And the trench warfare——
“They learned that from us,� chuckled old Captain Anderson; “and iron ships. Ah! we showed the world a thing or two.�
But never had they dreamed of trenches like these—stretching in long lines from the Swiss mountains to the Belgian coast, bent in and out by great attacks like the British at Neuve-Chapelle, the Germans at Verdun, and both sides in the bloody battle of the Somme.
And there were strange, new modes of warfare—U-boats hiding underseas, aircraft battling miles above the earth, tanks pushing forward and cutting barbed wire like twine.
There were many things besides fighting to discuss.
America was making vast and speedy preparation for its part in the World War.
Two weeks after war was declared, Congress without a dissenting voice voted the largest war credit in the history of the world. And there was a two-billion-dollar issue of Liberty Bonds. The government must be trying to gather up all the money in the United States, so as to have enough to carry on the war many years, so these country people said, little dreaming of the billions and billions to be raised during the next two years.
There was the draft, too, to discuss. The Selective Conscription Bill had passed. “They� were having men from the ages of twenty-one to thirty registered, and “they� were to pick and choose soldiers from these registered men. It was wonderful how calmly this supreme assertion of the government’s power was accepted. There was a little opposition here and there—in the Virginia mountains, in Kansas and Ohio, in New York City—but all plots were promptly and firmly quelled.
The Draft Act was accepted quietly by The Village. It had its sentimental, passionate devotion to the past; but now that it was being tested, it realized the living, sacred strength of the ties that bound it to the Union.
It heard, with even more horror than of things “over there,� of outrages at home—the German plot to get Mexico to declare war against the United States, factories blown up, railroad bridges destroyed, food poisoned; even here in Virginia, things were happening. “They� said loyal citizens everywhere ought to be on the lookout.