then and there. We
wondered about gas and discussed it by the hour in our barracks. Some of
us, bigger fools than the rest, insisted that the German nation would
repudiate its army. But days went by and nothing of the kind occurred.
It was then I began to take my soldiering a little more seriously. If a
nation wanted to win a war so badly that it would damn its good name
forever by using means ruled by all humanity as beyond the bounds of
civilized warfare, it must have a very big object in view. And I
started--late it is true--to obtain some clue to those objects.

May found us at our port of embarkation for the voyage to England. The
news of the "Lusitania" came over the wires and that evening our convoy
steamed. For the first time, I believe, I fully realized I was a soldier
in the greatest war of all the ages.

Between poker, "blackjack," and "crown and anchor" with the crew, we
talked over the two big things that had happened in our soldier
lives--gas and the "Lusitania." And to these we later added liquid fire.

Our arguments, our logic, may have been elemental, but I insist they
struck at the root. I may sum them up thus: Germany was not using the
methods of fighting that could be countenanced by a civilized nation. As
the nation stood behind its army in all this barbarism, there must be
something inherently lacking in it despite its wonderful music, its
divine poetry, its record in the sciences. It, too, must be barbarian at
heart. We agreed that if it should win this war it would be very
uncomfortable to belong to one of the allied nations, or even to live in
the world at all, since it was certain German manners and German methods
would not improve with victory. And we, as a battalion, were ready to
take our places in France to back up our words with deeds.

A week or so later we landed in England. A marked change had come over
the men since the day we left Halifax. Then most of us regarded the
whole war, or our part in it, as more or less of a lark. On landing we
were still for a lark, but something else had come into our
consciousness. We were soldiers fighting for a cause--a cause clear cut
and well defined--the saving of the world from a militarily mad country
without a conscience. At our camp in England we saw those boys of the
first division who had stood in their trenches in front of Ypres one
bright April morning and watched with great curiosity a peculiar looking
bank of fog roll toward them from t