But Polly welcomed the suit-case as if it had been full of that other form of carbon which women wear in rings and necklaces. The whole country was underheated. To the 243 wheatless, meatless, sweetless days there were added the heatless months. Major Widdicombe took his breakfasts standing up in his overcoat. Polly and Mamise had theirs in bed, and the maids that brought it wore their heaviest clothes.
There were long lines of petitioners all day at the offices of the Fuel Administration. But it did little good. All the shops and theaters were kept shut on Mondays. Country clubs were closed. Every device to save a lump of coal was put into legal effect so that the necessary war factories might run and the ships go over the sea. Soon there would be gasoleneless Sundays by request, and all the people would obey. Bills of fare at home and at hotel would be regulated by law. Restaurants would be fined for serving more than one meat to one person. Grocers would be fined for selling too much sugar to a family. Placards, great billboards, and all the newspapers were filled with counsels to save, save, save, and buy, buy, buy Bonds, Bonds, Bonds. People grew depressed at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so little show of accomplishment.
American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics, for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no reserves worth the name. France and England were literally “all in.”
Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future. Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out now to confess––or rather to boast––that they had planned this triumph all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a German planet.
The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the bills.
In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never so many fowls counted before they were hatched––and in the final outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.
But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The strategical experts protested against the wasteful “side-shows” in Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian résistance in the Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own mountainsides.
Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German collapse, no one put his finger on Bulgaria as the first to break.
So sublime, indeed, was the German confidence that many in America who had been driven to cover because of their Teutonic activities before America entered the war began to dream that they, too, would reap a great reward for their martyrdom on behalf of the Fatherland.