CANADA'S WAR CAMP
When we reached Valcartier no one in his wildest dreams would ever
have associated us with soldiers, as a more motley-looking crowd
would be hard to find. Here trudges a squat Scotchman, his freckled
face a stream of perspiration, cursing the heat with a Doric accent
you could cut with a shovel; next to him marches Big Bill Skerry, a
tall Nova Scotian, as straight as the pine trees of his native
province. Dear old Bill! he lies in the death trap at Ypres, dying
as he had lived, afraid of nothing in human form, witty and dry of
speech, quickest in repartee, and proud of his Irish-Canadian
ancestry. And for all his profane mouth and caustic tongue, he was
one of the best and bravest comrades a man could find with whom to
share the trials and pleasures of active service. Marching with his
usual air of detached boredom is Captain Innis Hopkins, the most
ridiculed and, later, the best loved officer of all the gallant men
who cursed us and nursed us and finally led us into France, as fine a
bunch of men as ever stepped from a deck of a transport.
At my immediate right proudly marched a handsome, rosy-cheeked boy,
with a complexion a lady might have envied; tall, lithe, with the
promise of a fine manhood, and with the frank blue eyes of him
shining with good-natured deviltry, he was already winning the hearts
of his future comrades. By his side tramped a squat, slightly
bow-legged man, of swarthy skin and jet-black hair, streaked with
gray, surmounted by a stubble of black beard. The contrast between
those two was startling, and yet a friendship sprang up between them
that no ordinary civilian ever will understand, a friendship cemented
by sharing danger and suffering, sinking every selfish consideration
for the well-being of the other.
This will give some slight idea of the boys I soldiered with and who
were to be my chums. But of all these, Morgan was closest to me. By
that mysterious attraction which draws men to one another we became
chums and yet no two men could be more unlike in temperament; he was
reserved almost to the point of rudeness, while I have always been
ready--perhaps too much so for my own good--to make friends at once.
When we got into the game, through the medium of that peculiar
characteristic I have already mentioned, he sensed, like the steer
nearing the shambles, any disaster or trouble ahead, and at those
times he would overwhelm me with demonstrations of affection, and
afterwards, apparently ashamed of his outburst, he would find some
pretext to pick a quarrel with me, and curse me with a fluency and
picturesqueness only acquired by long and careful practice. Many
times we got to blows. But we loved each other and still do, and his
love for me was thoroughly evidenced later on.