ed. "It is better that way.
And what a man you are in uniform! I think I see you smashing heads
instead of bottles. Six out of six, Dave! It's awful, but you must do
it. Already we know what has happened in Belgium. You will forget
your own wrongs in the greater wrongs of others. . . . And I shall
join the service as a nurse. My father was a doctor, and I can soon
pick it up."

She chatted on, but he had become suddenly grave. "I don't think that
is your course, Irene," he said. "This is going to be a bigger job
than it looked. The Government will get soldiers and nurses; the
popular imagination turns to such things. But it will be neither
soldiers nor nurses that will win the war. I feel sure of that now.
It has come to me, perhaps as a kind of presentiment, but I feel
absolutely sure. The determining factor will be food. The world's
margin is narrow enough in normal times, and now we are plunged into
the abnormal. Millions of men will be taken from production and turned
to purposes of destruction. They will be taken from offices, where
they need little food, and put in the trenches, where they need much
food. Countries will be devastated; armies will retreat, destroying
all food as they go. Ships will go down with cargoes of wheat;
incendiary fires will swallow warehouses of food. I do not regret my
decision, I believe my place is in the trenches; but those less fit for
the fight than I must, in some form or other, produce food. That
includes the women; it includes you."

"Me? But what can I do?"

"Since I left home I've thought a good deal of the old ranch. I
despised it in those prosperous days--those days we thought we were
prosperous--but the prosperity is gone and the ranch remains. It still
lies out there, just as it did when you and your father motored down
that afternoon a dozen years ago. I think you'll have to go back
there, Reenie. I think you'll have to take the boy Charlie, and what
other help you can get, and go back to the old ranch and raise
something for the soldiers to eat. You can do it. There are good men
to be had; men who can't very well carry a rifle, but can drive a plow.
And believe me, Reenie, it's the plow that's going to win. Go back and
put them at it. Think of every furrow as another trench in the
defences which shall save your home from the fate of Belgium's homes.
It's not as easy as going to the front; it hasn't got the heroic ring
to it, and I suppose