Ralph Connor

“ Barry spoke in a voice of quiet deliberation, as if pondering the proper action in the premises.
“Quite right, too,” said Sandy gravely, but with a twinkle in his blue eye. “They ought to be reported. I have no use for those poachers.”
Duff made no reply. His rage and disgust, mingled with the sense of his being in the wrong, held him silent. No man in the whole country was harder upon the game poachers than he, but to be held up in his action and to be threatened with the law by this young preacher, whom he rather despised anyway, seemed to paralyse his mental activities. ”

“ Vincent and Captain Neil leading the way.
“Oh, Barry, aren't you going?” said Phyllis in a low voice.
“How can I answer that?” he replied, almost in anger. “Do YOU ask me to go? Do YOU want me to go?”
“Of course, we all want you to go,” said the girl.
“Is that your answer?” His voice was tense; his face strained. “If that is all, Phyllis, I must say 'Good-bye' to-night. Why should I go with you? Why should I stay here in London? There's nothing for me here. The war is the only place—”
“Oh, Barry,” she said, her eyes bright with tears, “how unkindly, how terribly you talk.” ”

“ All this time she was standing before him, her face white, her lips parted, a look of wonder, almost of fear, in the brown eyes, so bravely holding his, her hands pressed hard upon her bosom, as if to stay its tumult.
“I have no right to say this to you,” said Barry again. “You belong to a great family. Perhaps you are rich. Great Heavens!” he groaned. “I never thought of that. You are beautiful. Many men will love you, great men and rich men will love you. You are so wonderful. Why, there's Captain Neil, he—”
“Captain Neil,” echoed Phyllis, with infinite scorn in her voice. ”

“ God love you and keep you all,” said Barry.
He took his paddle and stepped into the canoe, Paula still stooping over it to keep it steady.
“Dear, dear Barry,” she whispered, and for the first time her tears fell. “Goodbye! Goodbye!”
Together the little company stood watching them away, Phyllis in the bow, not paddling, sat with her face toward them, Barry swinging his paddle with graceful, powerful strokes, until just at a curve of the shore, where some birches overhung the water, he swung the canoe half round, and with paddle held Voyageur fashion in salute, they passed out of sight. ”

“ CHAPTER V THE WAR DRUM CALLS
“Well, dad,” said Barry next evening as they were sitting in the garden after tea, “I feel something like Mohammed's coffin, detached from earth but not yet ascended into heaven. It's unpleasant to be out of a job. I confess I shall always cherish a more intelligent sympathy henceforth for the great unemployed. But cheer up, dad! You are taking this thing much too seriously. The world is wide, and there is something waiting me that I can do better than any one else.” ”

“ He could hardly force himself to remove his muddy, filthy clothes. He would gladly have laid himself down upon his cot just as he was, and given himself up to the luxury of his grief and loneliness, until sleep should come, but his life as a soldier had taught him something. These months of discipline, and especially these last months of companionship with his battalion through the terrible experiences of war, had wrought into the very fibre of his life a sense of unity with and responsibility for his comrades. ”

“ My wife would despise me if I stayed up here. Sir, my wife will buckle on my belt and spurs and send me off to the war,” cried Duff in a voice that shook as he spoke.
With a single stride Barry was at his side, offering both his hands.
“Thank God for men like you! And in my soul I believe the Empire has millions of them.”
“Does your Empire demand that you desert those you have pledged yourself to?” enquired Brand in a sneering tone.
“Oh, Cornwall!” exclaimed Paula, “how can you?”
“Why, Brand,” said Mr. Howland, “that is unworthy of you.” ”

“ An hour later, wearied as he was, Barry crawled into his icy blankets, but with a warmer feeling in his heart than he had known since he joined the battalion. But before he had gone to sleep, there came into his mind a thought that brought him up wide awake. He had quite forgotten all about his duty as chaplain. “What a chance you had there,” insisted his chaplain's conscience, “for a word that would really hearten your men. This is their first night in France. To-morrow they march up to danger and death. ”

“ Do you know that during the last twenty years the rate of Canada's growth was three times greater than ever in the history of the United States? You are a great commercial nation, but do you know that the per capita rate of Canada's trade to-day is many times that of the United States? You are a great agricultural people, but do you know that three-quarters of the wheat land on this continent is Canadian, and that before many years you will be coming to Canada for your wheat, yes, and for your flour? ”

