Will you see it tonight over the maple grove ? `` I 'm enclosing a little scrap of verse , Rilla . I wrote it one evening in my trench dug-out by the light of a bit of candle -- or rather it came to me there -- I did n't feel as if I were writing it -- something seemed to use me as an instrument . I 've had that feeling once or twice before , but very rarely and never so strongly as this time . That was why I sent it over to the London Spectator . It printed it and the copy came today . I hope you 'll like it . It 's the only poem I 've written since I came overseas . '' 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 . Rilla copied it in her diary at the beginning of an entry in which she poured out the story of the hard week that had just passed . `` It has been such a dreadful week , '' she wrote , `` and even though it is over and we know that it was all a mistake that does not seem to do away with the bruises left by it . And yet it has in some ways been a very wonderful week and I have had some glimpses of things I never realized before -- of how fine and brave people can be even in the midst of horrible suffering . I am sure I could never be as splendid as Miss Oliver was . `` Just a week ago today she had a letter from Mr. Grant 's mother in Charlottetown .
And it told her that a cable had just come saying that Major Robert XXXXX had been killed in action a few days before .
Blythe Canadian Charlottetown Cross Grant Piper Pte. Walter dailies first