Into the vortex of the nations she had seen the young men of Canada flinging themselves with laughing voices and sturdy courage. With the other women of the city she had watched the endless stream of youth as though, across the seas, some Hamelin Piper were playing an irresistible, compelling melody…. And still the cry was for more—more sons, more brothers, more fathers! Month after month the ceaseless crusade went on—month after month new battalions sprang into being, trained a short time, and then made for the sea…. Always the sea, waiting with its foaming restlessness to carry its human cargo to the slaughter.
The sea … the sea….
It became the symbol of sacrifice to her. Across its turbulent expanse, youth was forfeiting its life for the blindness of the past. The hungry fire of war was being fed with human hearts…. But such is the nature of fire that what lives through it is imperishable.
A year ago Montague had gone with his battalion—without even a good-bye. She had never heard of him, but the ordeal of the flames had left him stripped of his artificiality as a tree stricken by a sudden frost is robbed in a moment of its foliage. It is not only the best in men that lives through war—vile passions vie with courage and great sacrifice…. But artificial things succumb and crumple with the scorching heat, and are blown into space by the breath of passions, base or noble—it matters not—they are real.
With trembling hands she opened the letter.
"Somewhere in France.
"My dear Girl,—In a couple of hours we are going over the parapet to reach the German lines or gain oblivion—or worse. All around me the men I have worked with, slept with, fought with, are writing to, or thinking of, some loved one at home. I do not know whether the love you once felt for me has died or not, but it was once strong enough to hurt me as no one had ever done before—to tear my soul out to where I could see its rottenness with my own eyes. I could not live with myself after that, and as you must have heard, for I believe it was a drawing-room jest for some time, I joined a battalion composed almost entirely of men from the factories, the workshops, and the streets.
"It was partly a spirit of bravado made me do it, and partly a desire to wrestle with truth. I cannot say how hard it was at first to endure their company, their incessant, meaningless profanity. I hated every one of them. To salute an officer in the street caused me such humiliation that I thought of desertion a dozen times. From my contempt of my fellow-soldiers to an understanding of their nobility has been a hard, cruel road to travel; but I have traveled it, and I think that somewhere on the road there is a cross whereon my pride was crucified. Vera, my prayer is no longer that of the Pharisee, but of the Publican. I was offered a commission; I was urged to join the signalers or the machine-gun section, because there I should find men more after my own stamp; but I refused—the memory of your words made me stick with the men I started with.
"I have found them crude, uneducated, unambitious, but true as steel, and asking no better reward for their heroism than that their 'missus and kids' will be looked after at home. I tell you, Vera, that when the war is over we shall have to realize that it is not only the consumptive and the imbecile that deserve care and thought. There is a grandeur, a manhood, in the ordinary, unlovely, unkempt man of the streets that our civilization has failed to bring out, but war has done it. So much has war given to us; so much has peace failed to give.
"Life has become a riddle to me, still fascinating, but fascinatingly puzzling. Perhaps I shall find the answer in No Man's Land.