At the End of the Line in War Time

IF you will open your map of Canada and turn to the Province of Alberta, you will find in about the centre of the province the town of Edmonton. South of this point your map will be filled with the names of other towns and villages and of a network of railway lines — the ordered minutiœ of human occupation. North of it you will find, in the main, only magnificent and nameless distances — the large silences of the mapmaker. Your map will trace for you a branch line of the Canadian Pacific Railway which comes north to Edmonton and stops here; and if it is unexpectedly up to date it will contain two transcontinentals which pass through on their westward way; but for those who see that the westward march of the pioneer is over and that only northward new things await him, Edmonton remains the end of the line.

Now turn to the side of your map and reckon the parallel of latitude. You will figure it at about 54°. At any other time this parallel would interest you only as it spelled certain climatic and industrial conditions. It would suggest to you cold winters, with nights that endure from four o’clock in the afternoon to eight or nine in the morning, and brief intense summers with an amazing fecundity and rapidity of growth. It would mean for you a wheat-grower’s world south of us and around us; and north of us a trapper’s and a hunter’s world — a world of strange tracks in the snow, of moose and elk and caribou moving warily through the Silent Places. That is what latitude 54 would mean to you at other times; but if you would know what it means to us symbolically just now, you must take a larger map, a map of both hemispheres. You must trace that parallel around to the other side of the world, and your moving finger will touch Scarborough and go on through to the fleet-locked harbor of Kiel. Conceive that imaginary line now as a sensitive nerve along which thrills a feeling and a passion, and you will be ready for the picture I wish to draw for you — the picture of a town at the edge of the Silent Places — a town inconceivably remote from the terrible focus of the world’s thought, and yet vividly and grievously and elatedly conscious that it too is a part of the Empire at war.

Yesterday the local papers contained the head-lines: ‘Last Bag of Mail for the Far North left City this Morning.’ A few years ago that sack of mail would have started behind a dog-team. Now the sack will make the first lap of its journey by rail — a short lap on an antenna of the transcontinental; and where that antenna ends, the dog team will relay the sack to Fort Chipewyan, and other dog-team relays will carry it by successive stages through the rest of the seventeen hundred miles to Fort McPherson. That will be a two months’ journey; and here and there on that long route men are waiting, with a hunger which you whose ears are assailed with hourly cries of ‘Extra’ cannot understand, for news of the war. Anywhere from three to six months after August, 1914, men drifted in from the north to learn for the first time that there was a war, and buried themselves for days thereafter in the files of the local dailies in a dazed effort to ‘catch up.’

Can you conceive just what that would mean? Imagine yourself back, let us say, in December, 1914; and instead of having been able to assimilate the news, item by item, day by day, imagine yourself being compelled, all at once, to grasp the whole stunning mass of it! Bear in mind too as a part of the background of the picture that on these railway lines that stretch eastward from Edmonton over the prairies and westward from Edmonton toward the mountains, there are many little settlements, visible to the eye of the railway traveler only as a passenger station, a grain elevator, and a shop or two, but actually extending back for miles over scattered quarter-sections. To these little stations men will ride a far journey, and crowd the platform when the train is due. And as you stand on the rear platform looking back at the receding station, the little group will seem transfixed there, motionless save for the flutter of the unfolding newspapers. They have business, doubtless; they must get back to their farms; but for the moment there is nothing to be seen but that eager thrust for the news — the news from the front.

True, it is not a picture of the hinterland, the Silent Places, or even of the remote prairie or mountain railway station which I wish to draw for you. Edmonton is a town of perhaps fifty thousand inhabitants, and it has its two daily newspapers. But you cannot really see the picture of the town itself as an integral part of the Empire at war, unless you see it as a focal point, with the sparsely settled, news-hungry prairie around it, and the more sparsely settled, news-hungry Silent Places stretching indefinitely north of it — and from the prairie and from the Silent Places, men coming in by ones and twos and threes, with their traps left to rust on wilderness trails, or their reapers left to rust on hard-won acres — men hungry to know and hungry to go.

