“Your house has been raided?” Vassar asked.
“I’ve just heard that every house on both Stuyvesant Square and Gramercy Park has been smashed and wrecked. The soldiers have been looting private dwellings at their leisure—while mobs of thieves and cutthroats join in the sport.”
There was no help for it then.
He whispered a hurried good-bye to Virginia, kissed Zonia and Marya and rushed for his horse.
The first gray streaks of dawn were already tinging the eastern sky. The invading army had followed with amazing rapidity. Whole regiments armed with machine guns had been hurled forward by automobile transports. Hood had destroyed the railroad as he retreated. The advancing hosts didn’t need it. The hardened veterans who marched, with quick swinging gait, smoking their pipes and singing, could make thirty miles a day and be ready for a fight at the end of their march. They meant to rush our trenches today and make quick work of it. They were not going to waste any more big shells which might be needed elsewhere.
The wind was blowing directly in the faces of our men for the first time since the landing had been made. They wondered if the wild stories we had heard of the use of poisonous gases and liquid fire in the great war were true. We had begun to scout these tales as press work of the various governments. The day was destined to bring a rude awakening.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE first day’s battle brought to many a raw recruit the sharp need of military training. Many a man who had never consciously known the meaning of fear waked to find his knees trembling and hung his head in shame at the revelation.
Tommaso had led his squad into the trenches before his bitter hour of self-revelation came. He had caught a glimpse of his wife and boy in a group of panic-stricken refugees and the sight had taken the last ounce of courage out of him. He was going to be killed. He knew it now with awful certainty. What would become of his loved ones? All night in the trenches he brooded over it. When the sun rose he was only waiting for a chance to run in the excitement of battle. He swore he would not leave his wife and child to starve!
Angela carrying the poor little fear-stricken monkey, with the boy tightly gripping his dog Sausage, trying to save his kitten and his mother lugging a huge bundle had penetrated the American lines and found Vassar the day of the opening fight.