Burned Bridges

"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.