'Inarticulate Doubt'

1915.
The year itself looks sepia and soiled - muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots, everyone at first seems timid - lost - irresolute. Boys and men stand squinting at the camera. Women turn away suspicious. They still maintain a public reticence....
...Then something happens. April. Ypres. Six thousand dead and wounded. The war that was meant to end my Christmas might not end till summer. Maybe Fall. This is where the pictures alter - fill up with soldiers - horses - wagons. Everyone is waving at either the soldiers or the cameras. More and more people want to be seen. More and more people want to be remembered. Hundreds - thousands - crowd into frame.
Here come the troops down Yonge street! The women abandon all their former reticence and rush into the roadway, throwing flowers and waving flags. Here come the 48th highlanders! Boys run after them on bikes. Girls, whose mouth hangs over, hardly dare to follow. Older men remove their hats. There is Sir Samuel Hughes standing on the dais, taking the farewell salute. 'GOD SAVE THE KING!!!' (a banner). Everywhere you look, trains are pulling out of stations, ships are sailing out of ports. Music drowns the long hurrah. Everyone is focused now, shadinf their eyes against the sun. Everyone is watching with an outstretched arm. Silence at the edge of wharves and time....
...Then you see him: Robert Ross - standing on the sidelines with pocketed hands - feet apart and narrowed eyes. His hair falls sideways across his forehead. He wears a checkered cap and a dark blue suit. He watches with a dubious expression; half admiring, half reluctant to admire. He's old enough to go to war. He hasn't gone. He doubts the validity in all this martialling of men, but the doubt is inarticulate. I stammers in his brain. He puts his hand out sideways, turns. He reaches for the wicker back of a wheelchair. 'Come on Rowena, there's still the rest of the park to sit in [p. 8-9].'

Robert's intuition warns him against the flurry of nationalism proffered by the alliance of the crown and Sir Sam to the masses. It appeals to the youth searching for an identity in a world whose modernisation has been sped up by war. He would rather protect the serenity of his dear disabled sister than join the impersonal fray, but cannot justify his reluctance. He is everything to his helpless sister, and would become nothing to the eminent British Empire were he to enlist - and yet, his inklings are undermined even by his own family; a mother who hands out chocolate to the departing troops, a brother who has altered his wagon to vaguely resemble a tank, and a father, whose own sense of forboding remains mute.