over the areas that were being shelled, it came to my mind. I would shoulder the box and "go to it."' The tragic misery of war could not shake his dogged resolve though it could rob him of his youth and all his gaiety and reduce him almost to despair. '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.'
It was with some dark forefeeling of this mood upon him that, in April 1915, with the second titanic battle of Ypres raging around him, 'the enemy in full cry of victory,' and Paris and the Channel ports apparently doomed, he wrote 'In Flanders Fields':
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 fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
