“Has war really been declared? We haven’t had the papers for nearly a week. Everybody is so busy with farm work right now.”
Leigh stood looking anxiously at Thaine.
“Declared! The first gun has been fired. The call for volunteers has come from Washington, and the Governor has said he will make Fred Funston Colonel of the first regiment of Kansas volunteers, and he sent out his appeal for loyal Kansas men to offer themselves. I tell you again, Leigh Shirley, I’ll not be the one hundred and twenty-five thousandth man in the line. I’m going to be right close up to little Fred Funston, our Kansas boy, who is to be our Colonel. I have a notion that University students will make the right kind of soldiers. There will be plenty of ignorance and disloyalty and drafting into line on the Spanish side. America must send an intelligent private if the war is to be fought out quickly. I’m that intelligent gentleman.”
“But why must we fight at all, Thaine? Spain has her islands in every sea. We are almost an inland country. Spain is a naval power. Who ever heard of the United States being a naval power? I don’t understand what is back of all this fuss.” Leigh asked the questions eagerly.
“We fight because we remember the Maine,” Thaine said a little boastfully. “We are keeping in mind the two 293 hundred and sixty-six American sailors who perished when our good ship was sunk in the harbor at Havana last February. If we aren’t a naval power now we may develop some sinews of strength before we are through. Your Uncle Sam is a nervy citizen, and it was a sorry day for proud old Spain when she lighted the fuse to blow up our good warship. It was a fool’s trick that we’ll make Spain pay dearly for yet.”
“So it’s just for revenge, then, for the Maine horror. Thaine, think how many times worse than that this war might be. Isn’t there any way to punish Spain except by sending more Americans to be killed by her fuses and her guns?” Leigh insisted.
“There is more than the Maine affair,” Thaine assured her. “You know, just off our coast, almost in sight of our guns, Spain has held Cuba for all these centuries in a bondage of degradation and ignorance and cruel oppression. You know there has been an awful warfare going on there for three years between the Spanish government and the rebels against it. And that for a year and a half the atrocities of Weyler, the Captain General of the Spanish forces, make an unprintable record. The United States has declared war, not to retaliate for the loss of the Maine alone, awful as it was, but to right wrongs too long neglected, to put a twentieth century civilization instead of a sixteenth century barbarity in Cuba.”
Thaine was reciting his lesson glibly, but Leigh broke in.
“But why must you go? You, an only child?”
She had never seen a soldier. Her knowledge of warfare had been given her by the stories Jim Shirley and Dr. Carey had told to her in her childhood. 294