And so, through weeks of labor, Nancy and Dick steadily went their ways, each unconscious of what was in the heart of the other, each valiantly resolved that they would make no sign that would hurt the other, and yet daily each growing closer to the other.
CHAPTER XI
It is only when one loves a town as Richard Ingraham loved Sabinsport that one is conscious of the currents of unrest, of groping, of joy and of grief that fluctuate through it as truly as they fluctuate through the soul of man or woman. Love makes one sensitive—sensitive to fleeting shadows that others never see, to secret hopes and faiths that others never know. Dick had not been long home before he began to understand that Sabinsport, hammering at her war tasks like a Vulcan, hating her enemy as robustly and openly as any primitive deity, still was restless in heart, dissatisfied with the war, untouched by its loftiest aims and hopes.
Something more in experience must come to Sabinsport, thought Dick; and he sometimes wondered if it would have to be a baptism of blood. She would stick—stick to the end, he felt. Indeed, he did not believe that all the nations of the earth combined could pry Sabinsport now from the task to which she had put her hand. But he wanted more from her in carrying out this task—a fuller sense of the bigness of the thing in which she was engaged. Where was it all to come from?
As the spring drive of the Germans pounded back farther and farther the English and French lines, the anxiety in Sabinsport grew, intensified. Out of it Dick saw coming one emotion that greatly rejoiced him. Sabinsport, through all the war, had never any very strong feeling for England. To Belgium and France she had given her heart, a little of it had gone to Serbia, England never had won more than a slightly grudging recognition; but now, when that amazing army stood with its back to the sea, and the world realized that though every man might fall, no man would surrender, something broke in Sabinsport.
For the first time she realized something of the fullness and the nobility of the English sacrifice—how with characteristic English quiet, the nation had put everything in and called it a “bit.” To Dick, whose love of English hearts and English ways and whose faith in the unconquerable English soul was second only to his love and faith in America, this belated understanding of England by Sabinsport gave both joy and hope. She was beginning to see things. They were getting down into her soul.
As the days went on and the Germans drew nearer and nearer to Paris, as the city was actually shelled, and as rumors came of preparations for a siege, with all the doubts they brought of its being possible for her to long withstand it, something like panic seized Sabinsport—an almost angry panic. Where, where were the Americans? For what had she been making all her great effort? Why, but to stay the invading hordes? Were we too late? Were these hundred thousands of men that we boasted now of having landed in so short a time, to come in only in time to see the destruction of France and the certain invasion and destruction of England, which Sabinsport believed that would mean? Doubt and anger and horror possessed her.
And then suddenly the American army did appear. There was Cantigny, and then, in the very nick of time, the last moment, when the wearied and overwhelmed French were actually in retreat, our boys came—Sabinsport’s boys; and, careless of the long journeys which had brought them to the spot—the sleepless hours, they broke over the foe, beat him down, beat him back, followed, defied, laughed at his boasted formations, his impregnable trenches, his deadly nests of guns. It was true, as the most experienced and hardened French cried, Rien les arreste—Nothing stops them! Nothing stops them!
When the story of Château-Thierry came back to Sabinsport, men shook one another’s hands, clapped one another on the back, told over and over every item they could gather. Captain Billy walked up and down the street, not ashamed of tears, crying, “I knew they would do it. Just like the boys of ’61.” They treasured every story of reckless exploit, of daredeviltry. “That’s our boys. Just like them!” And they were even prouder of the fact that, reckless and unafraid as they showed themselves, they had known how to take discipline, to play the game according to rules, that the wisest of English and French generals were saying, “They are good soldiers.”
Château-Thierry and the weeks of struggle that drove back the Hun from the lovely Marne country, back through Soissons, back to the Aisne—those were great days for Sabinsport; and particularly they were great days for the War Board.