And he thought, with a slowly rising tide of bewilderment, of the wholly inadequate preparation that had been bestowed upon them for such a bitter sip of life's cup. For her a lonely childhood, an education frugally achieved, and marriage. For him eighteen years of a sheltered, tutored existence, four years of college, twelve months in a logging camp, three months of inconceivable happiness—and the war.
The Great War—which in five years was to bestow upon his country, at the price of many lives and out-poured treasure, such priceless victories as a scramble for oil and a squabble over debts!
CHAPTER XVIII
When men walk often in the shadow of death they rise superior to its dread aspect, or they become indifferent to it, or they succumb to its ghastly presence and welcome it as a relief from unendurable suspense. Upon these emotional reagents all the heroism and endurance and cowardice of humanity in war is based. And when the shouting and the tumult dies the survivors sometimes find themselves incredible of their survival in a world excitedly muttering the shibboleths of peace,—peace, where there is only a truce. For the dumb clods, led or driven, and the high-spirited adventurers did not alone comprise the armies which the nations lately sent forth. Willy-nilly, by outward compulsion or inner sense of duty, the sensitive, the lovers of beauty, the humanitarian, the altruist, those strange souls to whom disorder is an evil, justice a passionately cherished dream, freedom the birthright of every man,—they too wore khaki and were deafened by the guns.
Upon them, and they are no inconsiderable portion of this our country's manhood, the war has left its mark. Not so much in the scars on their bodies—for those are things men forget as easily as women forget the pangs of childbirth—but in the more tenuous fabric of their souls, in the processes of their intellect. Many question the value of the ordeal,—judged by its results.
It was a questioning of this nature that troubled Rod Norquay on an evening in January, A.D. 1919. He sat among civilians in a Canadian Pacific smoking car while the Imperial Limited rolled westward through a rainy night. He was on familiar ground again, the soil where five generations of his blood had been nourished. The Coast Range was far behind the train. On his right the Fraser River made a pale shimmer in the darkness, with here and there the glowworm running lights, the yellow window squares of a river boat. It was good to be back, back to life that could be lived fully and freely, not simply endured.
But it was not good for him, in those last homeward miles, to listen to the talk that ran in the smoker. It was pitched to the same key as had fretted him in Paris, in London, all the way across North America,—boundaries, coal and iron, concessions, indemnities, reparations. Europe, Asia, and Africa, the islands of the Pacific, had been rearranged, parcelled out, in Rod's hearing in hotel lobbys, in ship saloons, in railway coaches, day after day, by sleek, middle-aged civilians, clever successful fellows who knew what was what. He was sick of it. Was that the reality behind the war to end war?
"Loot," he said to himself scornfully. "They can call it what they like, but that's what they mean."
In the field even Fritz shot his looters when he caught them red-handed. But in civil life, behind the rampart of a victorious army, they had their eye on the loot. They couldn't see much else that was worth consideration. This group in the smoker,—he had been in the enforced physical intimacy of railway travel with them for four days. They had been a trifle backward about approaching this moody young man in a London-tailored uniform of the C.E.F. with three thin gold stripes on his sleeve. They had respected his reserved silence. But they had talked for his benefit. Short of stuffing his ears with cotton he could not avoid hearing. And they talked voluminously, sagely, on the political and economic aspects of the war, and the peace that was in the making. Rod grew to hate them. In his own mind he called them buzzards. Which is a measure of his state of mind, for he was naturally courteous and tolerant toward his fellow men.