aking.

Chapter XXI

That thunder in the soil, at first too deep within it to be audible, had
come to the surface now and gradually became heard as the thunder of
a million feet upon the training grounds. The bugles rang sharper; the
drums and fifes of town and village and countryside were the drums and
fifes of a war that came closer and closer to every hearth between the
two oceans.

All the old symbols became symbols bright and new, as if no one had ever
seen them before. "America" was like a new word, and the song "America"
was like a new song. All the dusty blatancies of orating candidates,
seeking to rouse bored auditors with "the old flag"; all the mechanical
patriotics of school and church and club; all these time-worn flaccid
things leaped suddenly into living colour. The flag became brilliant and
strange to see--strange with a meaning that seemed new, a meaning long
known, yet never known till now.

And so hearts that thought they knew themselves came upon ambushes of
emotion and hidden indwellings of spirit not guessed before. Dora Yocum,
listening to the "Star Spangled Banner," sung by children of immigrants
to an out-of-tune old piano in a mission clubroom, in Chicago, found
herself crying with a soul-shaking heartiness in a way different from
other ways that she had cried. Among the many things she thought of then
was this: That the banner the children were singing about was in danger.
The great country, almost a continent, had always seemed so untouchable,
so safe and sure; she had never been able to conceive of a hostile
power mighty enough to shake or even jar it. And since so great and
fundamental a thing could not be injured, a war for its defence had
appeared to be, in her eyes, not only wicked but ridiculous. At last,
less and less vaguely, she had come to comprehend something of the
colossal German threat, and the shadow that touched this bright banner
of which the immigrants' children piped so briskly in the mission
club-room.

She had begun to understand, though she could not have told just why,
or how, or at what moment understanding reached her. She began to
understand that her country, threatened to the life, had flung its line
those thousands of miles across the sea to stand and hold Hindenburg and
Ludendorff and all their Kaisers, Kings, Dukes, and Crown Princes, their
Krupp and Skoda monstrous engines, and their monstrous other engines of
men made into armies. Through the long