The news came to the Glen in the first week of August, 1914, on a hot evening, and at first it seemed to belong to other people. England was at war. Canada, therefore, was at war. Susan said that the Kaiser would be sorry, and went on shelling peas.
Within the week Jem had gone into Charlottetown with the minister’s son, and they came back two days later in khaki.
He was twenty-one. He had not asked us. He did not need to, and he knew it, and so did we. I remember Gilbert’s face when the two of them came up the walk — the face of a man who is very proud and very frightened and has decided to show only the first. I remember that I said something ordinary about supper.
They were to go to a great camp in Quebec, at Valcartier, where the first contingent was being gathered and trained before it sailed. Jem wrote from there that the tents went on for miles, that the food was bad and the company was good, and that he had never been so happy in his life. I believed him. That was the worst of it.
Walter did not go that year. He was not yet strong after a typhoid the year before, and he was honest, and he told his sister what he would not tell me: that he was afraid, not of dying, but of what he would have to do. It was a long time before I understood that this was not the opposite of courage.
