George Gallie Nasmith

“ Never does one see such a smartly dressed crowd of women as one sees in Paris. No matter what the combination of colour, no matter what the style, they look well, for they have the national gift of knowing how to wear their clothes. Even the widows in mourning, and there were many of them, looked most interesting. French women have a grace of carriage and know how to walk, which is in striking contrast to the majority of English, Canadian or American women. ”

“ Yet, I feel that we cannot judge because we don't know all the facts. The best men in the United States are with us heart and soul; they feel disgraced and degraded individually and as a nation because they are forced to eat dirt; they want to go to war for they realize the European situation. Yet, we can't tell what is going [221] on behind the scenes in the United States; we don't know all facts; the cards are not all on the table. If we knew what President Wilson knows, we might judge, but we don't. For all we know Great Britain and the other Allies may want America to keep out. ”

“ Though, in theory, the French are most excellent sanitarians and as a country revere the name of Pasteur, while we have forgotten, if we ever did know, the name of Lister, in practice they are about as poor a nation in practical sanitation as it is possible to be. Imagine a hospital, thoroughly equipped and clean as a new pin, with such bad air that one of our party fainted and another had to leave in a hurry to escape the same fate. ”

“ It is extraordinary how war conditions will break down conventions. Many times that day I saw absolutely nude men bathing in a roadside ditch, and women passing only a few yards away, neither of them being at all concerned about the others. Sections of the Aire-La-Bassee canal looked like the "old swimming pool" in midsummer. Hundreds of soldiers dived, swam, and rolled about in the dirty waters. Finely built, rosy-skinned chaps they were too, playing about like care-free boys, with aeroplanes buzzing by overhead, and shells exploding in a village to the rear. ”

“ The fact that in an army men are crowded together makes it easy for all communicable diseases, once introduced, to spread with great rapidity. And because soldiers are always associated with the civilian population, it means that such diseases are readily communicated from the army to the civilians, and from the civilians to the army. It is therefore apparent that during a war, disease, unless quickly checked, may run like wild fire through a country, and be disseminated far and wide by soldiers returning to and from their own homes, or other distant places while on leave. ”

“ But to five millions of men in the army of the British Empire a man has become a man once more. When men stand side by side in the trenches, while the German shells play upon them, the men of wealth, or education, or title realize that a shell does not discriminate between him and the workman by his side. The soldier knows that the only thing that counts is whether a man is really a man ”

“ Not a soul risked a sound lest the players should mistake it as an invitation to renew their entertainment; so the real pipe band came on for another whirl and we were made happy once more.
Precisely at five-thirty, the concert ended, and the cosmopolitan crowd of French civilians and soldiers, British Tommies, Indians, Highlanders, and Canadians, melted away. Five minutes after, save for the presence of a few blue rock pigeons flitting about in search of their evening meal, the square showed no sign of life. ”

“ And deeper in each mind was the unspoken fear, "Perhaps it is already too late to save France—perhaps, even now, the question is 'Can England save herself?'" [2] The great depression in men's minds during those early days of the war when the bottom seemed to have dropped out of life and men strove to grasp at something upon which to reconstruct a new system of thought and life and work, had enveloped us like a chill evening mist. ”

“ But the British are coming to it and if the war lasts long enough Great Britain will be rejuvenated. She was getting pretty rotten before the war. Suffering is chastening her; I have great faith in that for there is no doubt that trials and suffering strengthen a nation just as they strengthen individuals. I believe a newer and greater Britain will arise out of the ashes of the old. There will be many problems between capital and labor to work out; there must be a redistribution of land; people will have to work much harder than they have ever had to before. ”

“ These hundreds of thousands of people who have been helping in Red Cross and other service work will not go back to the old careless life, for they will have been moulded to new points of view and a new sense of responsibility. All this, of course, pre-supposes that the war will last long enough so that the nation as a nation will suffer. The profiteer must be shorn of his ill gotten gains; the taxes must be heavy enough to pinch everybody; the necessity to save in order to provide for others must come home to every man, woman and child. ”

“ When the French people of the little villages through which we passed saw the name "Canadian" on our car they nudged each other and repeated the word "Canadien." It was the name in everybody's mouth those days, for it was now general knowledge that the Canadian division had thrown itself into the gap and stemmed the German rush to Calais. The whole world was ringing with the story of how the colonial troops had barred the road to the channel to a force many times [110] its size in men and guns, and armed with poison gas, the most terrible device of warfare that had yet been invented. ”

“ What is needed is that every man should be working for the Empire. Whether it is in growing wheat, making munitions or fighting, makes little difference. We need everybody working for the common cause. There are plenty of men trying to sell real estate to-day who should be out ploughing land for wheat to keep French and British soldiers fit; there are lots of chaps who cannot fight or plough who can run a lathe in a munitions factory; there are plenty of women who could replace men on [224] farms; every woman and man in France is working. Why should not Canada be doing the same? ”

“ The chief Russian delegate was a prince, a lieutenant-general of cavalry, and a wonderfully well informed scientist. Though a man over sixty years of age and without a medical degree, he seemed to be perfectly informed in every question relating to bacteriology, chemistry, sanitation and medicine and would put the [203] average notable medical officer of health to shame. He was to all of us a perfect marvel. He spoke English and French fluently and had the keenest sense of humour of any member of the congress, constantly enlivening the proceedings by his witty and humorous remarks. ”

