institution of the old land system. Russia in the throes of her struggle for life is not likely to accept a tyranny which takes from her the only substantial results of the agony she has endured the possession of the land and the institution of the local Soviet. In the ultimate she must be left to work out her own redemption or destruction. Meanwhile, those neighboring countries which are not prepared to accept Lenine's philosophy should surely be permitted to clear their borders of insurgent Bolsheviki without interference. Personally, I can see no reason why a food mission should not have been dispatched to Moscow and to Petrograd. At the present moment the only chance of obtaining a morsel of food is to become a Bolshevist official. The knowledge that an antiBolshevist might have a chance of sat

The New Witness

isfying his hunger would do much to restore sanity to a nerve-stricken people. This, at least, is the considered opinion of a number of men who, imprisoned in the Kremlin at Moscow, eventually made their escape to Warsaw where I met and interviewed them. They told me very many terrible things which do not come within the scope of this article, but an impression of Lenine by a Pole who had endured eighteen months' imprisonment, I reproduce: 'I was walking between two warders in the yard where I took my daily breath of air, when for the first time during my imprisonment I saw Lenine. He passed me like a bloody shadow; and stood, gazing at dying Moscow at his feet.'

The revolution and the man which will survive the other?

Or the two treaties laid upon the table of the House of Commons on Thursday by Mr. Lloyd George, one at any rate will receive almost unanimous approval throughout the United Kingdom. That England must stand by France has happily become one of the root principles of our national policy. The purpose of the Anglo-French Treaty is to give effect to that principle, and the only criticism to which the authors of the treaty are liable is

that they have made the compact between England and France contingent on the negotiation of a similar compact between America and France.

There is good reason to hope that this defect will prove to be one of form rather than one of substance. It is almost inconceivable that the United States Congress should refuse to accept an obligation to come to the help of France in the event of any unprovoked movement of aggression against

her being made by Germany.' Nevertheless, the provision in the treaty that it is only to be binding on Great Britain if the United States enters into a similar obligation is hardly consistent with the dignity of the British Empire, and still less with the spirit that animates Englishmen in their attitude toward France. We have learned in this long war that the fortunes of France and England are indissolubly united. Even if Germany had not forced us into war on August 4 by the invasion of Belgium, whom we were pledged by treaty to defend, we should have been compelled by the logic of facts within a very few weeks to come to the help of France- though possibly then our help would have been too late.

The lesson has been learned. We now all understand what only a few of us realized before, that the integrity of France is as important to us, from the point of view of our own national security, as the integrity of Belgium, and, therefore, France may be suretreaty or no treaty that if she is wantonly attacked by Germany she will be whole-heartedly helped by England. It would have been more in accord with the traditions of our national diplomacy if the representatives of Great Britain in Paris had framed the treaty on this fundamental fact instead of waiting for the endorsement of another nation separated by three thousand miles of water from the possible scene of action.

If it be asked why the permanent identity of the interests of France and England should now be assumed in face of the fact that in past centuries we were repeatedly at war with one another, the broad answer is that the movement of world forces has created for both of us common perils which are greater than any possible mutual differences. During the later centuries

when we fought with one another, France to a large extent dominated the continent of Europe; her population was immensely larger than ours; her natural resources at least as great. We had, therefore, good reason to fear not merely that she might block our commercial development, but that she might even threaten our national independence. Before the thrones of England and Scotland were united France repeatedly aided Scotland against England; later she aided the Stuart refugees in their conspiracies against the legal sovereigns of Great Britain. These dangers are past; the old rivalry is over; we have each of us grown sufficiently assured of prosperity to be free from the folly of coveting one another's possessions.

Simultaneously we have found ourselves both subject to the envious designs of others. The late war, in its broadest aspects, was a war of the 'have-nots' against the 'haves.' Germany wished to gain at a blow the assured position that England and France had slowly won. She hoped to make herself mistress of the world upon the ruins of their power. That danger may possibly recur. It is true that the military power of Germany is for the moment destroyed; but in spite of the elaborate provisions of the Peace Treaty we do not know how soon it may be renewed. There still remain within the frontiers of the German Empire some seventy million people, as against forty million in France and about forty-five million in the United Kingdom, including in the last figure perhaps a couple of million Sinn Fein friends of Germany.

But we have to look beyond Germany. It is conceivable that the future danger lies farther east. The most satisfactory circumstance of the past ten years or so is the steady decline of the German birth rate. Even before the

war the German people had definitely abandoned the practice of reckless breeding which is characteristic of the lower races throughout the animated world, and it is quite possible that if their minds had not been inflamed by a deliberate pan-German propaganda they would have realized that they had no sufficient racial motive for embarking on a war of aggression. During the war the German population has declined heavily, and there is at least a possibility that it will continue to decline. In that event we may, perhaps a generation hence, find Germany on the side of France and England seeking a higher civilization instead of following the barbarian instinct of racial warfare.

But beyond the Germans lie other peoples the Slavs of Russia, the semi-barbarian hordes of Central Asia, the numberless millions of the Far East. We do not know how the world will shape itself in the future; but we

The Sunday Times, August 6

do know that as nations grow in refinement and civilization they are ever liable to attack from the overflowing masses of less highly developed and more prolific races. Until all races advance far enough to understand that progress is irreconcilable with unlimited increase of numbers, the only way in which the higher races can protect themselves is by joint action.

