CHAPTER XII IN THE DAYS OF LANGEMARCK `` How can spring come and be beautiful in such a horror , '' wrote Rilla in her diary . `` When the sun shines and the fluffy yellow catkins are coming out on the willow-trees down by the brook , and the garden is beginning to be beautiful I ca n't realize that such dreadful things are happening in Flanders . But they are ! `` This past week has been terrible for us all , since the news came of the fighting around Ypres and the battles of Langemarck and St. Julien . Our Canadian boys have done splendidly -- General French says they ` saved the situation , ' when the Germans had all but broken through . But I ca n't feel pride or exultation or anything but a gnawing anxiety over Jem and Jerry and Mr. Grant . The casualty lists are coming out in the papers every day -- oh , there are so many of them . I ca n't bear to read them for fear I 'd find Jem 's name -- for there have been cases where people have seen their boys ' names in the casualty lists before the official telegram came . As for the telephone , for a day or two I just refused to answer it , because I thought I could not endure the horrible moment that came between saying ` Hello ' and hearing the response . That moment seemed a hundred years long , for I was always dreading to hear ` There is a telegram for Dr. Blythe . ' Then , when I had shirked for a while , I was ashamed of leaving it all for mother or Susan , and now I make myself go . But it never gets any easier . Gertrude teaches school and reads compositions and sets examination papers just as she always has done , but I know her thoughts are over in Flanders all the time . Her eyes haunt me . `` And Kenneth is in khaki now , too . He has got a lieutenant 's commission and expects to go overseas in midsummer , so he wrote me . There was n't much else in the letter -- he seemed to be thinking of nothing but going overseas . I shall not see him again before he goes -- perhaps I will never see him again . Sometimes I ask myself if that evening at Four Winds was all a dream . It might as well be -- it seems as if it happened in another life lived years ago -- and everybody has forgotten it but me .
`` Walter and Nan and Di XXXXX home last night from Redmond .
came coming gets got haunt lived make reads realize thinking