Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing
prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard
Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to
get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I
did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if
anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as
you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of
our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up
liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you
remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody
forget!

What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not
recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-
passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line
across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the
curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of
gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at
names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small
places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where
lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand
butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that
had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain
the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our
fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the
orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would
wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to