CHAPTER XV
GLORY AND TRAGEDY IN THE NORTH
In the recent Great War a somewhat casual visitor was present when a vagrant shell smashed the refreshment dug-out where a young Red Cross man was handling some comforts for the khaki-clad boys near the front line. And when the alarmed visitor explained to the dispenser of refreshments, "I would not stay here for a hundred dollars a day," the answer came back swiftly but kindly, "Neither would I." He was not there for the hope of gain, but out of a sense of duty and adventure so strong that both danger and remuneration were forgotten.
There was a good deal of this spirit manifest in Mounted Police history from the beginning. Not the pittance in the way of pay drew men to the corps, but the love of the adventurous and the desire to do work in the out-of-the-way places, where new trails had to be blazed beyond the accustomed sky-line. This was especially true of the men who served and volunteered to serve again in the vast spaces of the white and frozen North. Not for a hundred a day would they have so risked their lives, as others risk them still in that region. It was because the jurisdiction of their country's flag had to be asserted, and because lonely outposts and scattered groups of sometimes starving natives challenged the best that was in them, that these uniformed crusaders went out again and again on their hazardous patrols.
And so, when in 1911 Inspector Fitzgerald, Constables Kinney, Taylor and Special Constable Carter, four men of the finest type and the most thorough experience in those desperate, trackless and frozen areas, men cast in so fine a mould that some of them were to be selected for the King's Coronation, perished on a patrol from Herschell Island to Fort Macpherson and Dawson City, Canada was stabbed broad awake to what the men of the Force had been doing for their country in those Arctic lands. It seems as if such catastrophes are periodically required to make a selfish world aware of what some men are enduring in order that others may live in comfort and ease. But the world does not always receive such lessons in the right spirit. The tendency is rather to raise a protest against the authorities who permit men so to sacrifice themselves. Thus, when those four gallant men fell in the Northern wilderness, the first note from the press seemed to indicate that this patrol was an exceptional occurrence, and that it should not have been allowed to take place in view of the possible sacrifice it might involve. This gave Commissioner Perry, than whom no one was more deeply distressed and grieved at the tragic event, an opportunity to remind the country that such patrols had been for years a common and every-day event in the work of his men in the North. From year to year, under the Polar sky, in scores of different directions, the Police had carried on this work, performing definite duties, carrying mails, visiting camps of Indians and Esquimaux who were the wards of the nation, maintaining law and order beyond the confines of civilization and generally exercising a wholesome oversight in the loneliest spaces in the world. "This is dangerous work," wrote the Commissioner; "in our rigorous winter climate and in spite of every precaution, a tragedy may occur at any time. It does not deter our men from seeking service there, and it is to the North many prefer to go." The spirit of adventure was in the blood of these men, and the tragic possibilities which no one foresaw as well as they did themselves erected no barrier which could discourage them in their endeavours. If there was the constant looming up of danger through the "white death" fog, there was also the glory of adventure under the flashing splendour of the aurora borealis.
R.N.W.M.P. BARRACKS, CHURCHILL, HUDSON BAY.