lier
years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of
neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.

Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing
prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard
Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and
to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow,
as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if
anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as
you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces
of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up
liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you
remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody
forget!

What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not
recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of
by-passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon
line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off
the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of
gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring
at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small
places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since,
where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now
a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the
wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which
made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming?
Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns
among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken
hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had
learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun,
the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy morsel. He had
written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these Pan-German schemes
had been leaking out for all who chose to understand them. A great many
did not so choose. The Hun had wanted us and planned to get us, and now
more than ever