“Alack, alack!” cried Azalea. “What shall we do for copybook mottoes?”
“I’ll give you a better one . . . ‘What’s only worth doing once in a while, should be forgotten until the next time!’ Now for the foreign papers. This parcel? Thank you.”
He glanced rapidly through half a dozen of them—English, French and German. Azalea, watching him, saw his expression darken into apprehension, the meaning of which she could not fathom. Nor was she able to interpret his increasing preoccupation until one August morning he called her to the telephone.
“I can tell you now why I stayed in Ottawa,” he said. “Despatches have just arrived . . . England has declared war on Germany . . . Canada will have to fight!”
PART THREE
They Conquered
CHAPTER 21.
Destiny seemed to be setting the stage for Armageddon, the last tragic scene in the play of human life. Pandora’s box had been opened and every mortal ill loosed to the bonds of hate. For more than three years, the sword of War had maimed the body of civilisation. It was a time when the vision of young men was carnage, and the dream of old men, despair. Prussian frightfulness was still exacting dreadful tribute from Celt and Anglo-Saxon battlefields that had lost all trace of old-time chivalry. The virtue of sheer sacrifice was confined to the English-speaking Dominions, the flower of whose youth had gone forth against a foe that had not directly challenged them; gone forth with joy to build their splendid bodies into ramparts that might be shattered but never stormed.
The Blond Beast was shaking the blood from his eyes and looking anxiously across the Atlantic. But America had not yet decided to step into the breach.
Thus with the men. Nor was the mettle of our women lacking in the hour of trial. Spartan mothers never sent their sons into battle with finer renunciation than did the mothers of the unconscripted youths who crowded the transports in the first two years of conflict. Women stepped into the gaping ranks of industry at home—into the farms and fields, and into factories originally designed for making ploughshares and pruning hooks, but now converted into plants for fashioning the panoplies of war. Thousands of these women clad themselves in the overalls of labour, and hundreds put on the uniform of the Red Cross. Life so lived was hard but it was intense, and “Carry on”, came to express one of the spiritual values of the ages.
This was one picture of the activities of women during the grim tourney of Might against Right. There was another, not so inspiring. It revealed the cocotte and the flapper. Birds of beautiful plumage, these, who thronged London, Paris, Ostend—God knows where they were not—and sang their siren songs into masculine ears echoing with the shriek of shot and shell . . . songs that offered forgetfulness, Nirvana, to men who came out of a stinking Hell where the form of Death stalked grinning at their side. These were they who filled the theatres, cabarets, and tea shops, providing fat profits for jewellers, modistes, motor liveries; the hotels and inconspicuous road-houses.