The Imposter's War by Mark Arsenault

Author:Mark Arsenault
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2022-04-05T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 12 Good Friends/High Places

The winter sun had been down for hours. It was a cold night in Ottawa, Ontario. Hard snow lingered on the grounds of the grandiose Parliament Building, seat of the Canadian government, perched on a bluff above the Ottawa River.

The people’s business on the legislative calendar that evening was light and a bit dull. Samuel Francis Glass, MP, a member of the House of Commons, let himself into the Parliament reading room around quarter to nine. Glass was fifty-five, clean-shaven, and wore his hair parted straight up the middle. He perused the shelves of newspapers for fresh editions from London. Finding none, he grabbed that afternoon’s copy of the Ottawa Evening Journal, February 3, 1916, a Thursday, and settled down at a long table to catch up with the news.

There were six long tables in the reading room, laid out in a row. Horizontal shelves installed under the tables held all sorts of newspapers. Around the room, books and more periodicals were organized—in some cases simply piled—on even more shelving. Just about all the fittings in the room were made from soft white pine; dry old wood oiled and varnished to a sheen.

The top headline in the Evening Journal reported speculation that President Woodrow Wilson had sent an envoy to Germany to try to broker peace in Europe. Glass devoured the gossipy political notes column on the front page, perhaps looking for his own name—no luck there—and then became engrossed in a story about the Appam, a British steamship captured at sea by the Germans, when suddenly he felt a whoosh of heat passing alongside of him, as if somebody had flicked the switch of a hot air blower.

Glass turned and caught a whiff of burning paper. Flames flickered from a file of newsprint beneath the next table. Glass threw up his hands and called out, but the caretaker was not in the room. The MP ran to the door and shouted for the constable in the hall to get a fire extinguisher. In those precious seconds, the fire became too big for one person to put out. Flames spread with startling speed out of the reading room and into corridors ornamented with polished, highly flammable wood paneling.

In the chamber of the House of Commons, a couple dozen members wearily debated a proposal related to retail fish prices when the chief doorkeeper burst in and shouted, “There is a big fire in the reading room! Everybody get out quickly!”

A big fire? None of the members smelled fire. They calmly gathered their things and locked their desks. When they opened the door to leave, choking black smoke poured into the chamber. The members of Parliament and the spectators in the gallery had to run for their lives, hands over their faces, through a hot death fog. A newsman crawled from the gallery on his hands and knees. A worker cut a portrait of Queen Victoria from its frame and sprinted it to safety just ahead of the conflagration.

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