“ In the sorely tortured graveyard, beside the little shell-wrecked Zillebeck church, in a hole made by an enemy shell, they laid McCuaig—a fitting resting place for one who had lived his days in the free wild spaces of the Canadian west, a fitting tomb for as gallant a soldier as Canada ever sent forth to war to make the world free. ”

“ It was a deeply moving scene.
“Madam,” said Mr. Howland, wiping his eyes, “forgive me, but you mothers are the wonder of the war.”
“There are many of us in this glen, sir,” she replied. “We cannot give our lives, sir. We can only give what is dearer than our lives, our dear, dear sons, and, believe me, we don't grudge them.”
“Madam,” said Mr. Howland, “the whole world honours you and wonders at you.”
“Sir,” said Barry, obeying a quick impulse, “I cannot preach, but may I tell your people something about their boys and how splendid they are?”
“Thank you,” said the minister. ”

“ The deck was a mass of soldiers struggling, swearing, fighting their way to their various stations. Officers, half dressed and half awake, were rushing hither and thither, seeking their units, swearing at the men and shouting meaningless orders. Over all the stentorian voice of the sergeant major was vainly trying to make itself understood.
In the confusion the cry was raised: “We're torpedoed! We're going down!”
There was a great rush for the nearest boats. Men flung discipline to the winds and began fighting for a chance of their lives. ”

“ Worn, spent, but with spirit unbroken, they crawled out from under that matted mass of tangled trunks, sending out their wounded before them, and leaving their buried dead behind them, to hold with other Canadian dead the line which from St. Julien, by Hooge, Sanctuary Wood, and Maple Copse, and Mount Sorel, and Hill 60, and on to St. Eloi, guards the way to Ypres and to the sea. To Canada every foot of her great domain, from sea to sea, is dear, but while time shall last Canada will hold dear as her own that bloodsoaked sacred soil which her dead battalions hold for Honour, Faith and Freedom. ”

“ To them it seemed a toy landscape for children to play with, but, as they passed through the big towns and cities with their tall, clustering chimneys, their crowding populations, with unmistakable evidences of great wealth, their shipping, where the harbours bit into the red coast line, there began to waken in them the thought that this tiny England, so beautifully finished, and so neatly adorned, was something mightier than they had ever known. ”

“ The difference between a herd of steers and a battalion of soldiers, in the face of sudden danger, is only this:—the steers break blindly for God knows where, and end piled up over a cut bank; soldiers stand steady listening for the word of command.”
If the O. C. handled the men with a light hand, the sergeant major did not. His tongue rasped them to the raw. No one knows a soldier as does his N. C. O., and no N. C. O. is qualified to set forth the soldier's characteristics with the intimate knowledge and adequate fluency of the sergeant major. ”

“ It is a queer way to speak, after all. What I really ought to say is that God thought it best that I should camp 'round here for a bit longer before moving in nearer.”
“Nearer?”
“Yes, into the nearer circle. Life moves 'round a centre, in outer and inner circles. This is the outer circle. Nearer in there, it is kindlier, with better light and clearer vision. 'We shall know even as we are known.'” Barry mused on, as if communing with himself.
“But when you move in,” said Paula, and there was no mistaking the earnestness of her tone, “you break touch with those you love here.” ”

“ Now, Barry,” continued his father, “this is our last day together for some months, perhaps forever,” he added in a low tone.
“Don't, daddy, don't,” cried Barry, “I can't bear to think of that to-day.”
“All right, Barry, but why not? It is really far better that we should face all the possibilities. But now that we have this day—and what a perfect day it is—for our last day together, what shall we do with it?”
“I know, dad—I think you would wish that we take our ride into the foothills to-day.” ”

“ He turned to his motor car. “I won't forget, sir,” he said to Barry. “Oh, I'll be sure to tell her,” he added with a significant smile.
As Barry was mounting his horse, the strains of the battalion band were heard floating down the street. He drew up his horse beside the entrance and waited. Down the winding hill they came, tall, lean, hard-looking men, striding with the free, easy swing of the men of the foothills. Barry felt his heart fill with pride in his comrades. ”

