall
never take such delight in killing them as when we next meet them.
Germany is simply a mad dog that must be killed, a cancerous growth
that must be removed.
I suppose that I am the proudest man in the British Isles to-night,
but I am not the happiest. I am the proudest man because I command the
finest fighting force in all the Allied armies. An officer of Canadian
birth, who has spent the whole of his military career with the British
Army, and married an English wife, told me the other day that he was
proud to be a Canadian, for everywhere he went men spoke of the deeds
of the Canadian Army Corps. When the women with their children and the
old men were fleeing before enemy forces on the Western Front on a not
very distant occasion, and learned that the troops meeting them were
Canadians, they turned round and went back home. On another occasion,
when visiting a British Headquarters, I saw a Brigadier sitting by
the roadside, tired, and dirty, and wan. He called out, "Who's that
coming along?" When the reply was, "General Currie", he said, "Are the
Canadians coming down here?" Told that they were, he threw his hat in
the air and declared, "Then we are all right now".
When we came to England first, we were not regarded as the finest
fighting soldiers. We had many things said about us unjustly; and
suggestions were put about that it was improbable we should ever become
good soldiers. Everywhere to-day, at General Headquarters and all other
places, it is recognized that Canadian soldiers are fit to take their
place beside the veteran soldiers of the British Army, with whom we are
proud to serve.
I know that it has been said that Canadians and other Overseas troops
are placed in the hottest parts of the war area. The greatest fighting
of the war has been this year, and we have not taken any particular
part in it. The Boche has not attacked the Canadian Front. He knows
that he has never yet met the troops from Canada without suffering
severely. The turn of the Canadian Corps must come. The temper of the
Canadian soldier is that there is no position he is asked to take that
he will not take; and I know that the Boche will not take any part of
our line, except over the dead bodies of your Canadian fellow-citizens.
That is why I am not the happiest man in the British Isles to-night.
The Canadian Corps is going to die. It is simply a question of who can
stand killing the longer.
I have never seen the Corps in finer fighting fettle than it is to-day.
The Canadians are now more efficient than ever; and we could not be in
that position unless we were backed up by General Sir Richard Turner
and his staff in England. There is a feeling of co-operation now that
never existed before; and the better the liaison we have between
France, England, and Canada, the better it is for the fighting forces.
And so we stand in a great cause, on the eve of great events. We have
to preserve the British Empire. It would be a terrible calamity if
anything should happen that would make the peoples of the British
Empire hesitate at such a juncture. The British Empire must be saved.