Page:In Flanders Fields and Other Poems.djvu/141

And the New at the side. The father and the eldest brother carried the box along the shovelled path. The mother close behind was followed by the two families. The snow was falling heavily. At the grave John Eckford read a psalm, and prayed, "that they might be enabled to believe, the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting unto them that fear Him."

John McCrae himself was an indefatigable church-goer. There is a note in childish characters written from Edinburgh in his thirteenth year, "On Sabbath went to service four times." There the statement stands in all its austerity. A letter from a chaplain is extant in which a certain mild wonder is expressed at the regularity in attendance of an officer of field rank. To his sure taste in poetry the hymns were a sore trial. "Only forty minutes are allowed for the service," he said, "and it is sad to see them 'snappit up' by these poor bald four-line things."

On Easter Sunday, 1915, he wrote: "We had a church parade this morning, the first since we arrived in France. Truly, if the dead rise not, we are of all men the most miserable." On the funeral service of a friend he remarks: "'Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God,'—what a summary of the whole thing that is!" On many occasions he officiated in the absence of the chaplains who in those days would have as many as six services a day. In civil life in [117]