He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George’s plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged something....
He tore open the message, and read: “Utica July thirty-first. No news from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher.”
“Good Lord!” Campton groaned—“and I never even asked the boy’s address!”
BOOK II
X
The war was three months old—three centuries.
By virtue of some gift of adaptation which seemed forever to discredit human sensibility, people were already beginning to live into the monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its language, regard it as a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by day, and sleep on it—yes, and soundly—at night.
The war went on; life went on; Paris went on. She had had her great hour of resistance, when, alone, exposed and defenceless, she had held back the enemy and broken his strength. She had had, afterward, her hour of triumph, the hour of the Marne; then her hour of passionate and prayerful hope, when it seemed to the watching nations that the enemy was not only held back but thrust back, and victory finally in reach. That hour had passed in its turn, giving way to the grey reality of the trenches. A new speech was growing up in this new world. There were trenches now, there was a “Front”—people were beginning to talk of their sons at the front.
The first time John Campton heard the phrase it sent a shudder through him. Winter was coming on, and he was haunted by the vision of the youths out there, boys of George’s age, thousands and thousands of them, exposed by day in reeking wet ditches and sleeping at night under the rain and snow. People were talking calmly of victory in the spring—the spring that was still six long months away! And meanwhile, what cold and wet, what blood and agony, what shattered bodies out on that hideous front, what shattered homes in all the lands it guarded!
Campton could bear to think of these things now. His son was not at the front—was safe, thank God, and likely to remain so!