He jerked his head up and down in violent assent, his jaws clicking and his face muscles jumping. The old woman shoved him away from in front of her.
“Come on with me!” she bade the other women, in a tone that clarioned out high and shrill above the sobbing of the boy on the floor, above the gurgling of the cripple and the sound of the firing without. “Come on!”
They knew what she meant; and behind her they massed themselves, their bodies bent forward from their waists, their heads lowered and their hands clenched like swimmers about to breast a swift torrent.
“Bide where you are—you women!” the blinded man commanded. He felt his way out to the middle of the room, barring their path with his body and his outspread arms. “You can do nothing. The war goes on—this fight here goes on—until we win!”
“No, no, no, no!” shouted back the old beldam, and at each word beat her two fists against her flaccid breasts. “When babies fight this war this war ends! And we—the women here—the women everywhere—we will stop it! Do you hear me? We will stop it! Come on!”
She pushed him aside; and, led by her, the tatterdemalion crew of them ran swiftly from the cellar and into the looming darkness of the tunnel, crying out as they ran.
Strictly speaking, the beginning of this story comes at the end of it. One morning in the paper, I read, under small headlines on an inner page, sandwiched in between the account of a football game at Nashville and the story of a dog show at Newport, a short dispatch that had been sent by cable to this country, to be printed in our papers and to be read by our people, and then to be forgotten by them. And that dispatch ran like this:
BOYS TO FIGHT WAR SOON
Germany Using Some Seventeen Years Old.
Haig Wants Young Men