Page images
PDF
EPUB

From this time on the glamour ceased. Silently the troopships slipped away, and one knew that they had started only when news came of their safe arrival. Valcartier was merely on the other side of Canada. We could visualize it. But the vast intricate organism of Salisbury Plain and Shorncliffe, which was absorbing countless thousands from all the world-wide supply-sources of the Empire - what could one make of that, here in this remote town on the edge of the Silent Places? Strange tales came to us, of chaotic conditions, of utter discomfort, of mud more bottomless than Alberta roads in springtime, of forced marches so strenuous that hundreds of men dropped in their tracks, of troops standing so long at attention that they fainted by scores. What was it all for, this apparent penalization of the men who had given themselves to their country? And rumors began to be rife that this unit or that unit had at last gone to the front. For a time we believed them believed them one day, to have them contradicted the next. But at last we learned that the only indubitable news from the front was in the casualty lists. It is a sad paradox, this - that your only means of knowing where your friend in a certain regiment is, is to know where his comrade was. And tomorrow your friend's name may be there, and you will cease to trace that regiment and some other eager watcher will profit by the information. Yes, the casualty lists began to come in, and here and there a father put a black band around his coat-sleeve or a mother or a wife quietly garbed herself in mourning. One woman had three sons at the front. One is dead now 'somewhere in France'; one is a prisoner in Germany; and one lies desperately ill in a foreign hospital. But why multiply examples? This is merely war with the glamour gone.

Meanwhile, as

Thousands speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest, begins the service of those who stand and wait. Social gayeties, involving expenditure for pleasure's sake, are discontinued. 'Pay' affairs, the profits of which are to go to one of the many funds, crop up on every hand. Knitting women are everywhere. They knit at concerts, at receptions, at dances, at lectures. Not Madame Defarge herself was more persistent in her vengeful task than are these women in their labor of love. If one is fated to lecture occasionally in their presence, these knitting women are a sort of challenge. "There!' they seem to say, 'I am not exactly throwing down a gauntlet, but at least I am taking up a sock. If you think that you have anything to say that would warrant me in taking my eyes from this sock and my thoughts from the one who is to wear it, you are welcome to make the attempt; but I cannot encourage you.' As to the results of this unceasing activity, they transcend the powers of the imagination. If one woman in her leisure moments can knit one sock in two days and if something more than fifty per cent of all the women who concern themselves about the war are thus engaged, how long will it take to knit enough socks to reach from Ypres to Berlin — but I am no mathematician! However, the letters that come from the trenches say that one pair of socks lasts only two days.

In any event, what really staggers the imagination is that these homely little things do actually find their way through the welter to the very one for whom they are intended. It is a curious thing, this intimacy between a fireside here in northwest Canada and a dugout or a trench somewhere in France. I sat at such a fireside the other day, and listened to a batch of let

ters from a dugout. The mother read them quietly, with only a little catch in her voice now and then. The boy - he is only eighteen-wrote, of course, of the usual things the long toil in the trenches, the scream of the shells, an occasional aeroplane battle overhead, the danger (so slightly touched!), the loss of a comrade. But the real charm of the letters lay in the simple little details of his daily routine: how, as he put it, he 'managed'; and it was this which brought the fireside and the dugout so close together. And then the mother, urged by these simple details, told how, each week, she sent a parcel: towels- there is a dearth of them at the front; half-worn suits of underclothing with washing almost impossible, it was easier for him to wear a cheap suit and throw it away; handkerchiefs his nose, he wrote her with boyish humor, was not recognized by the government. Into every parcel too went cookies and a bar of chocolate; and every little while a fruit-cake, warranted to mellow en route, started on its long journey to the dugout. The earlier letters, before these little extras began to arrive, were full of appeals for 'sweets'; the later, full of gratitude for just these favors. There was a curious pathos about these letters not in the language, for there was no sniveling in them; but unconsciously, in the picture which they evoked. Only eighteen, all boy yet, hailing the arrival of a pot of jam as an event; but somehow all man too, making light of the physical torture of the muddy trenches; glossing over the danger; ending every letter with an insistent 'Now please don't worry, mother!' And that mother sitting there, not knowing just where the boy was, content perforce with the hope that he was still somewhere, and following him into the awful welter with all these homely little things! Was not this what she had been doing, this

[blocks in formation]

Well, I suppose this tale of socks and underclothes and jam and chocolate is commonplace enough; but I confess that as I sat by the fireside and thought how many thousands of other firesides there were now just like that, I fell to wondering whether 'the nations at war' were not paying almost too large a price for 'discovering their souls.' I saw under that mother's restraint of manner, the desperate fear, every time she sent the homely little parcel, that the boy might not be there to receive and enjoy it. There was evidence of such a good citizen and such a good true man in those simple-hearted, manly, and thoughtful letters; and one of the multitudinous fragments of a blind shrapnel might have put an end to him while we sat there.

