Stretcher Bearers at the Double - ElectricCanadian.com

280 POST-WAR ACTIVITIES
Why were the known defeatists at London and Ottawa not
brought to trial and punished?
Why were some of the profiteers who supplied uneatable food,
dud munitions and shoddy war materials given knighthoods
and other high honors instead of being sent to prison?
Why was it possible for the Government to conscript a man s
life - - but impossible to conscript the money of the wealthy
who were battening on the war?
Have our federal, provincial and civic governments treated
returned men in a manner befitting the sacrifices they made
overseas? Haven t we too many "professional patriots"
and
flag-wavers exploiting our veterans?
Has not the total amount spent in the administration of pen
sions, etc., been out of all proportion to the amount of assistance
which has actually reached the very men it was intended to help?
Truly these are disturbing questions - - and we despair of ever
hearing them answered satisfactorily. Our questions betray the
fact that we are distrustful of the past and fearful of the future,
but our concern is not for ourselves. We are thinking of our sons
and grandsons. Most of our young men of military age are now
too young to have participated in the Great War. Very soon
that powerful present argument against war - - the recollection
of its horrors, abuses, propaganda and exploitations, by the men
who took part in it - - will no longer be valid. What will happen
then? Will the world be plunged into a war which will, in com
parison, make the last war seem like a mere skirmish?
But we who soldiered overseas have Something we would not
exchange for -
anything else in this world - a Memory of com
radeships dearer than any which peacetime could have brought;
a Memory of experiences, trials and moral victories which are
almost beyond belief; a Memory of sacrifice and self-abnegation
of which we never dreamed ourselves capable before the war.
Oh no ! We wouldn t trade our army days for anything - - even
though we were, in a sense, robbed of our boyhood, plundered
of our youth, and flung deliberately into a hellish testing furnace
before we were old enough, many of us, to know the ordinary
ways and pitfalls of a peacetime world. Many of us came out
of the war burned-out wrecks, possessed only of tragic disillus
ioned minds and broken bodies to carry us toward an old age
from which we will, thank Heaven, be mercifully spared.