Looking at the crops and the river and the line of forest behind the parish that summer, it was hard to believe the country had now been four years at war. But the war was there, over the horizon, threatening Quebec the way so many things over the horizon had always done: not only the fighting, not the killing and the cruelty, but the enormousness of it, the way it had grown into a world industry, the new machinery and the growing madness and the altars to national gods.
In the rest of Canada no horizon held it off. In all the little towns along the double tracks that held the country together from one end to the other the war ate into everyone’s mind. People went to bed with it, and during the days it worked beside them like a shadow of themselves. They could never do enough for it. Names like Ypres, Courcelette, Lens, Vimy, Cambrai, Arras, the Somme, had become as familiar and as much a part of Canada as Fredericton, Moose Jaw, Sudbury or Prince Rupert.
Perhaps in Quebec the serene permanence of the river itself helped confirm the people in their sureness that their instinct was right; that the war was the product of the cities which constantly threatened their tradition, of English-American big business, factories, power dams, banks, trusts, heavy industry and the incessant jabbering noise of the outside world which bombarded their own idea of themselves, roaring that they were weak, unimportant, unprogressive, too backward to understand the magnificence of the war. And beside, there was the faith. All through the Laurentian country thousands of Sulpicians, Jesuits, Dominicans, Benedictines, Franciscans, Trappists, Servites, Carmelites, Ursulines, Little Sisters of the Assumption, Grey Nuns, lay-brothers and lay-sisters, bishops, parish priests, vicars and seminary students worked on in the unbroken tradition out of the Middle Ages and contemplated the Catholic God. Against the light of Eternity, the war seemed only a brutish interlude.
So the country brooded on through midsummer, each part bound to the others like a destiny, even in opposition forming a unity none could dissolve, the point and counterpoint of a harmony so subtle they never guessed its existence.