Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/324

264 in phrase, as the poems they involuntarily interpret.

One of the first of Canada's soldier poets to fall in the war was Sergeant Frank Brown, and one of the last was Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. Frank Brown, a sergeant of the 'Princess Pat's Regiment,' was the son of an Ontario clergyman, and had been a schoolmaster in the Quebec district. But he had spent some of his life before that in Western Canada and was a good horseman and an expert shot. He crossed to France with the first draft of his regiment, and was shot at St. Eloi, in February 1915, on his first day in the trenches. His homely, hearty, soldierly rhymes, with their glowing loyalty to the Empire, a ready sense of the humours and the hardships of campaigning, and the glory of fighting against tyranny and wrong, are the simplest, clearest expression of his native courage and honour and sterling manhood. There is in 'The Call' and 'The Convoy' the heart-beat of that love of her sons for the homeland which stirred all Canada, as it had stirred all