For, sophisticated as it is getting to be in spots, this Canadian Northwest is still a pioneer’s world, a man’s world. Native Canadians who had ‘come out’ from eastern Canada and were ‘baching’ on lonely quarters; Englishmen of birth and means who had established themselves on ranches; cockneys who had escaped from the overwhelming submersion of London poverty; Boer war veterans; men who had had professional military training but had not seen actual service — slowly but surely the call made its way out to them all, and slowly but surely they came in. When the war began, the population of the Province of Alberta, which has an area about four times as large as all the New England States put together, numbered approximately 517,000. Of these, at the time of writing, 18,000 have enlisted and are either at the front or being prepared to go. This is practically one fighting man out of every thirty men, women, and children. To accomplish this, there has been no conscription, nothing remotely resembling coercion, nothing more than the fine suasion of the call. In an older community, with the call coming from a ‘mother country’ which many of them had never seen, this proportion of voluntary enlistments would be almost beyond belief. But this is a population of greater detachment, of fewer ties, less rooted to the soil, — and the apparently impossible is already the accomplished fact. And the end is not yet; for, as I write, comes the news of two more regiments to be recruited in the Edmonton district; and a prophecy from the D.C.O. that approximately 25,000 will enlist from the province before the war is over.

Yes, as far as the outlying districts are concerned, it is a detached population; and there, perhaps, there is not the same sense of desperate uprooting that there would be in an older community; but when you turn from the outlying districts to the town itself, the feeling is a pretty desperate one. One in thirty! Interpret that in terms of Boston. It would mean that every human being in Boston either had enlisted or had some relative or friend in the ranks. And that is what it means here. Aside from the larger philosophical sense in which the liberty of every fireside is involved, it means, in the vivid Western phrase, that every one ‘has a stake’ in the great enterprise.

At first, perhaps, this personal ‘stake’ was not so vividly felt. The war seemed a grand game, a splendid triumphant thing that would be over in three or four months. The Fair grounds, with the long rows of horseand cattle-sheds and the big exhibition pavilion became a barracks. Everywhere in the streets squads were drilling. On the campus of the Provincial University drill took the place of gymnasium exercise and athletic contests. On the suburban meadows, which we remembered as the farm lands of a few years ago, and the more recent battleground of real-estate speculators, cavalry deployed. The street-cars were filled with khaki, new faces mostly, men who had ‘come in.’ From Edmonton and the outlying districts, picked men, veterans, went to join the ‘Princess Pats,’ the pride of Canada. They went to the front, with the tragedy which nobody dreamed of already hanging over their heads; but of the many who were already enlisting, few seemed really away. Most of them were in local barracks, or at the Sarcee reserve in the southern part of the province, or, at the worst, at Valcartier. Nobody whom one knew seemed really to have crossed the Rubicon. Were they not still in Canada, with letters only a matter of a few days, and with a known address? The days when all the world would be ‘somewhere in France’ were not yet.

Then came the news of what had happened to the ‘Princess Pats.’ You could not call it a casualty list. It was not even decimation. It was — annihilation. On a certain day in May, after having been reduced by what one may call normal casualties, they went into a charge 650 strong. They came out of it with only 175 living men. With that ended for us the first phase of the war — the phase when it was still only a grand game. But even yet it did not quite come home to us. The first contingent had consisted largely of men who had already seen service as privates in the British army, men of worth, but not of education. The second contingent — well, it is not safe to generalize, and there were many exceptions — but on the whole, so far as local impressions went, the second contingent seemed to consist chiefly of men who were out of a job and whose patriotic instincts were supplemented by the certainty of a berth. But the third contingent — that was a different matter. There went the cream of us — the University students, the little band of alumni accumulated through the brief years since the University was established, the young business and professional men — all the thoughtful young men who had said within themselves, —

and who, no longer thinking too precisely on the event, dedicated themselves forthwith to the cause.

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.

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 letters 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 ‘looking out’ for him, from his infancy? And she would keep on doing it — to the end.

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 perhaps 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 all — a 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.