lages and towns were beginning to come those tales of
unbelievable atrocities that were to shock the world into horrified
amazement. These tales read in the Canadian papers clutched men's
throats and gripped men's hearts as with cruel fingers of steel.
Canadians were beginning to see red. The blood of Belgium's murdered
victims was indeed to prove throughout Canada and throughout the world
the seed of mighty armies.

At the end of the second week Jane could refrain no longer. She wrote to
Larry.

CHAPTER XXIII

A NEUTRAL NATION

The first days of the war were for Larry days of dazed bewilderment and
of ever-deepening misery. The thing which he had believed impossible had
come. That great people upon whose generous ideals and liberal Christian
culture he had grounded a sure hope of permanent peace had flung to the
winds all the wisdom, and all justice, and all the humanity which the
centuries had garnered for them, and, following the primal instincts of
the brute, had hurled forth upon the world ruthless war. Even the great
political party of the Social Democrats upon which he had relied to make
war impossible had without protest or division proclaimed enthusiastic
allegiance to the war programme of the Kaiser. The universities and the
churches, with their preachers and professors, had led the people in mad
acclaim of war. His whole thinking on the subject had been proved wrong.
Passionately he had hoped against hope that Britain would not allow
herself to enter the war, but apparently her struggle for peace had
been in vain. His first feeling was one of bitter disappointment and of
indignation with the great leaders of the British people who had allowed
themselves to become involved in a Mid-European quarrel. Sir Edward
Grey's calm, moderate--sub-moderate, indeed--exposition of the causes
which had forced Britain into war did much to cool his indignation, and
Bethmann-Hollweg's cynical explanation of the violation of Belgium's
neutrality went far to justify Britain's action consequent upon that
outraging of treaty faith. The deliberate initiation of the policy
of "frightfulness" which had heaped such unspeakable horrors upon the
Belgian people tore the veil from the face of German militarism and
revealed in its sheer brutality the ruthlessness and lawlessness of that
monstrous system.

From the day of Austria's ultimatum to Servia Larry began to read
everything he could find dealing with modern European hist