ce at the front the old gaiety never returned. There
were moments of irascibility and moods of irritation. The desire for
solitude grew upon him, and with Bonfire and Bonneau he would go apart
for long afternoons far afield by the roads and lanes about Boulogne.
The truth is: he felt that he and all had failed, and that the torch
was thrown from failing hands. We have heard much of the suffering, the
misery, the cold, the wet, the gloom of those first three winters; but
no tongue has yet uttered the inner misery of heart that was bred of
those three years of failure to break the enemy's force.

He was not alone in this shadow of deep darkness. Givenchy, Festubert,
Neuve-Chapelle, Ypres, Hooge, the Somme--to mention alone the battles in
which up to that time the Canadian Corps had been engaged--all ended in
failure; and to a sensitive and foreboding mind there were sounds and
signs that it would be given to this generation to hear the pillars and
fabric of Empire come crashing into the abysm of chaos. He was not at
the Somme in that October of 1916, but those who returned up north
with the remnants of their division from that place of slaughter will
remember that, having done all men could do, they felt like deserters
because they had not left their poor bodies dead upon the field along
with friends of a lifetime, comrades of a campaign. This is no mere
matter of surmise. The last day I spent with him we talked of those
things in his tent, and I testify that it is true.

IV. Going to the Wars

John McCrae went to the war without illusions. At first, like many
others of his age, he did not "think of enlisting", although "his
services are at the disposal of the Country if it needs them."

In July, 1914, he was at work upon the second edition of the 'Text-Book
of Pathology' by Adami and McCrae, published by Messrs. Lea and Febiger,
and he had gone to Philadelphia to read the proofs. He took them to
Atlantic City where he could "sit out on the sand, and get sunshine and
oxygen, and work all at once."

It was a laborious task, passing eighty to a hundred pages of highly
technical print each day. Then there was the index, between six and
seven thousand items. "I have," so he writes, "to change every item in
the old index and add others. I have a pile of pages, 826 in all. I
look at the index, find the old page among the 826, and then change the
number. This about 7000 times, so you may guess the drudgery." On July