The following article was first published on November 1, 2015.

We present Arthur Stringer’s Shadowed Victory as we observe Remembrance Day in Canada and many other countries on November 11. In some countries, Armistice Day is observed, while in the United States, November 11 marks Veterans Day.

Arthur John Stringer, novelist, screenwriter and poet, was born in 1874 in Cedar Springs, Ontario. He is best known as a writer of crime fiction, wilderness adventures, numerous film scripts, and several books of poetry. His best known blank-verse drama is Sappho in Leucadia. In 1914, he attained fame as the first Canadian poet to use free verse with his Open Water book of verse. Seven years before he died in 1950, he published Shadowed Victory, a blank-verse poem about Canada during World War I.

In the poem, Stringer paints the story of Hugh, the young man who rushes to join and go to war, and his friend Clyde, the young man who stays behind to work the farm on the prairie to feed the troops. Each fights the enemy presented to them; one “fighting the Hun” and the other fighting the drought and frost and the loss of his girl, Lynn, to the soldier. The war ends, but for Hugh, Clyde and Lynn, it is a shadowed victory.

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