where the soldiers soon had it by heart. It was a cry from the dead that reached the hearts of men and everywhere stiffened the determination not to break faith with those who had died but to take up the torch they had dropped and carry it, at all costs, through the long night into the day of victory. Not a great poem, yet no poem of the war made a more poignant or more powerful appeal to the minds and imaginations of the British and American peoples.
But even when the prolonged stress had told upon him at last, and he was weary and seemed despondent, McCrae did not despair nor doubt of the ultimate issue; behind his settled sadness was the dogged will and calm confidence that breathes through 'The Anxious Dead,' which he wrote in 1917, less than a year before his health was irrevocably shattered and he laid down his life:
O guns, fall silent till the dead men hear
Above their heads the legions pressing on:
(These fought their fight in time of bitter fear,
And died not knowing how the day had gone).
