If you count up the men who have been wounded and invalided from all causes you will find that there are still twice as many sick people as there are wounded; and the strange thing is that as there are more wounds there is less sickness, because directly a “push” comes the men don’t think nearly as much about sickness as when there is nothing doing.
If you take 1000 persons in ordinary civil life you will find that there will always be 3·3 sick per 1000; but at the front the rate is not quite half as many—only 1·8 per 1000 men. It is a very strange thing, but I have met with a number of men who were always more or less sick in civil life, yet who got quite well again at the front. The trenches are the place for a change of air!
I am sure that after this war a very great many men will never go back to the civil life they were in before. They must have more life in the open air; and there can be no finer field for them than that glorious Canada which I know so well, with its boundless possibilities of harvests and material development.
One is impressed at the front with the apparent valuelessness of human life, and deeply impressed by the lavishness with which that life has been laid down by all ranks for King and country. This remark applies to every rank of life without exception, to the highest of the aristocracy as well as to the humblest private. And very remarkable, too, is the zeal and willingness to serve in quite subordinate positions of men who have had every advantage in life, particularly the University type.
I remember at one place, when we were sitting in the mess, a sergeant brought in a paper, which he handed to the colonel to read. It was a most elaborate scientific treatise on the body vermin that so greatly trouble our troops, and it was beautifully illustrated. In addition to that the paper showed the willing endurance of personal suffering for practical purposes that I for one should not have cared to undergo, for the sergeant had made himself thoroughly well acquainted with the effects of the visitation of the pests he described.
I was so much impressed by the performance that I said to the colonel, “Who is your sergeant?” and he replied, “Oh, he’s the Professor of Entomology in the University of ——!”
As I talk my mind takes me back to Labrador and its ice-bound coast, and I recall that when working through the ice-fields in our little mission ship, the Strathcona, or travelling in lonely regions with my dog-teams, I saw so many evidences of the eagerness of men out there to do their bit in this tremendous war. Almost to a man, when they heard that we were fighting, they wanted to come over. But at first in Labrador we got very little news, and when news did come it was not credited. “Oh,” said the men, “don’t you believe it. They’ve always got some scare on. They’re going to put the price of fish up!” Fish, you know, is the greatest of all material things out in that vast and lonely land. But what happened when they knew that it was not a scare, but real war, and a fight for liberty and justice? Why, 1500 men of Labrador and Newfoundland went into the Navy alone, and these brave and splendid fellows crowded into the Army too. A thousand of them were in Gallipoli. And wherever they were they found their hard experience of the utmost worth. Our trappers soon learn the knack of getting a seal with the gun, though the seal only just pops his head through an ice-hole and the tiny target is the hardest of all things to see. But the trapper gets him—he seldom misses; and whenever a German puts his head out—well, he gets it too.
I have been in Labrador twenty-five years, and I am proud of the way in which my friends out there have done their duty at the front.
My own view of life is that one has to do one’s duty in any place where one happens to be; and I know from what I have seen that our splendid fellows at the front have the same outlook. There are many, many soldiers out there who, with practically nothing to look forward to when the war is over, are sustained by one great thing, and that is the knowledge that they are doing their best.
I have mentioned Canada as a great place for receiving men who will be set free when the war is over. I have just seen the statement that Canada has gone prohibition from end to end, and that pleases me very much. I have spent thirty years amongst deep-sea fishermen and sailors as a medical missionary and a master mariner, and I have shared many dangers with them in the North Sea, out on the Labrador coast and elsewhere, but I have seen more sorrow and misery in the homes of our seafaring men through drink than I ever found in even small craft at sea.