No, Germany could not be beaten. She had driven back Russia. She had won at Gallipoli, she had stripped Serbia from its people and driven king and army to take refuge on an island of the sea. She had devised unheard of weapons of terror and destruction in the air and under the water. She stood surrounded by enemies, but enemies divided by seas, divided in command, untrained and unfurnished; sure, and daily more brutal and fearful because so sure. Sabinsport did not believe she could be conquered. She had a great distaste for the conclusion, but a fact was a fact, and what reason had you to suppose she could be held when once she advanced? She would not make a second mistake on the Marne.
And if this was the truth, what was the use of Sabinsport’s going in? Of course there were those who said, “It will be our turn next.” But Sabinsport was very far, at this point, from believing this.
This crust over Sabinsport’s soul had more and more discouraged Dick through the winter. Hard as it was, however, he held on, in face of the town’s settled conviction, to his belief in final victory. He simply could not see either England or France giving up. It wasn’t possible. They weren’t made that way. They would die and die and die but not surrender; and it was this inner conviction that amounted to knowledge that was both his support and his torture, for he did not fool himself for a moment with any hopes of speedy victory. It would be long, long, long years—and what years! Young men, boys, old men, steadily marching to death, and always behind them others coming to fill their places—the earth ravaged of its manhood. High hearts, great loves, beautiful talents, beneficent powers, destroyed until the earth had been stripped of its best. Women, steadfast and brave, giving lovers, sons, friends—all that made life fruitful and lovely—giving them with no waver in their heroic souls, the only outward sign their whitening hair, their sinking cheeks, their anguished eyes. He saw the destruction of the best work of men’s hands, the stopping of kindly industries, the making of things which brought comfort and health and joy to men—all ended that every hand could be put to making that which would best and quickest blow to pieces the largest number of human beings or most certainly sink them to the secret bottom of the pitiless ocean. He saw all this and still believed in victory.
We would go in. Dick never doubted it from the day that England’s ultimatum was given and refused. Our turn would come. It was the logic of the struggle. Sabinsport would see its men march off to death and mutilation, would see its women silently growing old, its works of peace turned to works of war; all its healthy, daily life remolded to serve the Great Necessity of conquering the Monster broken loose.
Most cruelly had he suffered through the days of Gallipoli, and in this he was alone. It seemed to him sometimes that no one in Sabinsport ever thought of what was going on in Gallipoli. The truth was the field of the war had become too wide, too complicated, for Sabinsport to follow. The war for her was the line from the Channel to Switzerland, and particularly the part of it where the fighting of the moment was liveliest, so she refused to consider Gallipoli.
Dick followed every detail of that cruel and valiant struggle. He had a talent for the visualization of physical things which he had trained until it was instinctive. Topography, contour, forests and fields, towns, farms, churches, the turn of streets and the winding of rivers, the look of shop fronts, the town square, its fountains and statues, the town promenade, the costumes of men and women, the cattle they prized, the horses they drove, the dogs at their heels—he saw them all. It had been his play in travel to anticipate what he was to see, and then to compare with what he found. With much travel, gaining knowledge of things as they are and as the books say them to be, Dick had grown amazingly clever in this play of construction.
But since the war this faculty had become a torture. It was so much a part of him that he could no more prevent its operating than he could prevent his mind from instinctively forming judgments. But never in the war had he been so cruelly tormented as by the scenes which passed before his eyes, as real as the streets of Sabinsport, every time that he saw or heard the word “Gallipoli.” True, his affections were deeply touched. Some of the best friends of his Oxford days were there, and one by one he learned they would never return. The sandy, burning, treeless, waterless tongue of land, with its scanty footholds for the English and its sheltered pits for the enemy that from over their heads in the heights poured fire and death on them, to him seemed like some hideous dragon—a dragon fifty-seven miles long, carrying on back and in belly every weapon of destruction known to man and nature. He grew sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly, chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure.
Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack on Verdun—and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone now in his anxiety. Everybody cared. There was Patsy. Patsy was wild with fury and with dread. The day and night she had spent in Verdun in August, 1914—preceded and followed as it was by much looking at fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends and the officers who piloted them—had given Patsy a keen sense of what Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnability of the place when there—her sense of surprise that the French officers should look serious, even anxious—had been shattered by the events of Belgium’s invasion. Did not Namur have encircling forts? Had she not seen their guns and heard tales of their strength, and had not the Germans walked into Namur?
Oh, they would shatter Verdun and all its pleasant places. She would never do what she had dreamed—go when she was old and sit again in the garden of the little café by the Meuse, and reflect how here were things that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had seen—could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the highest tower of the Verdun citadel and looked over the town and country—and now, why now, those very buildings were many of them in heaps—all that fair country torn open, its great trees down, its farms desolate. The infamy of it!
Patsy lost no chance now to stir Sabinsport. In school, in her club, with her friends, she talked Verdun, and she asked tragically and constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium’s relief, and that was, “When are we going in? Are we going to let this thing go on? If Paris is to be ravished like Louvain, are we going to sit quiet?”