feel like an
impertinent child.

By enlistment and draft, the sons of Lyman Cass, Nat Hicks, Sam Clark
joined the army. But most of the soldiers were the sons of German and
Swedish farmers unknown to Carol. Dr. Terry Gould and Dr. McGanum became
captains in the medical corps, and were stationed at camps in Iowa and
Georgia. They were the only officers, besides Raymie, from the Gopher
Prairie district. Kennicott wanted to go with them, but the several
doctors of the town forgot medical rivalry and, meeting in council,
decided that he would do better to wait and keep the town well till he
should be needed. Kennicott was forty-two now; the only youngish doctor
left in a radius of eighteen miles. Old Dr. Westlake, who loved comfort
like a cat, protestingly rolled out at night for country calls, and
hunted through his collar-box for his G. A. R. button.

Carol did not quite know what she thought about Kennicott's going.
Certainly she was no Spartan wife. She knew that he wanted to go; she
knew that this longing was always in him, behind his unchanged
trudging and remarks about the weather. She felt for him an admiring
affection--and she was sorry that she had nothing more than affection.

Cy Bogart was the spectacular warrior of the town. Cy was no longer the
weedy boy who had sat in the loft speculating about Carol's egotism and
the mysteries of generation. He was nineteen now, tall, broad, busy, the
"town sport," famous for his ability to drink beer, to shake dice, to
tell undesirable stories, and, from his post in front of Dyer's drug
store, to embarrass the girls by "jollying" them as they passed. His
face was at once peach-bloomed and pimply.

Cy was to be heard publishing it abroad that if he couldn't get the
Widow Bogart's permission to enlist, he'd run away and enlist without
it. He shouted that he "hated every dirty Hun; by gosh, if he could just
poke a bayonet into one big fat Heinie and learn him some decency and
democracy, he'd die happy." Cy got much reputation by whipping a farmboy
named Adolph Pochbauer for being a "damn hyphenated German." . . . This
was the younger Pochbauer, who was killed in the Argonne, while he was
trying to bring the body of his Yankee captain back to the lines. At
this time Cy Bogart was still dwelling in Gopher Prairie and planning to
go to war.

II

Everywhere Carol heard that the war was going to bring a basic change
in psychology, to purify and uplift everything from ma