Burned Bridges

"No. I suppose they were drunk or something. Fritz was pretty bad in

spots, all right. Maybe they just wanted to put the fear of God in their

hearts. A pal of mine in Flanders told me of a woman--in a place they

took by a night raid--she had her breast slashed open. She said a Boche

officer did it with his sword."

The man spoke of these things in a detached, impersonal manner, as one

who states commonplace facts. He had not particularly desired to speak

of them. For him those gruesome incidents of war and invasion held no

special horror. They might have rested heavily enough on his mind once.

But he had come apparently to accept them as the grim collateral of war,

without reacting emotionally to their terrible significance. And when

Thompson ceased to question him he ceased to talk.

But in Thompson these calmly recounted horrors worked profound distress.

His imagination became immediately shot with sinister pictures. All

these things which he had read and doubted, which had left him unmoved,

now took on a terrible reality. He could see these things about which

the returned soldier spoke, and seeing them believed. Believing, there

rose within him a protest that choked him with its force as he sat in

the cockpit beside this veteran of Flanders.

The man had fallen silent, staring into the green depths overside.

Thompson sat silent beside him. But there was in Thompson none of the

other's passivity. Unlike the returned soldier, who had seen blood and

death until he was surfeited with it, until he wanted nothing but peace

and quietness, and a chance to rest his shrapnel-torn body and

shell-shocked nerves, Thompson quivered with a swift, hot desire to kill

and destroy, to inflict vengeance. He burned for reprisal. For a

passionate moment he felt as if he could rend with his bare hands a man

or men who could wantonly mutilate women and children. He could find no

fit name for such deeds.

And, responding so surely to that unexpected stimulus, he had no

stomach for crossing the Inlet as Tommy's guest, to view the scene of

Tommy's industrial triumph-to-be. He wasn't interested in that now.

Sitting under the awning, brooding over these things, he remembered how

Sophie Carr had reacted to the story of the Belgian refugee that

afternoon a year and a half ago. He understood at last. He divined how

Sophie felt that day. And he had blandly discounted those things. He had

gone about his individual concerns insulated against any call to right

wrongs, to fight oppression, to abolish that terror which loomed over

Europe--and which might very well lay its sinister hand on America, if

the Germans were capable of these things, and if the German's military

power prevailed over France and England. When he envisaged Canada as

another Belgium his teeth came together with a little click.