“ It was an odd sight to see bus after bus tearing down that long, straight road, with the tall trees on either hand, each bus with rows of soldiers seated on the upper deck, with heads and arms bandaged, looking about at everything with the greatest interest,—like tourists rather than men who had just come from the very gates of hell. ”

“ As we passed through the rolling land of Belgium under the brow of "The Scherpenberg," with Mount [90] Kemmel over to the right honeycombed with dugouts, it was difficult to believe that, locked in a death grapple, not three miles away, were thousands of soldiers living underground like moles, and that at any moment the air might be filled with shells carrying death and destruction.
At the end of a peaceful day we reached our little French home town, glad to have seen our friends in their new area by the famous old city of the Flemish weavers. ”

“ When I see these chaps here tramping in and out of the trenches day after day and think of those spineless blighters at home it makes me sick."
"Ottawa has no backbone. It hasn't nerve enough to do anything. Quebec holds the whip hand and Quebec is anti-war. And so the political game goes on while Canadian profiteers make barrels of money—blood money—out of munitions and food-stuffs. We make the most of what we have done but I believe that Canada's effort is a disgrace." ”

“ The British and French were doing well and taking many prisoners on the Somme, as were the Russians on their front while the Roumanians began their offensive and swept far over the country much to the horror of the critics and everybody else.
There was great elation on the day of the big offensive on the Somme when the British first used "tanks." I shall never forget the thrill I had when we read a telegram received at one of the headquarters repeating a wireless message from an aeroplane observer to the effect that he could see a tank wobbling into a village followed by cheering troops. ”

“ England is a strange country. We felt that perhaps if a force of 50,000 or 100,000 Germans would land in England she would waken from the long sleep she had slept since her shores had been invaded by William the Conqueror. 30,000 men could watch a football match at the very moment the British line in Flanders was actually so thin that if the Germans had tried to advance there was nothing to stop them. ”

“ No man of prophetic foresight had yet risen to say "This is a life and death struggle for us; we need every man in the country, and every shilling to win the war." The common talk was that we had stepped in to keep our treaty with France and to assist poor Belgium, whose neutrality had been violated. Englishmen did not feel that England's fall was first and last the object of Germany's ambition. They did not realize that Germany saw in England the nation which was always thwarting her and frustrating her desire for "a place in the sun." ”

“ My visit to the Institute for the blinded soldiers was to me the most inspiring experience that I had in France, strange as that statement may sound, for it showed more conclusively than war itself the infinite capacity for courage that exists in almost every man. ”

“ In war time when soldiers were involved, it was more terrible than ever, for the results, as the medical men saw them, were disastrous from the military standpoint alone.
From this great ulcer in the heart of London a deadly poison passes far and wide into the national organism. The ulcer is there still for the knife of some strong man to excise, for there is little doubt that though restrictions will not prevent vice, it is equally true that making vice open, enticing and easy, increases it. ”

“ Nothing lay between them and Calais but the Canadian Division, and whether the Canadians could hang on long enough in face of this new terror of poison gas until new troops arrived, [106] no one could even venture to guess. We felt that they would do all that men could do under the circumstances, but without means of combating the poison it was doubtful what any troops could do. Supposing the Germans just kept on discharging gas? Nothing under heaven apparently could stop them from walking over the dead bodies of our soldiers, choked to death like drowned men. ”

“ The country became flat, and the roadside ditches were filled to the brim with water. That we were within the sphere of military operations became more and more evident. Motor cars carrying officers passed frequently; motor transports carrying food and fodder rumbled along the roads or were parked in the outskirts of villages or in village squares; motor ambulance convoys were drawn up in front of hospitals, and, in general, we felt that we were nearing the real seat of operations, the front line. ”

“ Great Britain has been fortunate above all other nations in this respect that she sent over at first a small army of regular troops, perfectly equipped from the medical standpoint as well as in every other way. Efforts had been made for years to remove typhoid carriers from the regular army, and naturally no soldier was sent into the field who was known to have typhoid, or to be a carrier of typhoid or any other contagious disease germs. Furthermore, the soldiers had practically all been vaccinated against smallpox and inoculated against typhoid fever. ”

“ It is quite a different disease from typhoid fever, and is conveyed from man to man solely through lice. In other words, the phrase "No lice, no typhus" is scientifically true.
Every army in the field is a lousy army, and every soldier in a fighting unit is more or less lousy. The louse commonly present is the body louse, and it lays its eggs in the seams of the uniforms and on the underclothes. The eggs hatch out quickly so that when a man once becomes infected the lice multiply with great rapidity. ”

“ Canada is the ideal country for a powerful German colony. I honestly believe they would prefer Canada with all its latent resources, its water power, great wheat fields, minerals and forest wealth, to any spot on earth. With their systematic methods, their thousands of trained scientists in all branches of industry, their tremendous capacity for work and resourcefulness, they would take a hold of Canada and [225] develop it in a way that would startle the world. Germany has millions of surplus population that she would transfer to Canada for development purposes. ”