had been in that district
for more than a year and I owed it to Dog Creek and the district to join
up with the rest. By that time I wanted to go. I was crazy to go! It
would be great to see London and maybe Paris and some of the other
famous old towns--if the war lasted long enough for us to get over
there. I began to bubble over with enthusiasm, just thinking about it.
So I made an appointment with some of the boys for the next evening,
rode back to the ranch and threw the mail and my job at the foreman.

A week later we were in Vancouver. Then things began to get plainer--to
some of the fellows. We heard of broken treaties, "scraps of paper,"
"Kultur," the rights of nations, big and small, "freedom of the seas,"
and other phrases that meant less than nothing to most of us. It was
enough for me, then, that the country which had given me the protection
of its laws wanted to help England. I trusted the government to know
what it was doing. Before we were in town an hour we found ourselves at
a recruiting office. By the simple expedient of moving my birthplace a
few hundred miles north I became a Canadian and a member of the
expeditionary force--a big word with a big meaning. Christmas came and I
was in a well-trained battalion of troops with no more knowledge of the
war than the retreat from Mons, the battles of the Marne and the Aisne,
and an occasional newspaper report of the capture of a hundred thousand
troops here and a couple of hundred thousand casualties somewhere else.
We knew, at that rate, it couldn't possibly last until we got to the
other side, but we prayed loudly that it would. In April we heard of the
gassing of the first Canadians at Ypres. Then the casualty lists from
that field arrived and hit Vancouver with a thud. Instantly a change
came over the city. Before that day, war had been a romance, a thing far
away about which to read and over which to wave flags. It was
intangible, impersonal. It was the same attitude the States exhibited in
the autumn of '17. Then suddenly it became real. This chap and that
chap; a neighbor boy, a fellow from the next block or the next desk.
Dead! Gassed! This was war; direct, personal, where you could count the
toll among your friends. Personally, I thought that what the Germans had
done was a terrible thing and I wondered what kind of people they might
be that they could, without warning, deliver such a foul blow. In a
prize ring the Kaiser would have lost the decision