Spring 1915

The thaw came late that year, but when it did, it carried with it a sense of motion. The roads turned to mud, the sap began to run, and the men who hadn’t gone overseas yet found themselves working double — at home, in the fields, and for the war effort. The talk had shifted from if we’d win to how long it might take, and no one liked the answers.

Across the Pontiac, the tone of The Equity was changing. Less cheering, more doing. Articles urged readers to “make your farm a factory” and treat every acre like a soldier’s duty. The Patriotic Fund campaigns were still strong — women’s groups organizing socials, young people gathering donations, the occasional band concert to keep spirits up — but you could sense fatigue setting in. The excitement of 1914 had worn off. This was work now, plain and hard.

Prices rose. Butter and pork fetched a few cents more each week, but so did everything else. Flour, sugar, lamp oil — it all crept upward. People grumbled, quietly, but few blamed the merchants. Everyone understood that ships carrying goods to Europe carried danger too, and that prices were just another front in the war.

Letters from the front began arriving more regularly, and with them came the first details that the early dispatches had left out — the cold, the mud, the endless waiting. Some boys wrote cheerfully, describing France like a foreign farm; others wrote less often, their words fewer and heavier. Those letters were read aloud at kitchen tables and church suppers, always with a mix of pride and fear.

In April, the news from Ypres reached even the smallest villages. The talk of gas attacks sounded unbelievable at first — poison in the air? But the casualty lists that followed silenced any doubt. The Equity printed them carefully, line by line, with a kind of reverence. Familiar names. Family names. The kind that made neighbours stop talking when they saw each other in town.

Still, life pressed on. Spring meant planting, no matter the headlines. The fields along the Ottawa River filled with the usual sight of horses pulling seeders, and women took over jobs that had never been theirs before — tending fences, driving teams, running stores while husbands and brothers were away. If anyone called it sacrifice, they didn’t say it out loud. It was just what needed to be done.

When Easter came, the sermons were heavy with talk of duty and redemption. Ministers reminded congregations that Christ had suffered, too, and that endurance was a kind of faith. There were fewer lilies on the altars that year — too expensive, too impractical — but the pews were full. People needed something steady to hold on to.

By the end of May, a headline in The Equity read simply: “The War Grinds On.” The phrase stuck. It wasn’t defeatist, just honest. The spring had brought no peace, only more names and more work. But under the weariness, a kind of quiet strength had taken root. The first shock of war had passed; now came the long endurance.