It was a questioning of this nature that troubled Rod Norquay on an evening in January, A.D. 1919. He sat among civilians in a Canadian Pacific smoking car while the Imperial Limited rolled westward through a rainy night. He was on familiar ground again, the soil where five generations of his blood had been nourished. The Coast Range was far behind the train. On his right the Fraser River made a pale shimmer in the darkness, with here and there the glowworm running lights, the yellow window squares of a river boat. It was good to be back, back to life that could be lived fully and freely, not simply endured. But it was not good for him, in those last homeward miles, to listen to the talk that ran in the smoker. It was pitched to the same key as had fretted him in Paris, in London, all the way across North America,--boundaries, coal and iron, concessions, indemnities, reparations. Europe, Asia, and Africa, the islands of the Pacific, had been rearranged, parcelled out, in Rod's hearing in hotel lobbys, in ship saloons, in railway coaches, day after day, by sleek, middle-aged civilians, clever successful fellows who knew what was what. He was sick of it. Was that the reality behind the war to end war? "Loot," he said to himself scornfully. "They can call it what they like, but that's what they mean." In the field even Fritz shot his looters when he caught them red-handed. But in civil life, behind the rampart of a victorious army, they had their eye on the loot. They couldn't see much else that was worth consideration. This group in the smoker,--he had been in the enforced physical intimacy of railway travel with them for four days. They had been a trifle backward about approaching this moody young man in a London-tailored uniform of the C.E.F. with three thin gold stripes on his sleeve. They had respected his reserved silence. But they had talked for his benefit. Short of stuffing his ears with cotton he could not avoid hearing. And they talked voluminously, sagely, on the political and economic aspects of the war, and the peace that was in the making. Rod grew to hate them. In his own mind he called them buzzards. Which is a measure of his state of mind, for he was naturally courteous and tolerant toward his fellow men. He welcomed the dim turreted and domed outlines of Hasting Park. He recalled the mustering and drilling there, the housing of men by thousands in buildings designed for show cattle. By a curious association of ideas he reflected that many of those men had been butchered less mercifully than the stall-fed beeves once shown in those barn-like structures, every time a battalion went up the line, wherever bombing squadrons could locate trench or billet, whenever enemy field guns could get the range.