Acland would have met his unnamed school chum while attending Upper Canada College. The autumn after graduation, he began the first of what would be five directionless years at University College, University of Toronto, “either reading assiduously on courses [he] was not taking, or else not reading at all.”5 The deputy minister’s son began a literary journal at the university titled Arbor, dabbled in verse, some of which was published, and earned a bit of money through occasional work at the Globe and the Ottawa Free Press. Graduation, which was unavoidable, came in May of 1913, with Acland receiving honours in Modern History.
The previous month had seen one of his poems appear in The Canadian Magazine:
Spring in the Foothills6
Ride! Ride!
For the Winter snows have run
From their foe, the April sun,
And the roses rise in pride on the grassy mountain side,
(Then ride!)
Where the echo of my shout
Comes a-rolling round about,
As if winding on his horn had young Spring himself replied.
Ride! Ride!
For the timid calves are bawling,
And the antelopes are calling,
And each buck to each doe has cried that Winter at last has died.
(Then ride!)
When the scented winds blow strong,
And the old Earth-love calls long,
Swiftly leap into your saddle and westward, westward ride!
Peregrine Palmer Acland. This photograph was likely taken in Toronto prior to the September 1914 departure of the 1st Canadian Division. (Photo courtesy of the 48th Highlanders Museum, Toronto)
As if heeding his own advice, Acland soon set off for British Columbia to assume the editor’s position at the Prince Rupert Daily News. The tenure was short, though he did leave his mark: the paper became more attractive, news coverage increased, and there was a new focus on things literary. As the third month drew to a close, Acland resigned and trekked across British Columbia until he met the then-unfinished Grand Trunk Railway line, where he caught the first in a series of trains that would take him to his parents’ Ottawa home. Once back in the capital he embarked on a civil service career as a clerk in the Department of Finance.
Nine months later came the Great War.
Acland’s service record is one of extraordinary activity and advancement. He enlisted as a private in the Queen’s Own Rifles in Ottawa on September 19, 1914, and within three days was in Val Cartier, Quebec. Two weeks later, newly commissioned as a lieutenant in Toronto’s 48th Highlanders, the young officer was bound for Plymouth, England, aboard the SS Megantic as part of the largest convoy to then cross the Atlantic, carrying the 30,617 men of the 1st Canadian Contingent.
Acland wrote of the beginning of his Atlantic crossing in “With the Highlanders En Route to England.” Published in the October 6, 1914, edition of The Globe, while the ship was at sea, it is very much a document of another age, and a striking example of the Canadian military’s early amateurism; the article reveals operational details concerning not only the date of departure, but also which ship contained the divisional ammunition column, as well as the field and clearing hospitals — a tidy bit of information for an ambitious U-boat captain. Such a disclosure today would likely lead to court-marshal.
While “With the Highlanders En Route to England” and Acland’s personal diary of the crossing hold great value to military historians, the most significant writing he produced aboard the SS Megantic came in the form of a fifty-two-line poem:
The Reveille of Romance
Regret no more the age of arms,
Nor sigh “Romance is dead,”
Out of life’s dull and dreary maze
Romance has raised her head.
Now at her golden clarion call
The sword salutes the sun;
The bayonet glitters from its sheath
To deck the deadly gun;
The tramp of horse is heard afar
And down the autumn wind
The shrapnel shrieks of sudden doom
To which brave eyes are blind.
The Reveille of Romance was printed as an eight-page chapbook, likely by Acland’s family, for private distribution. The poet John Masefield sent Acland an encouraging note on receiving a copy, hoping he would find it “profitable to write more.”7 The Canadian poet and writer E.W. Thomson, himself a veteran of both the American Civil War and the Fenian Raids, wrote to congratulate Acland’s father on his son’s achievement. Alfred Noyes8 also wrote approvingly, and recalled a poetry reading Acland attended at the home of Duncan Campbell Scott.
The first they would have seen of the poem came in the February 27, 1915, edition of the Globe, four months after Acland had disembarked from the Megantic. It would then be reprinted in the Canadian Military Gazette on June 27, 1915, with the “remarkable poem” generating such interest that the publication was obliged to provide some brief biographic details of the young soldier-poet in a subsequent issue.
Reading the poem today within the context of the great anti-war poems that came after, one is tempted to dismiss it as emblematic of the high-spirited, patriotic verse that appeared in newspapers and periodicals the world over, particularly in the early years of the war. Yet, in giving the presidential address to the Royal Society of Canada in 1918, Canadian Poets of the Great War anthologist W.D. Lighthall9 includes Peregrine Acland’s poem in a discussion alongside the work of John McCrae and Bernard Freeman Trotter. “The Reveille of Romance” he said, showed “the spirit of high resolve and the imaginative outlook which actuated those who sprang to arms at the first call.”10
At the time Acland’s poem was being read by the public, the lieutenant had already endured a rainy autumn training in the mud of Salisbury Plain, a miserable experience that was relieved by occasional trips to London on weekend furlough. He would later recall one memorable visit to George Bernard Shaw’s home in Adelphi Terrace. Acland, who had “been more strongly influenced by the Third Act of ‘Man and Superman’ than by anything else in literature except the Sermon on the Mount,”11 was not disappointed:
As I gave him a little Irish blarney about being able to die happy now that I had seen him, he soon dropped his mask and treated me quite humanely. His pose, icy and with a shade of the sneer about it, damages him, though he assumes it as a protection. It is as incongruous as the comic mask on the face of tragedy. I have seen no eyes which can show greater depth of feeling than do his on occasion, and for all his flippancy, I have met no one who realizes more intensely the essential horror of war and who yet so vigorously appreciates the necessity of fighting our way out of it.12
The beginning of 1915 brought disappointment when Acland was sent to Weymouth to supervise training with the 3rd Wiltshires, the depot and training battalion for the Moonrakers, as they were nicknamed, rather than being sent to France with the rest of the 15th Battalion (48th Highlanders). As a result, he was still in Weymouth when word came in April of the German gas attack at Ypres. “From this none of the junior officers of the Fifteenth Battalion (48th Highlanders) came out undamaged,” he wrote in the war’s dying days, “and very few came out at all, on our side of No Man’s Land. Nineteen officers out of twenty-one and 670 men out 1,000 represented the loss of that unit alone.”13
Acland