The war came home to the finest of our people first. It has not reached them all yet, but it is working in, like the frost into the cellars when the thermometer shows forty degrees below zero. Many a cellar can stand a week of this--but look out for the second! Every day it comes to some one.
"I don't see why we are always asked to give," one woman said gloomily, when the collector asked her for a monthly subscription to the Red Cross. "Every letter that goes out of the house has a stamp on it--and we write a queer old lot of letters, and I guess we've done our share."
She is not a dull woman either or hard of heart. It has not got to her yet--that's all! I cannot be hard on her in my judgment, for it did not come to me all at once, either.
When I saw the first troops going away, I wondered how their mothers let them go, and I made up my mind that I would not let my boy go,--I was so glad he was only seventeen,--for hope was strong in our hearts that it might be over before he was of military age. It was the Lusitania that brought me to see the whole truth. Then I saw that we were waging war on the very Princes of Darkness, and I knew that morning when I read the papers, I knew that it would be better--a thousand times better--to be dead than to live under the rule of people whose hearts are so utterly black and whose process of reasoning is so oxlike--they are so stupidly brutal. I knew then that no man could die better than in defending civilization from this ghastly thing which threatened her!
Soon after that I knew, without a word being said, that my boy wanted to go--I saw the seriousness come into his face, and knew what it meant. It was when the news from the Dardanelles was heavy on our hearts, and the newspapers spoke gravely of the outlook.
One day he looked up quickly and said, "I want to go--I want to help the British Empire--while there is a British Empire!"
And then I realized that my boy, my boy, had suddenly become a man and had put away childish things forever.
I shall always be glad that the call came to him, not in the intoxication of victory, but in the dark hour of apparent defeat.
Let's pretend the skies are blue, Let's pretend the world is new, And the birds of hope are singing All the day!