A tribe of Eskimos hunting south had met some coast Indians who had been trading, at Christmas, at Fort George in James Bay. The Crees had tried to explain to the Huskies what the Missionaries and White Traders had told them, but the peace-loving Eskimos could not realize what the word “war” meant. Furthermore, their knowledge of the Cree language was very confused. They told our man that there were a lot of dead people in the white man’s land, far away over the sea; that the noise was terrible and that the white men’s Igloos were all destroyed. They did not mention the words—war, shell, gas—which the more civilized Indians knew from hearsay and had told to them. They just repeated what had struck their imagination. In other words, what they had understood.
The trader pondered for months over that rumor. In the end he came to the conclusion that there had been a great earthquake somewhere in Europe, like the one in California in 1906, and dismissed the matter from his mind. He never thought of war.
It was in summer, when the supply ship reached his Post, that he learned what had really happened. He left at once to join the French Army and was killed a year later at Verdun.