The weeks went by, and day by day Grandpa read his paper with growing indignation. You remember how for months the army in France seemed to stand still before that great “Hindenburg line” which stretched out like an iron wall in front of Germany. It seemed to Uncle Isaac as if his boys and the rest of the army were cowards—afraid to march up to the line and fight. One day he threw down his paper and expressed himself fully, as only an old soldier can.
“I told you those boys never would fight. At the Battle of the Wilderness Lee had a line of defense twice as strong as this Hindenburg ever had. Did General Grant sit still and wait for something to happen? Not much!
“‘Forward by the left flank!’
“That was the order, and we went forward. Don’t you know what he said at Fort Donelson? ‘I propose to move on your works at once.’ If General Grant was in France that’s what he’d say, and within an hour you’d see old Hindenburg coming out to surrender! My regiment fought all day against a regiment from North Carolina. I’ll tell you what! Let me have my old regiment and that North Carolina regiment alongside and I’ll guarantee that we will break right through that Hindenburg line, march right across the Rhine, hog-tie the Kaiser and bring him back with us.”
“But, father,” said his daughter gently, “don’t you remember what Harry writes? They don’t fight that way now. The cannon must open a way first. Harry says they fire shells so large and powerful that when they strike the ground they make a hole so large you could put the barn into it. Suppose one of these big shells struck in the middle of your regiment?”
“I don’t care,” said Uncle Isaac. “We’d start, anyway! We’d move on those breastworks and take our chances!”
And mother wrote about it to her boys in the army over in France. The young fellows laughed at the thought of those old white-haired men, with their antiquated weapons, lined up before the death-dealing power of Germany. It seemed such a foolish thing to youth. The letter finally came to the grey-haired colonel of the regiment—an elderly man who had in some way held his army place in the ocean of youth which surrounded him. His eyes were moist as he read it, for he knew that if that group of wasted, white-haired men had lined up in front of the army they would not have been alone. Down the aisles of history would have come a throng of old heroes—the spirit of the past would have stood with them. They would have stilled the laughter, and if these old veterans had started forward the whole great army would have thrown off restraint, broken orders and followed them through the “Hindenburg line.”
But Uncle Isaac, at home, humiliated and sad, went about the farm with something like a prayer in his old heart.
“Why can’t I do something to help? Don’t make me know my fighting days are over. What can I do?”
And Uncle Isaac finally had his chance. Perhaps you remember how at one time during the war things seemed dark enough. Our boys were swarming across the ocean, and submarines were watching for them. Food was scarce. Frost and storm had turned against us. Money was flowing out like water. Spies and German sympathizers were poisoning the public mind, and the Liberty Loan campaign was lagging. Uncle Isaac, reading it all day by day in his paper, felt like a man in prison galled to the soul by his inability to help. There came a big patriotic meeting at the county town. It was a factory town with many European laborers. They were restless and uneasy, opposed to the draft, tired of the war and not yet in full sympathy with America. Uncle Isaac determined to go to this meeting, though his daughter did all she could to dissuade him. There was no stopping him when he once made up his mind, so his daughter let him have his way, but she sent old John Zabriski along with him. Old John was a German Pole who came to this country as a young man out of the German army. He had lived on Uncle Isaac’s farm for years, and just as a cabbage or a tomato plant seems the stronger and better for transplanting, so this transplanted European in the soil of this country had grown into the noblest type of American. So the daughter, standing in the farmhouse door with eyes that were a little dimmed, watched these two old men drive away to the meeting.