when he accomplished the navigation of the Northwest Passage during
1903-6.

The opening years of the second decade of the twentieth century,
however, had not been without their toll of the Empire makers in
Canada. Just before the Great War broke on an unsuspecting Dominion,
Lord Strathcona passed away in his 94th year. From an apprentice clerk
in Hudson's Bay Company he had passed from honour to honour until his
death, when he was High Commissioner for Canada in London. Not many
months later he was followed by the last surviving Father of
Confederation, Sir Charles Tupper, who had preceded him in the office.
Both of these pioneers in Canadian life wielded an influence very far
reaching in the interests of the British Empire.

At the outbreak of the war similar losses in Canadian public life
passed without much notice in the stress and strain of the struggle to
which Canada was to devote herself during the ensuing years.

The prompt action of Sir Sam Hughes, the Minister of Militia, the
sending of 400,000 men overseas to fight the great fight, the seemingly
never-ending battles of Ypres, St. Julien, Festubert, Givenchy, St.
Eloi, Sanctuary Wood, Vimy Ridge, Loos, Hill 70, Courcelette,
Passchendaele, and the Somme, under General Lord Byng and General Sir
Arthur Currie, appear too vivid in the mind as yet to be regarded as
history.

{466}

Something of the spirit of the Canadians in sharing the common
sacrifice is reflected in the beautiful though poignant lines of
Colonel Macrae of the Canadian Army Medical Corps, who himself made the
supreme sacrifice in one of the early engagements of 1915:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Beneath 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 falling hands, we throw
The torch. Be yours to lift it high!
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies blow
In Flanders fields.

As for those at home, now that the war has passed into the ages-long
annals of the Empire, no words can express their thoughts better than
those of Laurence Binyon at the entrance of the British Museum in
London, England:

They shall grow not old
As we tha