Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/326

266 Colonel John McCrae, who has written his name imperishably in Canada's military and literary annals. He had studied and practised medicine for twenty years, and between serving as resident house officer and later as physician at various hospitals, went to South Africa in 1900 and fought throughout the Boer war as a private in the Canadian contingent. At the outbreak of the war with Germany he was on a visit to England, and wrote home saying he had immediately cabled to Ottawa that 'I am available either as combatant or medical if they need me. I do not go into it very light-heartedly, but I think it is up to me.' In the general upheaval and uncertainty of those days there was some little delay in accepting his offer, but presently he had a cable from Colonel Morrison provisionally appointing him surgeon to the 1st Brigade Artillery; and sailed for Canada on the 28th August, and within a few weeks was at the front.

The letters in McCrae 's posthumous volume, In Flanders Fields, give most vivid realistic impressions of his life under