annon-thunder of war.

It would be waste words to describe here the varying fortunes of the
grappling armies during the next few months. The newspapers and current
periodicals and countless self-appointed historians have attended to
that. It is all recorded, so that one must run to read it all. It is as
terribly vivid to us now as it was distant and shadowy then--a madness
of slaughter and destruction that raged on the other side of the earth,
a terror from which we stood comfortably aloof.

There was something in the war unseen by Thompson and the Hendersons and
a countless host of intelligent, well-dressed, comfortable people who
bought extras wet from the press to read of that merciless thrust
through Belgium, the shock and recoil and counter-shock of armies, of
death dealt wholesale with scientific precision, of 42-centimeter guns
and poison gas and all the rest of that bloody nightmare--they did not
see the dread shadow that hung over Europe lengthening and spreading
until its murky pall should span the Atlantic.

Thompson was a Canadian. He knew by the papers that Canada was at war, a
voluntary participant. But it did not strike him that he was at war. He
felt no call to arms. In San Francisco there was no common ferment in
the public mind, no marching troops, no military bands making a man's
feet tingle to follow as they passed by. Men discussed the war in much
the same tone as they discussed the stock market. If there was any
definite feeling in the matter it was that the European outbreak was
strictly a European affair. When the German spearhead blunted its point
against the Franco-British legions and the gray hosts recoiled upon the
Marne, the Amateur Board of Strategy said it would be over in six
months.

In any case, American tradition explicitly postulated that what
occurred in Europe was not, could not, be vital to Americans. But in the
last test blood proves thicker than water. Sentimentally, the men
Thompson knew were pro-Ally. Only, in practice there was no apparent
reason why they should do otherwise than as they had been doing. And in
effect San Francisco only emulated her sister cities when she proceeded
about "business as usual"--just as in those early days, before the war
had bitten deep into their flesh and blood, British merchants flung that
slogan in the face of the enemy.

So that to Wes Thompson, concentrated upon his personal affairs, the war
never became more than something akin to a ba