was handed out.

This was only one of the many steps that led up to that final day when,
with the band playing such cheerful airs as "The Girl I left behind me"
and "Will ye no come back again," the active service volunteers of the
Umpteenth Battalion left their native town.

The way to the station is but dimly remembered as a haze of faces,
spasmodic attempts at cheering, and the waving of many handkerchiefs.
Much handshaking and the sudden thrusting of presents into arms already
full prefaced the actual pulling out of the train.

The officers gathered on the back of the last car and watched the white
faces of the crowd dwindle to pin points, and then a curve hid town and
people alike from view.

It was less lonely inside the car, where were officers of another
battalion whose men were in the fore part of the train. The elder men
talked in low, serious tones as befitted those who knew something of
what lay before them.

To Lyte and the younger subalterns it seemed as though they were on the
threshold of life's Great Adventure, as indeed they were.

But they were not facing a war of chivalrous deeds such as they
imagined.

Alas for our ideals! war now appears in its true light, as the game of
commerce played on a larger scale with human lives as pawns in the place
of dollars and cents!

And as for chivalry, how can it live in the midst of machine-guns,
asphyxiating gases, and liquid flames?

CHAPTER IV

VAL CARTIER

A more picturesque site for a camp than Val Cartier could hardly be
imagined, situated as it was among the foothills of the Laurentian
mountains along the banks of the Jacques Cartier River.

A gentle slope, dry sandy soil, and plenty of water made it ideal from a
sanitary standpoint, and with the ample manoeuvre grounds available,
the shower sprays, and running water piped throughout the camp, Val
Cartier was the peer of any camp the Canadians have yet seen.

But when we tumbled out of the train in the early morning there was
nothing to show the existence of a military camp except one lonely
bell-tent guarding the railway platform and a pair of wheel-tracks
disappearing in the clumps of second-growth cedars.

Following these tracks we came upon an opening on either side of the
road in which men laboured at clearing away the underbrush. The vivid
colours of the jerseys in which they were clad told the world that those
on the one side were students from McGill, while those on the oth