“I was just wondering,” Amos remarked after some time had elapsed, “why both Germans and the Allies seem to set so great a store on the holding of Ypres. From all the information I’ve been able to pick up, as a place it doesn’t amount to a row of beans. And yet, Brussels, Antwerp and a whole lot of other cities fell without one-quarter of the fighting that’s been taking place around here. How do you make it out, Jack?”
“The only thing I can see,” replied the other, “is that it must be a railroad center, and from Ypres there’s a good road to Dunkirk and Calais. You know how set the Kaiser has been right along on getting his big guns stationed on the French coast, where the Channel is only twenty miles across. He’ll never be happy until he can watch one of those monsters hurling shells that fall on England’s shore.”
“And the British are just as bent on keeping him from doing it, seems like,” observed Amos. “Queer how a little thing like that brings about many desperate fights. Tens of thousands of Germans have been killed, wounded or captured just because of a pet whim of the Kaiser’s; for I don’t believe anything very great would come of it even if they did take Calais. The British battleships would pour in such a smashing amount of shells that they’d wreck any gun emplacement the Germans might build.”
“It’s a queer war all around, I think,” said Jack. “It started with a match in the powder magazine, when that murder occurred in Servia; and by degrees it’s getting to be the most terrible thing that ever happened on this old earth, barring none. We’re living in wonderful times, Amos.”
“Seems so, Jack, when you stop to think of all that’s being done, in the air with dirigibles and aeroplanes, and under the sea with the submarines.”
“Our fathers laughed at Jules Verne when they read some of his books,” ventured the other boy, seriously; “but let me tell you most of what he described there has already come to pass. We may live to see his account beaten to a frazzle, as Teddy says, the way things are going on nowadays.”
“It’s a blessed good thing that America’s three thousand miles away, and that the whole big Atlantic Ocean rolls between,” remarked Amos, reflectively.
“By which you mean we’re not likely to get into this scrap, I take it,” said his cousin. “Just go a little slow there, my boy.”
Amos stopped short to look at him in wonder and uneasiness.
“Whatever do you mean, Jack?” he started to say. “From the way you speak it looks as if you wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the United States get mixed up in this awful business, after all.”