I gathered that his stock among men of all ranks had been climbing steadily from the first days when many of them, including myself, felt that he was out of his own element in a rip-roaring regiment. As the regiment’s laureate, they all knew him and they knew, too, that he was at work on a history of the regiment. He had become quite an institution, with his arms full of maps as they used to be full of minor poetry, and his mouth full of that imperishable pipe. They all knew his verse. I found any number of men who had only to fish around in their tattered blouses to bring out the copy of a poem Kilmer wrote in memory of some of their number who were killed by a shell in March. You see that there is a refrain which calls for bugle notes, and I am told that at the funeral services, where the lines were first read, the desperately sad notes of “Taps” sounded faintly from a distant grave when the refrain invoked them. The lines were read by Joyce’s own beloved Father Duffy, and those who were there told me the tears streamed down the face of every boy in the regiment. They just blubbered. VIII Indeed, such was the power of his spirit over other men that even now he has become a legend, his excellence a popular heritage, benefiting and enriching human life. Writing with the pen of all those who knew him in his overcoat of glory and debonair hat, his friend Charles Willis Thompson says: “I had a great affection and a deep admiration and respect for him, different from that which I had for anybody else I knew.” And expressing, I think, the heart of innumerable ones who did not chance his way, Booth Tarkington says: “But I had a sense of him as of something fine and of fine promise. I haven’t read much that he wrote; but it was like knowing that there was a good picture somewhere in a gallery that I hadn’t visited, but might, some day.” The full beauty of his life is known only to God. As religion was the first thing in his life let it be the last thing said of him. In one of his last letters, he wrote to Sister M. Emerentia of St. Joseph’s College, Toronto, Ontario: “Pray that I may love God more. It seems to me that if I can learn to love God more passionately, more constantly, without distractions, that absolutely nothing else can matter. Except while we are in the trenches I receive Holy Communion every morning, so it ought to be all the easier for me to attain this object of my prayers. I got Faith, you know, by praying for it. I hope to get Love the same way.” POEMS FROM FRANCE ROUGE BOUQUET