That is the final basis of the AngloFrench Alliance. It is an alliance based upon the material necessity for mutual protection. Happily, it is also based upon spiritual kinship. Englishmen and Frenchmen look upon the world with the same eyes; their ideals are common; and the very fact that their temperaments are partially dissimilar creates the appreciation which springs from variety. To a arge extent each supplies what the other lacks. At any rate that is our English view of our French Allies, and treaty or no treaty we shall stand by them.

THE AUTHOR OF 'IN FLAN

DERS FIELDS'

AMONG the war poems directly inspired by contact with its realities few have attained a wider circulation than 'In Flanders Fields.' The lines, first printed in Punch of December 8, 1915, may be quoted for the benefit of those who have not read them, as they form the keynote of Sir Andrew Macphail's admirable and affecting study of his friend and colleague:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row

That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The lines "The Anxious Dead,' which appeared in the Spectator of June 30, 1917, are a variation on the same theme. 'In Flanders Fields,' to quote the words of Major-General Morrison, who commanded the Brigade to which McCrae was attached at the time,

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 of 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 the battle, he and I watched them burying their dead whenever there was a lull. Thus the crosses, row on row, grew into a goodsized cemetery. Just as he describes, we often heard 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.

The unit with which McCrae served was the most advanced of all the Allies' guns by a good deal, except one French battery, which stayed in a position yet more advanced for two days, and then had to be taken out. After ‘seventeen days of Hades,' in which none of them had their clothes off, in which gun and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds, the Brigade was moved out on May 9. On June 9 McCrae was posted to No. 3 General Hospital at Boulogne, and placed in charge of medicine with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. There he remained till his death from pneumonia on January 28, 1918, only a few days after his appointment as Consulting Physician to the British armies in France. Thus, as Sir Andrew Macphail says,

John McCrae witnessed only once the raw earth of Flanders hide its shame in the warm scarlet glory of the poppy. Others have watched this resurrection of the flowers in four successive seasons, a fresh miracle every time it occurs. Also they have observed the rows of crosses lengthen, the torch thrown, caught, and carried to victory. The dead may sleep. We have not broken faith with them. It is little wonder then that 'In Flanders Fields' has become the poem of the army. The soldiers have learned it with their hearts, which is quite a different thing from committing it to memory. It circulates, as a song should circulate, by the living word of mouth, not by printed characters. That is the true test of poetry - its insistence on making itself learned by heart. . . . If there was nothing remarkable about the publication of 'In Flanders Fields' there was something momentous in the moment of writing it. And yet it was a sure instinct which prompted the writer to send it to Punch. A rational man wishes to know the news of the world in which he lives; and if he is interested in life, he is eager to know how

men feel and comport themselves among the events which are passing. For this purpose Punch is the great newspaper of the world, and these lines describe better than any other how men felt in that great moment. It was in April, 1915. The enemy was in the full cry of victory. All that remained for him was to occupy Paris, as once he did before, and to seize the channel ports. Then France, England, and the world were doomed.

John McCrae, born in 1872, came of Scots stock on both sides. His early years were spent on his father's farm in Guelph, Ontario. He gained a scholarship at the University of Ontario in 1888, joined the Faculty of Arts, took the honors course in natural sciences, graduating from the department of biology in 1894. Then, turning to medicine, he graduated again in 1898 with a gold medal and a scholarship in physiology and Pathology. He was successively attached to the resident staff at a Children's Hospital at Mount Airy, Maryland, the Toronto General Hospital, and at Johns Hopkins University. Then he came to McGill University at Montreal as Fellow in Pathology, pathologist to the Montreal General Hospital, and later on as lecturer in medicine in the University. He became a F.R.C.P. (London) by examination, and won other distinctions. But though medicine was the main concern of his life, and though he studied and practised it for twenty years with great assiduity and success, he 'never developed, or degenerated, into the type of the pure scientist. For the laboratory he had neither the mind nor the hands.' He studied 'not medicine alone, but all the subjects ancillary to the science, and came to the task with a mind braced by a sound and generous education.' He never refused any work that was given him to do. Writing on the close of the Second Battle of Ypres, all he says of his own

share is: 'I have done what fell to hand.' He was of no party; but the friend of all men and the confidant of many; and he never neglected the opportunity of consorting with those who write and paint. The lore and art of angling, acquired in an early visit to Scotland, never left him. Furthermore, either in esse or in posse, he had 'always been going to the wars.' By his father - who when over seventy years of age raised and trained a field battery in Guelph and brought it overseas, and who had for many years commanded a field battery in the Canadian Militia- he had been early nourished in the history of the Highland regiments. At fourteen he joined the Guelph Highland Cadets and rose to the rank of First Lieutenant. Subsequently, he transferred to the artillery, and served with distinction as a combatant officer in the South African War, rising to the rank of Major. In Flanders, though he was attached as Medical Officer to the 1st Brigade of Artillery, he could not forget that he was no longer a gunner, and 'in those tumultuous days he was often to be found in the observation post rather than in his dressing station.' He went to the war without illusions, and after his service at the front his old gayety never returned. He had been profoundly moved, and 'bore in his body until the end the signs of his experience.' Yet in August, 1915, he wrote from his hospital post: 'I expect to wish often that I had stuck to the artillery.' He was at all times mindful of the noble message from his mother to which he refers in a letter after the worst of the ordeal was over:

On the eve of the battle of Ypres I was indebted to you for a letter which said, 'take good care of my son Jack; but I would not have you unmindful that, sometimes, when we save we lose.' I have that last happy phrase to thank. Often when I had to go out over the areas that were being shelled, it came into my mind.