After all, any human life, and particularly any young life full of the promise of fine things, is a big thing to waste in the casual way in which war wastes it. I think that those of you who live in great cities cannot realize that quite as vividly as we do. A city of anywhere from half a million to two or three million inhabitants is conceived on too great a scale. Half a dozen men and women lose their lives in a tenementfire; you see their names in next morning's paper and in most cases neither their names nor the street they lived on means anything to you. Death has a way, for long years, of touching only the periphery of your experience. But with us in a little town, death is somehow a more intimate thing. If you do not know the man himself, you are fairly certain to know a relative of his, or at least to have some knowledge of the little circle in which he moved. Life is small enough for one to see every man in his relation to the community. And so I wonder if per

haps you drift more readily than we into conceiving of those men who die daily in France or Russia or the Balkans merely as pawns in the great game. Am I wrong in thinking that we see them more in their relation to a fireside somewhere, and to a civic life in which they might have played a useful part? No, I am afraid I am no longer capable of commercing with the skies, as I think of the war. More and more it is getting to mean to me nothing but a tragedy of thwarted lives.

But for those of us who only stand and wait, it is not all gray. There are stories of the heroism of 'our boys'that stir us beyond words stories, too, that change with astonishing abruptness our estimates of those whom we had too lightly regarded. There was a certain youth, for example, for whom I fear that I had had scant respect during his student life: a sickly fellow with rather a hang-dog air. He was out of his classes a good deal of the time and he was not successful in examinations. I believe that I suspected him of malingering. He tried to enlist and was turned down by the medical inspector, and tried again and yet again without success. How he ever got in, nobody could understand; but one day he went, and we shook our heads and prophesied that he would be incapacitated in a week or two. We heard no more of him until word came in letters from his friends that he had quietly picked up a smoking bomb and thrown it clear of the trench before it exploded, and then had climbed out in the face of the flying bullets and brought in a wounded comrade. And this was he who had only last year seemed such a fainthearted traveler along life's common way!

And, after many months, when the permanently invalided soldiers began to come back how the local newspapers recorded every stage of their long

railroad journey from Montreal westward! And how, when the train at last reached Edmonton, the mayor and the citizens and the regiments still in barracks crowded the platform to welcome them! Here was one who had been on the battle cruiser Isis in the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, had enlisted with the 'Princess Pats,' and had, as he cheerfully expressed it, 'got his' at Ypres. And this 'veteran' was still in his twenties! Here was another who had been shot in the nose, the bullet passing out at the back of his head. But he was 'none the worse' and his wrath at not being permitted to return to the trenches was still simmering. Shattered arms, shrapnel wounds in thigh or back or shoulders - these were trifles. They would tell you how they got them if you insisted; but they really wanted to talk about the bravery of this officer or that comrade who alas! would have no other epitaph. It was only those who had been 'gassed' who could not enjoy and reciprocate our enthusiasm. They, poor fellows, had to be shipped quietly away, and cared for in the hope that some day they would be themselves again.

Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy - how real they seem as we talk to these men who have been there! To have been there one's self in the closed chapter of leisurely travel before the war counts for nothing. The time has passed when names in Belgium and in northern France meant places. They mean deeds. They were static once. They are dynamic now. And you can see Ypres more vividly through a crude and incoherent narrative plus an empty sleeve than you can through all the skillful and well-ordered descriptions of the war correspondents. Curious how in this world-business one's geographical reach expands. We seem so far from everywhere, up here on the edge of the wilderness. We have to travel nearly a

thousand miles to reach the nearest 'metropolis,' and Winnipeg is provincial enough! Two years ago we seemed utterly off by ourselves. Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy! Our family physician, who seemed preordained by nature to spend his days like a mouse in a hole, writes to us from Alexandria, where he is serving with a base hospital that receives the wounded from the Dardanelles; and to-morrow one's next door neighbor may be invalided home from Mesopotamia!

