It's Thursday, July 30, 1914. In five days time, England will declare war on Germany, taking Canada with her, and the pacific nineteenth century, which has lingered well past its sell-by date into a golden Edwardian twilight, will vanish in a new, savage warfare of peoples.

Who knows what sadnesses the people in this picture will endure as their sons and brothers go off to fight in the trenches of France. But all that is to come. It's a pleasant summer's eve in Belleville, Ontario. Archduke Ferdinand's assassination in Sarajevo a month ago is already old news. Mobilization may be sweeping like a tide through the empires of Europe, but if there's to be war, it will all be over by Christmas. Oh, surely. There are more immediate things to consider. Lawn bowling, for instance.

Charles Nelson Sulman, mayor of Belleville from 1905 to 1907, and the proprietor of The Beehive, a Belleville dry-goods store, is keen on the game. Surrounded by other members of the Belleville lawn-bowling club and their smartly turned-out wives, he observes carefully while the distance of his bowl from the "jack"—the small white ball proximity to which is the bowler's objective-is measured. Is his bowl closer? Or that of another gentleman? We'll never know.

In the 1920s, Sulman will go on to play against touring South African bowling teams. He will sell The Beehive in 1928 and put his money into stocks. The market will crash the following year, but he will carry on, as so many did. The war to end all wars will engender another war. Three years after that war ends, Charles Nelson Sulman will pass away.

Charles R. Bateman, who submitted this photograph, is the grandson of Charles Sulman. He lives in Waterloo, Ontario and still has possession of his grandfather's mahogany bowls.