FullReads

IV. Going to the Wars

John McCrae went to the war without illusions. At first, like many others of his age, he did not “think of enlisting”, although “his services are at the disposal of the Country if it needs them.”

In July, 1914, he was at work upon the second edition of the ‘Text-Book of Pathology’ by Adami and McCrae, published by Messrs. Lea and Febiger, and he had gone to Philadelphia to read the proofs. He took them to Atlantic City where he could “sit out on the sand, and get sunshine and oxygen, and work all at once.”

It was a laborious task, passing eighty to a hundred pages of highly technical print each day. Then there was the index, between six and seven thousand items. “I have,” so he writes, “to change every item in the old index and add others. I have a pile of pages, 826 in all. I look at the index, find the old page among the 826, and then change the number. This about 7000 times, so you may guess the drudgery.” On July 15th, the work was finished, registered, and entrusted to the mail with a special delivery stamp. The next day he wrote the preface, “which really finished the job.” In very truth his scientific work was done.

It was now midsummer. The weather was hot. He returned to Montreal. Practice was dull. He was considering a voyage to Havre and “a little trip with Dr. Adami” when he arrived. On July 29th, he left Canada “for better or worse. With the world so disturbed,” he records, “I would gladly have stayed more in touch with events, but I dare say one is just as happy away from the hundred conflicting reports.” The ship was the ‘Scotian’ of the Allan Line, and he “shared a comfortable cabin with a professor of Greek,” who was at the University in his own time.

For one inland born, he had a keen curiosity about ships and the sea. There is a letter written when he was thirteen years of age in which he gives an account of a visit to a naval exhibition in London. He describes the models which he saw, and gives an elaborate table of names, dimensions, and tonnage. He could identify the house flags and funnels of all the principal liners; he could follow a ship through all her vicissitudes and change of ownership. When he found himself in a seaport town his first business was to visit the water front and take knowledge of the vessels that lay in the stream or by the docks. One voyage he made to England was in a cargo ship. With his passion for work he took on the duties of surgeon, and amazed the skipper with a revelation of the new technique in operations which he himself had been accustomed to perform by the light of experience alone.

On the present and more luxurious voyage, he remarks that the decks were roomy, the ship seven years old, and capable of fifteen knots an hour, the passengers pleasant, and including a large number of French. All now know only too well the nature of the business which sent those ardent spirits flocking home to their native land.

Forty-eight hours were lost in fog. The weather was too thick for making the Straits, and the ‘Scotian’ proceeded by Cape Race on her way to Havre. Under date of August 5-6 the first reference to the war appears: “All is excitement; the ship runs without lights. Surely the German kaiser has his head in the noose at last: it will be a terrible war, and the finish of one or the other. I am afraid my holiday trip is knocked galley west; but we shall see.” The voyage continues. A “hundred miles from Moville we turned back, and headed South for Queenstown; thence to the Channel; put in at Portland; a squadron of battleships; arrived here this morning.”