And how quaintly touched with humor, sometimes, are these sudden changes in perspective! There was a Dane who used to own a little brickyard down by the river. It was a small business and we remember him as occasionally driving a load of bricks himself and delivering them at the University buildings. But he had seen service, and it was not long after the war began before he received his commission as major. In time he was captured by the Germans at Ypres, and interned in the little town of Bischofswerda one hundred miles south of Berlin, near the Austrian border. He could speak German perfectly had learned it as a boy in Denmark - and he determined to attempt the impossible and escape. Hiding in a well in the internment camp just as the prisoners were about to be shut up for the night, he crept away at dusk, eluded the double guards, and turned his face, not toward the Austrian border whither they would naturally set out in pursuit, but toward Berlin. He made his way to a village, found a newspaper containing the statement that he had escaped and was making his way toward Switzerland, bought a raincoat to cover his uniform, and then started on his perilous journey. In Berlin, with delightful effrontery, he took a taxi-ride down the Unter-den-Linden. How Dumas

would have revelled in the story! Then this Danish d'Artagnan disguised himself as a bricklayer and, after many adventures, including a trip through the Kiel Canal, reached Denmark, whence the British consul sent him to England. And now he has been formally received by the King at Buckingham Palace, and is detained at the War Office to report on conditions in Germany. From the little brickyard beside the Saskatchewan to Ypres; from Ypres to Bischofswerda; from Bischofswerda to Berlin; from Berlin to Buckingham Palace -'and so home,' as Pepys would say, to the brickyard. And two years ago we were entertaining d'Artagnan unawares! Well, there will be no unawareness when he returns to spend the Christmas holidays in Edmonton.

So it goes, here at the end of the line in war time- gray days and bright ones, bitter bereavements shared by a whole community, intense anxieties which no philosophy can dispel, new elations as the commonplace men of yesterday become the heroes of to-day, passionate news-hunger in the Silent Places, sparse districts becoming ever sparser as the men come in and keep coming in, to share in the great thing that is to do. I hope that you have seen, as I seem to see, that there is a kind of unity to it alla unity that springs from our very remoteness from the great scene upon which all our thoughts are fixed. But I cannot help thinking that there is another meaning as well. These are rather dark days just now in the great struggle days of halting, of uncertainty, of occasional defeat. But just as the men come in and keep coming in here, so do they come in and keep coming in in thousands of other remote little places all over the Empire. It is a slow process, but there is n't any limit to it. And nobody doubts what the end will be.

THE CONTRIBUTORS' CLUB

A TOUCHSTONE FOR PEACE

MAKERS

It is hard to recognize a peacemaker, even in the looking-glass, these days. A few single-minded ones, like the Kaiser and Mr. Bryan, are unfalteringly sure of themselves, but the rest of us hesitate to call ourselves, or one another, 'the children of God.'

Are we revealed in our works, these Hague Congresses, peace ships, preparedness programmes, secret diplomacies, so potential for strife? In our motives, aristocratic, democratic, lunatic? In our shibboleths, blessed are the pacifists? Were they the ones that Jesus had in mind? Ought we to join the League to Enforce Peace, or the Fellowship of Reconciliation, or the Stop-the-War Committee, or all of them, or none? These are the questions which confront the peacemaker every hour. How to classify himself?

There is a little book that helps; a dove-colored and partisan little book, but of a clarity in thought and utterance that cannot but clear up the most unwilling reader's hazy mind. It is not likely to convert any one; the value of a touchstone is in revelation, not in conversion; Miss Repplier may read it without trepidation; but it performs a service for the dovecote in pointing bewildered doves to their proper pigeonholes.

Women at the Hague is its title, and it describes the travels in Europe, and in their own minds, of Jane Addams, Emily G. Balch, and Alice Hamilton, during the summer of 1915. If it did no more than picture the Europe which the pacifists see to-day when they cross

the ocean, it would render an invaluable service to stay-at-home Americans. No one else has seen just that Europe, and we cannot afford to miss it. The ordinary war correspondent spares us few details of life in trench and hospital, but he does not tell us of the young Englishmen 'who cannot reconcile the thought of killing other men with what they have always held as their ideal of conduct, and yet who cannot refuse to respond to their country's call.' He is not the confidant of mothers who are thankful that their sons died early in the war before they had killed other women's sons. Only the sympathetic listener hears of the husband who told his wife that under no circumstances would he be driven to kill a fellow man, and who was killed at night by a sentry from whom he could doubtless have defended himself. Surfeited as we are with stories of German hatred and stupidity, it is reassuring to know that the most famous journalist of Germany 'was very fair to our country, saying that Germany had no right to criticize our sale of ammunition to the Allies,' and that Germany's attitude toward England was poor sportsmanship.

But the book does more than picture the pacifists' Europe; it explains the congress of women at The Hague. The newspapers have done so much to bring ridicule and discredit upon this movement that our American instinct for fair play should make us eager to read what Miss Addams and Miss Balch, whose practical wisdom in other fields we trust and honor, have to say for themselves. Their action is no right-aboutface, but the logical outcome of their

« PreviousContinue »