ered figures awaiting
them and began a mad battle in the blizzard. Some of their opponents
treacherously joined them, and turned upon the ambushers.

In the dusk the merry conflict waged up and down the snow-covered
lawn, and the combatants threw and threw, or surged back and forth, or
clenched and toppled over into snow banks, yet all coming to chant an
extemporized battle-cry in chorus, even as they fought the most wildly.

"Who? Who? Who?" they chanted. "Who? Who? _Who_ says there ain't goin'
to be no war?"

Chapter XVIII

So everywhere over the country, that winter of 1916, there were
light-hearted boys skylarking--at college, or on the farms; and in the
towns the young machinists snowballed one another as they came from the
shops; while on this Sunday of the "frat" snow fight probably several
hundreds of thousands of youthful bachelors, between the two oceans,
went walking, like Ramsey, each with a girl who could forget the
weather. Yet boys of nineteen and in the twenties were not light-hearted
all the time that winter and that spring and that summer. Most of them
knew long, thoughtful moments, as Ramsey did, when they seemed to be
thinking not of girls or work or play--nor of anything around them,
but of some more vital matter or prospect. And at such times they were
grave, but not ungentle.

For the long strain was on the country; underneath all its outward
seeming of things going on as usual there shook a deep vibration, like
the air trembling to vast organ pipes in diapasons too profound to reach
the ear as sound: one felt, not heard, thunder in the ground under
one's feet. The succession of diplomatic Notes came to an end after the
torpedoing of the _Sussex_; and at last the tricky ruling Germans in
Berlin gave their word to murder no more, and people said, "This means
peace for America, and all is well for us," but everybody knew in his
heart that nothing was well for us, that there was no peace.

They said "All is well," while that thunder in the ground never
ceased--it grew deeper and heavier till all America shook with it and it
became slowly audible as the voice of the old American soil wherein lay
those who had defended it aforetime, a soil that bred those who would
defend it again, for it was theirs; and the meaning of it--Life,
Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness--was theirs, and theirs to defend.
And they knew they would defend it, and that more than the glory of a
Nation was at stak