Darling, Robert Clifford
Flags across the city flew at half-mast. The overflow crowd at St. James Presbyterian Church on Gerrard St. included the lieutenant-governor of Ontario, provincial cabinet ministers and Toronto’s mayor and city council. Tens of thousands of people gathered outside the church and lined Yonge St. as the funeral procession headed north to Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
It was May 6, 1915. The man in the oak casket was Capt. Robert Clifford Darling, an adjutant with the 48th Highlanders for the past eight years. Six weeks earlier, he was crawling along a field behind the trenches near Neuve Chapelle, France, when he was shot through the lung. He was taken to a private hospital in London, where his condition worsened — he suffered two hemorrhages and his wound became septic. Surgeons, including the famous Sir William Osler, treated him, to no avail. With his wife, Phyllis, at his bedside, he succumbed on the night of April 19.
Darling was 27, a graduate of Royal Military College and “one of the most popular and efficient officers of the city,” according to the Star. He had the 48th Highlanders crest tattooed on his left arm. He was one of the first officers to volunteer for service; he married Phyllis right before he shipped out to Valcartier, Que., for training. He was eulogized as a “gallant soldier, winsome companion, constant friend; a man of stainless honour and with all that life held opening before him in hope and charm.”
Darling was not the first Toronto soldier to fall in battle, nor the highest ranking. And the circumstances of his death were not regarded as particularly heroic. But in the days after he died, the battle of Ypres claimed 6,000 Canadian lives, with many of the dead from Toronto. As Darling’s body made its journey home on the Transylvania steamship, newspapers began reporting soldiers’ accounts of the horrors at Ypres, and the scope of the devastation became clear.
It was unheard of for a soldier killed in war to be brought home for burial, but Darling came from a wealthy and wellconnected family. His funeral offered an unprecedented occasion for a city reeling from the shock of Ypres to unite in public mourning.
First a private ceremony was held in Darling’s father’s home on Dale Ave., overlooking the Rosedale ravine. So many flowers were sent that two carriages were needed to take them to the church. There was no shortage of ceremony, from the lone piper playing a lament, to the church organ draped in black, to Darling’s riderless horse, Paddy, following the casket up Yonge St. The funeral procession was said to be nearly a mile long. Rev. Andrew Robertson noted the larger symbolism: in his sermon, he told the mourners their gathering was “in some sense representative of a great nation suddenly thrust from the verge of the world travail into the very heart of its agony and loss.
“Around us in our service today there gathers a shadowy army of the dead, fallen in distant battlegrounds, who can never come back to lay themselves to rest in the kindly soil of this Dominion of ours,” he said. “Where they fell in the rush of the conflict, those gallant sons of Canada, they must lie — for a time, at least, if not until the day on which the trumpet shall sound — and it is not possible for us to keep them out of mind even if we should want to do so. They are our dead — Clifford Darling’s comrades in battle and blood, and with him fallen in glorious sacrifice for the great cause.”