"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."
On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific
train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves
and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging
imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt
beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of
a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.
Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few
whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome
for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper
and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from
the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered
with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the
train below.
It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But
it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely
heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious,
facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly
the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, gassed and
shrapnel-scarred--and some who bore no visible sign only the white face
and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and
suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of
the flesh, as many a man can testify.
From one coach there alighted a youngish man in the uniform of the Royal
Flying Corps. He carried a black bag. He walked a little stiffly. Beyond
that he bore no outward trace of disablement. His step and manner
suggested no weakness. One had to look close to discern pallor and a
peculiar roving habit of the eyes, a queer tensity of the body. A
neurologist, versed in the by-products of war, could have made a fair
guess at this man's medical-history sheet. But the folk on the platform
that night were not specialists in subtle diagnosis of the nervous
system. Nor were the committees. They were male and female of those who
had done their bit at home, were doing it now, welcoming their broken
heroes. The sight of a man with a scarred face, a mutilated limb,
elicited their superficial sympathy, while the hidden sickness of racked
nerves in an unmaimed body they simply could not grasp.
So this man with the black bag and the wings on his left arm walked the
length of the platform, gained the steel stairway which led to the main
floor of the depot, and when he had climbed half-way stopped to rest and
to look down over the rail.