ed. I'll put
your team away. Any news?"

"England has declared war."

Mr. Wheeler stood still a moment and scratched his head. "I guess
you needn't get up early tomorrow. If this is to be a sure enough
war, wheat will go higher. I've thought it was a bluff until now.
You take the papers up to your mother."

IX

Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium
where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back
until October. Claude and his mother gave all their attention to
the war despatches. Day after day, through the first two weeks of
August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out
into the farming country.

About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the
forts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a
few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,--guns which
evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or
ever could be constructed. Even to these quiet wheat-growing
people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their
safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way
of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which
afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of
unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or
the eruption of volcanoes.

On the twenty-third came the news of the fall of the forts at
Namur; again giving warning that an unprecedented power of
destruction had broken loose in the world. A few days later the
story of the wiping out of the ancient and peaceful seat of
learning at Louvain made it clear that this force was being
directed toward incredible ends. By this time, too, the papers
were full of accounts of the destruction of civilian populations.
Something new, and certainly evil, was at work among mankind.
Nobody was ready with a name for it. None of the well-worn words
descriptive of human behaviour seemed adequate. The epithets
grouped about the name of "Attila" were too personal, too
dramatic, too full of old, familiar human passion.

One afternoon in the first week of September Mrs. Wheeler was in
the kitchen making cucumber pickles, when she heard Claude's car
coming back from Frankfort. In a moment he entered, letting the
screen door slam behind him, and threw a bundle of mail on the
table.

"What do you, think, Mother? The French have moved the seat of
government to Bordeaux! Evidently, they don't think they can hold