Thompson's Return

"Anon we return, being gathered again
Across the sad valleys all drabbled with rain."

On an evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific
train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves
and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging
imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt
beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of
a hill on which the city sits looking on the harbor waters below.

Upon the long, shed-roofed platform were gathered the fortunate few
whose men were on that train. Behind these waited committees of welcome
for stray dogs of war who had no kin. The environs of the depot proper
and a great overhead bridge, which led traffic of foot and wheel from
the streets to the docks, high over the railway yards, were cluttered
with humanity that cheered loudly at the first dribble of khaki from the
train below.

It was not a troop train, merely the regular express from the East. But
it bore a hundred returned men, and news of their coming had been widely
heralded. So the wives and sweethearts, the committees, and the curious,
facile-minded crowd, were there to greet these veterans who were mostly
the unfortunates of war, armless, legless men, halt and lame, gassed and
shrapnel-scarred--and some who bore no visible sign only the white face
and burning eyes of men who had met horror and walked with it and
suffered yet from the sight. All the wounds of the war are not solely of
the flesh, as many a man can testify.