“Hurrah! hurrah!� he said. “News, great news!�
“The Liberty Loan has gone over the top,� guessed Red Mayo.
“Of course, of course! But something else is going over the top. Our American boys! They are facing the Germans in ‘No Man’s Land.’ To-day, to-day for the first time, our American boys were in the first-line trenches on the French front. Hurrah! hurrah! We are in The War!�
Every voice joined in a cheer that rang and rang again. Mr. Tavis and the other old Confederates raised the “rebel yell,� their old valiant battle cry. The children clapped their hands and shouted: “We are in it! We are in it! We are in The War!�
Sweet William clapped and cheered with the best. Then he turned to his mother. “What does it mean, mother, our men ‘in the trenches’?� he asked. “Does it mean we’ve beat the war?�
“It means our soldiers are over there, fighting side by side with our Allies against the Germans,� explained his mother. “I don’t know whether it’s defeat or victory to-day; but we Americans will stay there till we win The War—if you and I have to go to help, little son—to conquer the world for peace and freedom.�
CHAPTER XII
IN his Christmas sermon, the Village minister gave thanks that the British, in this twentieth-century crusade of liberty, had accomplished the purpose of the old Crusades and had wrested Jerusalem, the Holy City, from the Turks who had held it for nearly seven hundred years. And a few Sundays later, he charged each citizen to take, as his New Year’s resolution for the nation, the “fourteen principles of peace� formulated by the first citizen of America and of the world.
Thanksgiving and peace terms! Those were the things people were taking as matters of course, feeling sure, that now America was in the war, the victorious end would come, and that soon. But days began to darken. The spring of 1918 was a tragic, anxious time.
Germany had failed to clear the seas and win the war with submarines. Every few minutes a wooden or steel or concrete ship left the New World, bearing soldiers and food and munitions, and ninety-nine per cent of them came safe to harbor; soon there would be millions of trained and equipped doughboys in Europe. Germany’s one chance was to strike a decisive blow on the Western Front before those fast-coming Americans were there in full force.