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FOREWORD
IT
is with great pleasure I accede to the request of Canon
Scott to write a foreword to his book.
I first heard of my friend and
comrade after the second battle of Ypres when he accompanied
his beloved Canadians to Bethune after their glorious
stand in that poisonous gap—which in my own mind
he immortalized in verse:-
O England
of our fathers, and England of our sons,
Above the roar of battling hosts, the thunder of the
guns,
A mother’s voice was calling us, we heard it
oversea,
The blood which thou didst give us, is the blood we
spill for thee.
Little did
I think when I first saw him that he could possibly,
at his time of life, bear the rough and tumble of the
heaviest fighting in history, and come through with
buoyancy of spirit younger men envied and older men
recognized as the sign and fruit of self-forgetfulness
and the inspiration and cheering of others.
Always
in the thick of the fighting, bearing almost a charmed
life, ignoring any suggestion that he should be posted
to a softer job “further back,” he held
on to the very end.
The
last time I saw him was in a hospital at Etaples badly
wounded, yet cheery as ever—having done his duty
nobly.
All the Canadians in France
knew him, and his devotion and fearlessness were known
all along the line, and his poems will, I am bold to
prophesy, last longer in the ages to come than most
of the histories of the war.
I feel sure that his book—if
anything like himself—will interest and inspire
all who read it.
LLEWELLYN
H. GWYNNE.
Bishop
of Khartoum,
Deputy Chaplain General
To the C. of E. Chaplains
in France. [Page 9]
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