The effect was one of lonely grandeur.

What was it going to mean to us?
What did fate hold in store?
Among those hills, the outline of which I could now but faintly see, were the lakes and salmon rivers in the heart of the great forests which make our Canadian wild life so fascinating.

We were being torn from that life and sent headlong into the seething militarism of a decadent European feudalism.

I was leaning on the rail looking at the track of moonlight, when a young lad came up to me and said, "Excuse me, Sir, but may I talk to you for a while?
It is such a weird sight that it has got on my nerves." He was a young boy of seventeen who had come from Vancouver.

Many times afterwards I met him in France and Belgium, when big things were being done in the war, and we talked together over that night in Gaspe Basin and the strange thoughts that crowded upon us then.