CHAPTER XXIII
THE FUSE—
It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on its stomach, but it is true, and it is no less a verity that nations function primarily on food. The submarine was waxing to its zenith now, and Europe saw the gaunt wolf at its door. Men cried for more ships. Cost became secondary. A vessel paid for herself if she landed but two cargoes in an Allied port.
Every demand in the economic field produces a supply. On this side of the Atlantic great shipbuilding plants arose by some superior magic of construction in ports where the building of ships had been a minor industry. In this Vancouver did not lag. Wooden ships could be built quickly. Virgin forests of fir and cedar stood at Vancouver's very door. Wherefore yards, capable of turning out a three-thousand-ton wooden steamer in ninety days, rose on tidewater, and an army of labor sawed and hammered and shaped to the ultimate confusion of the Hun.
Thompson had seen these yards in the distance. He read newspapers and he knew that local shipbuilding was playing the dual purpose of confounding the enemy and adding a huge pay-roll to Vancouver's other material advantages. Both of which were highly desirable.
But few details of this came personally to his attention until an evening when he happened to foregather with Tommy Ashe and two or three others at Carr's home—upon one of those rare evenings when Sophie was free of her self-imposed duties and in a mood to play the hostess.
They had dined, and were gathered upon a wide verandah watching the sun sink behind the rampart of Vancouver Island in a futurist riot of yellow and red that died at last to an afterglow which lingered on the mountain tops like a benediction. A bit of the Gulf opened to them, steel-gray, mirror-smooth, more like a placid, hill-ringed lake than the troubled sea.
But there was more in the eye's cast than beauty of sea and sky and setting sun. From their seats they could look down on the curious jumble of long sheds and giant scaffolding that was the great Coughlan steel shipyard in False Creek. Farther distant, on the North Shore, there was the yellowish smudge of what a keen vision discerned to be six wooden schooners in a row, sister ships in varying stages of construction.