Such, then, was the life in Flanders fields in which the verse was born.
This is no mere surmise. There is a letter from Major-General
E. W. B. Morrison, C.B., C.M.G., D.S.O., who commanded the Brigade
at the time, which is quite explicit. "This poem," General Morrison writes,
"was literally born of fire and blood during the hottest phase
of the second battle of Ypres. My headquarters were in a trench
on the top of the bank of the Ypres Canal, and John had his dressing station
in a hole dug in the foot of the bank. During periods in the battle
men who were shot actually rolled down the bank into his dressing station.
Along from us a few hundred yards was the headquarters of a regiment,
and many times during the sixteen days of battle, he and I watched them
burying their dead whenever there was a lull. Thus the crosses, row on row,
grew into a good-sized cemetery. Just as he describes, we often heard
in the mornings the larks singing high in the air, between the crash
of the shell and the reports of the guns in the battery just beside us.
I have a letter from him in which he mentions having written the poem
to pass away the time between the arrival of batches of wounded,
and partly as an experiment with several varieties of poetic metre. I have
a sketch of the scene, taken at the time, including his dressing station;
and during our operations at Passchendaele last November,
I found time to make a sketch of the scene of the crosses, row on row,
from which he derived his inspiration."
The last letter from the Front is dated June 1st, 1915. Upon that day
he was posted to No. 3 General Hospital at Boulogne, and placed in charge
of medicine with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel as of date 17th April, 1915.
Here he remained until the day of his death on January 28th, 1918.
