Walter Cuthbert Blythe is a fictional character in Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series of novels.
Walter appears briefly and is also frequently alluded to in the final volume of the series, The Blythes Are Quoted (book 9, completed in 1942 but not published until 2009), in which several of his poems are printed in full and discussed by members of his family.
Walter and his siblings (along with the Meredith children who lived in the neighbouring house) spent many hours playing in a hollow called Rainbow Valley, which was located near Ingleside.
It was there that Walter had a prophetic vision of World War I, daydreaming of (and later insisting that he actually saw) a Piper who used the call of his pipe to sweep the children away.
He later survived a serious bout with typhoid that left him in a weakened state; after he recovered, he spent two years as a school teacher in the village of Lowbridge, P.E.I.
He resigned from this position in the spring of 1914, with the intention of pursuing a bachelor's degree at Redmond College in Kingsport, Nova Scotia.
While there, Walter increasingly felt pressure from all sides to enroll in the army, and was anonymously sent a white feather (a symbol of cowardice) by someone at the college.
Though his status as a college man may have made it possible for him to enroll as an officer, he, like his college-educated brother Jem, joined as a regular serviceman and was assigned the rank of private.
Entitled "The Piper", and drawing in part upon his prophetic vision of World War I, Walter wrote his younger sister Rilla that "I didn't feel as if I were writing it – something seemed to use me as an instrument."
Everywhere it was copied -- in metropolitan dailies and little village weeklies, in profound reviews and "agony columns," in Red Cross appeals and Government recruiting propaganda.
Mothers and sisters wept over it, young lads thrilled to it, the whole great heart of humanity caught it up as an epitome of all the pain and hope and pity and purpose of the mighty conflict, crystallized in three brief immortal verses.
The moon was shining on his pillow through the bars of the leaded window... casting the shadow of a clearly defined cross on the wall above his head.
Notably, Montgomery's version has two stanzas, not three, and makes no mention of "keeping faith" as was said to be a central portion of Walter's poem.