It was in this period that certain phases of the war began to shake the
foundation of things. I do not recall who said that an army marches on
its stomach, but it is true, and it is no less a verity that nations
function primarily on food. The submarine was waxing to its zenith now,
and Europe saw the gaunt wolf at its door. Men cried for more ships.
Cost became secondary. A vessel paid for herself if she landed but two
cargoes in an Allied port.
Every demand in the economic field produces a supply. On this side of
the Atlantic great shipbuilding plants arose by some superior magic of
construction in ports where the building of ships had been a minor
industry. In this Vancouver did not lag. Wooden ships could be built
quickly. Virgin forests of fir and cedar stood at Vancouver's very door.
Wherefore yards, capable of turning out a three-thousand-ton wooden
steamer in ninety days, rose on tidewater, and an army of labor sawed
and hammered and shaped to the ultimate confusion of the Hun.
Thompson had seen these yards in the distance. He read newspapers and he
knew that local shipbuilding was playing the dual purpose of
confounding the enemy and adding a huge pay-roll to Vancouver's other
material advantages. Both of which were highly desirable.
But few details of this came personally to his attention until an
evening when he happened to foregather with Tommy Ashe and two or three
others at Carr's home--upon one of those rare evenings when Sophie was
free of her self-imposed duties and in a mood to play the hostess.
They had dined, and were gathered upon a wide verandah watching the sun
sink behind the rampart of Vancouver Island in a futurist riot of yellow
and red that died at last to an afterglow which lingered on the mountain
tops like a benediction. A bit of the Gulf opened to them, steel-gray,
mirror-smooth, more like a placid, hill-ringed lake than the troubled
sea.
But there was more in the eye's cast than beauty of sea and sky and
setting sun. From their seats they could look down on the curious jumble
of long sheds and giant scaffolding that was the great Coughlan steel
shipyard in False Creek. Farther distant, on the North Shore, there was
the yellowish smudge of what a keen vision discerned to be six wooden
schooners in a row, sister ships in varying stages of construction.
Some one said something about wooden shipbuilding.
"There's another big yard starting on the North Shore," Sophie said.
"One of our committee was telling me to-day. Her husband has something
to do with it."
"Yes. I can verify that," Tommy Ashe smiled. "That's my
contribution--the Vancouver Construction Company. I organized it. We
have contracted to supply the Imperial Munitions Board with ten
auxiliary schooners, three thousand tons burden each."