Rilla of Ingleside

No,' said Gertrude, more bitterly still. 'It's true I haven't lost a husband--I have only lost the man who would have been my husband. I have lost no son--only the sons and daughters who might have been born to me--who will never be born to me now.'

The poem was a short, poignant little thing. In a month it had carried Walter's name to every corner of the globe. Everywhere it was copied-- in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies--in profound reviews and "agony columns," in Red Cross appeals and Government recruiting propaganda. Mothers and sisters wept over it, young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the mighty conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses. A Canadian lad in the Flanders trenches had written the one great poem of the war. "The Piper," by Pte. Walter Blythe, was a classic from its first printing.

In May Walter wrote home that he had been awarded a D.C. Medal