Service served during World War I; he was a British subject, and worked as an ambulance driver for the Canadian Red Cross, as well as working as a war correspondent for the Canadian government. He wrote a number of poems about the war, many appearing in a new book, The Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man, in 1916. Some of these, along with his earlier "The March of the Dead" about the Boer War, were put to music and compiled into the anti-war album War, War, War by "Country" Joe McDonald in 1971. Many of Service's poems celebrated duty to country in war, and although he often pointed out the sacrifice of the common soldier in war, he could not be considered an "anti-war" writer. His brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, was killed in action in France in August 1916. [6]