`` By the time you get this they will be out , blowing there under that lovely rosy sky . Are they really as bright and golden as ever , Rilla ? It seems to me that they must be dyed red with blood -- like our poppies here . And every whisper of spring will be falling as a violet in Rainbow Valley . `` There is a young moon tonight -- a slender , silver , lovely thing hanging over these pits of torment . 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 XXXXX which she poured out the story of the hard week that had just passed .
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