Ourselves we set the light, and know it wise,
(Seek not, O faint of heart, our hands to stay),
That, phoenix-like, a nobler world may rise
From out the ashes of a dead to-day.
Belief in a divinity that is shaping the rough-hewn brutalities of war to beneficent ends breaks as clearly from 'The Shrine,' one of Eugene Crombie's poems:
...Returning through the woods at evening's hour
I lay before Thy shrine my offering,
My candle-flame a yellow crocus flower,
Its life but newly lit, to Thee I bring,
In thanks that I can see Thy guiding hand
In every flower that decorates the land.
He wrote this at his billet in France shortly before he marched out to the attack in which he fell. Surely, it is more wonderful that he, and others with him, could hold by such faith there, where the vast menace of death was close about them, than that the saint of old, in no immediate peril, should be able to say, 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.'
Eugene Crombie was the only son of J. W. Crombie, who for sixteen years was Member of Parliament for Kincardineshire. From Summersfields School he went to Winchester, and but for the out-
