Part 13 (2/2)
3 with their officers; the rank and file of No. 14 with their officers; all officers from the Base, with Major-General Wilberforce and the Deputy Directors to complete.
It was a springtime day, and those who have pa.s.sed all those winters in France and in Flanders will know how lovely the springtime may be. So we may leave him, ”on this sunny slope, facing the sunset and the sea.” These are the words used by one of the nurses in a letter to a friend,--those women from whom no heart is hid. She also adds: ”The nurses lamented that he became unconscious so quickly they could not tell him how much they cared. To the funeral all came as we did, because we loved him so.”
At first there was the hush of grief and the silence of sudden shock.
Then there was an outbreak of eulogy, of apprais.e.m.e.nt, and sorrow. No attempt shall be made to reproduce it here; but one or two voices may be recorded in so far as in disjointed words they speak for all. Stephen Leac.o.c.k, for those who write, tells of his high vitality and splendid vigour--his career of honour and marked distinction--his life filled with honourable endeavour and instinct with the sense of duty--a sane and equable temperament--whatever he did, filled with sure purpose and swift conviction.
Dr. A. D. Blackader, acting Dean of the Medical Faculty of McGill University, himself speaking from out of the shadow, thus appraises his worth: ”As a teacher, trusted and beloved; as a colleague, sincere and cordial; as a physician, faithful, cheerful, kind. An unkind word he never uttered.” Oskar Klotz, himself a student, testifies that the relations.h.i.+p was essentially one of master and pupil. From the head of his first department at McGill, Professor, now Colonel, Adami, comes the weighty phrase, that he was sound in diagnosis; as a teacher inspiring; that few could rise to his high level of service.
There is yet a deeper aspect of this character with which we are concerned; but I shrink from making the exposition, fearing lest with my heavy literary tread I might destroy more than I should discover. When one stands by the holy place wherein dwells a dead friend's soul--the word would slip out at last--it becomes him to take off the shoes from off his feet. But fortunately the dilemma does not arise. The task has already been performed by one who by G.o.d has been endowed with the religious sense, and by nature enriched with the gift of expression; one who in his high calling has long been acquainted with the grief of others, and is now himself a man of sorrow, having seen with understanding eyes,
These great days range like tides, And leave our dead on every sh.o.r.e.
On February 14th, 1918, a Memorial Service was held in the Royal Victoria College. Princ.i.p.al Sir William Peterson presided. John Macnaughton gave the address in his own lovely and inimitable words, to commemorate one whom he lamented, ”so young and strong, in the prime of life, in the full ripeness of his fine powers, his season of fruit and flower bearing. He never lost the simple faith of his childhood. He was so sure about the main things, the vast things, the indispensable things, of which all formulated faiths are but a more or less stammering expression, that he was content with the rough embodiment in which his ancestors had laboured to bring those great realities to bear as beneficent and propulsive forces upon their own and their children's minds and consciences. His instinctive faith sufficed him.”
To his own students John McCrae once quoted the legend from a picture, to him ”the most suggestive picture in the world”: What I spent I had: what I saved I lost: what I gave I have;--and he added: ”It will be in your power every day to store up for yourselves treasures that will come back to you in the consciousness of duty well done, of kind acts performed, things that having given away freely you yet possess. It has often seemed to me that when in the Judgement those surprised faces look up and say, Lord, when saw we Thee an' hungered and fed Thee; or thirsty and gave Thee drink; a stranger, and took Thee in; naked and clothed Thee; and there meets them that warrant-royal of all charity, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of the least of these, ye have done it unto Me, there will be amongst those awed ones many a pract.i.tioner of medicine.”
And finally I shall conclude this task to which I have set a worn but willing hand, by using again the words which once I used before: Beyond all consideration of his intellectual attainments John McCrae was the well beloved of his friends. He will be missed in his place; and wherever his companions a.s.semble there will be for them a new poignancy in the Miltonic phrase,
But O the heavy change, now thou art gone, Now thou art gone, and never must return!
London,
11th November, 1918.
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