CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER BOMBS BURSTING IN AIR


There is something, though Heaven knows not much, to be said for
war as war. And the little to be said is said when one declares that
it refreshes life by taking us out of our ruts. Routine kills men
and nations and races; it is stagnation. But war shakes up society,
puts men into strange environments, gives them new diversions,
new aims, changed ideals. In the faint breath of war that came to
Henry and me, as we went about our daily task inspecting hospitals
and first aid posts and ambulance units for the Red Cross, there was
a tremendous whiff of the big change that must come to lives that
really get into war as soldiers. Even we were for ever pinching
ourselves to see if we were dreaming, as we rode through the strange
land, filled with warlike impedimenta, and devoted exclusively to
the science of slaughter. By rights we should have been sitting in
our offices in Wichita and Emporia editing two country newspapers,
wrangling mildly with the pirates of the paper mills to whom our
miserable little forty or fifty carloads of white paper a year was
a trifle, dickering with foreign advertisers who desired to spread
before Wichita and Emporia the virtues of their chewing gum or
talking machines, or discussing the ever changing Situation with
the local statesmen. At five o'clock Henry should be on his way to
the Wichita golf course to reduce his figure, and the sullen roar
of the muffler cut-out on the family car should be warning me that
we were going to picnic that night out on the Osage hills in the
sunset, where it would be up to me to eat gluten bread and avoid
sugars, starches and fats to preserve the girlish lines of my