“ Far down below all their feelings there lay an unanswered interrogation which no man dared to put to his comrade, and which indeed few men put to themselves. That interrogation was: “How shall I stand up under the test?”
The camp was overrun with rumours from returning battalions of the appalling horrors of the front line. Ever since that fateful 22nd of April, 1915, that day of tragedy and of glory for the Canadian army, and for the Canadian people, the Ypres salient, the point of honour on the western front from Dixmude to Verdun, had been given into the keeping of the Canadian army. ”

“ Then together the violin and piano rattled into a fantastic and brilliant variation of that famous and trifling air. Again, with a sudden change of mood, Barry swung into that old song of the homesick plantation negro, “The Suwanee River”—a simple enough air, but under the manipulations of a master lending itself to an interpretation of the deep and tender emotions which in that room and in that company of French, British, Canadian, American folk were throbbing in a common longing for the old home and the “old folks at home.” ”

“ There came to him the sudden thought that Cameron, too, must meet his fellow officers, and must endure their searching chaff, and that he would reveal himself to his undoing; for no man can ever live down in his battalion the whisper that he is a “quitter.” That very night Cameron would be forced to lead up his platoon into the front line, and must lead them step by step over that same Vlammertinghe road, where the transports were nightly shelled. In the presence of any danger soever, he must not falter. ”

“ From Barry's face they looked toward the colonel, who, too dumfounded for speech or action, sat gazing at his chaplain. Then from the end of the table a few places down from Barry, a voice was heard.
“Feel better, Dunbar?” The cool, clear voice cut through the tense silence like the zip of a sword.
“I do, thank you, sir,” looking him straight in the eye.
“The fresh air, doubtless,” continued the cool voice. “I always find myself that even a whiff of fresh air is a very effective antidote for threatening vertigo. ”

“ The R. T. O., a young Imperial officer, blase with his ten months of war in England, had some occult reason for delaying their departure. So, while the night grew every moment wetter and darker, the men sat on their kit-bags or found such shelter as they could in the tiny station, or in the lee of the “goods trains” blocking the railroad tracks, growing more indignant and more disgusted with the British high command, the war in general, and registering with increasing intensity vows of vengeance against the Kaiser, who, in the last analysis, they considered responsible for their misery. ”

“ Standing there to-day, he could only wonder at his former blindness and stupidity and pride.
“Who am I,” he said in bitter self-humiliation, “that I should judge my comrades? How little I knew myself.”
“A man of God,” his superintendent had said in his last letter to him. Yes, truly a man of God! A MAN not God! A MAN not to sit in God's place in judgment upon his fellow sinners, but to show them God, their Father.
Barry thought of the frequent rebukes he had administered to the officers and men for what he considered to be their sins. ”

“ There were those who were eager to “go up” to prove themselves in that deadly struggle where their fellow Canadians had already won their right to stand as comrades in arms with the most famous fighting battalions of the British army. Others, again, there were in whose heart burned a deep passion to get into grips with those hellish fiends whose cruelties, practised upon defenceless women and children in that very district where they were camped, and upon wounded Canadians, had stirred Canada from Vancouver to Halifax with a desire for revenge. ”

“ My country is at war, and I must be there. As God hears me, I am off to-day—now.”
“Me, too!” said Knight with a shout.
“I'm going with you, sir,” said little Harry Hobbs, ranging himself beside Barry.
“Count me in,” said Tom Fielding quietly. “I have a wife and three kids, but—”
“My God!” gasped Duff. “My wife.” His face went white. He had not yet fully adjusted himself to the fact of war.
“Why, of course,” said Mr. Howland, “you married men won't be called upon. You must be reasonable. For instance you, Mr. Duff, cannot leave your wife.” ”

“ Along the sides of the outer room were rows of wounded soldiers, their bandaged heads and arms no whiter than their faces, a patient and pathetic group, waiting without complaint for an ambulance to carry them down the line.
In an inner and operating room, Barry found two or three medical officers, with assistants and orderlies, intent upon their work. While waiting there for their driver, they heard overhead again that ominous and terrifying whine, this time, however, not long drawn, but coming in with terrific speed, and ending with a sharp and shattering crash. ”