ernoon to the Base with a
parting injunction that I should be well advised to have my foot taken
off; which, thank God, was not found necessary. From the C.C.S. at
Camiers, two days later I was sent to London to the Endsleigh Palace
Hospital near Euston Station, where I arrived with another wounded
officer at 2.30 a.m. I was put in a little room on the seventh storey,
and there through long nights I thought of our men still at the front
and wondered how the war was going. The horror of great darkness fell
upon me. The hideous sights and sounds of war, the heart-rending
sorrows, the burden of agony, the pale dead faces and blood-stained
bodies lying on muddy wastes, all these came before me as I lay awake
counting the slow hours and listening to the hoarse tooting of lorries
rattling through the dark streets below. That concourse of ghosts from
the sub-conscious mind was too hideous to contemplate and yet one
could not escape them. The days went by and intimations at last
reached us that the German power was crumbling. Swiftly and surely the
Divine Judge was wreaking vengeance upon the nation that, by its
over-weaning ambition, had drenched the world in blood.

On November 11th at eleven in the morning the bells of London rang out
their joyous peals, for the armistice had been signed and the war was
over. There was wild rejoicing in the city and the crowds went crazy
with delight. But it seemed to me that behind the ringing of those
peals of joy there was the tolling of spectral bells for those who
would return no more. The monstrous futility of war as a test of
national greatness, the wound in the world's heart, the empty homes,
those were the thoughts which in me overmastered all feelings of
rejoicing.

On Sunday morning, the 4th of May, 1919, on the Empress of Britain,
after an absence of four years and seven months, I returned to Quebec.
On board were the 16th Battalion with whom I had sailed away in 1914,
the 8th Battalion, the Machine Gun Battalion, the 3rd Field (p. 319)
Ambulance and some of the Engineers. Like those awaking from a dream,
we saw once more the old rock city standing out in the great river.
There was the landing and the greeting of loving friends on the wharf
within a stone's throw from the place whence we had sailed away. While
I was shaking hands with my friends, an officer told me I had to
inspect the Guard of Honour which the kind O.C. of the vessel had
furnished. I did not know how to