“You see, I never knew,” she wrote in her memory book, “what might happen.  I had visions of myself going after him in the night as Derry had gone and his mother.  I used to dream about it, and dread it.”

Yet she had said nothing of her dread to Derry in her smiling letters, and as men think of women, he had thought of her in the sick room as a guardian angel, shining and serene.

* * * * * *

And now, faint and far came to the men in the cantonments the sound of battles across the sea.  The bugles calling them each morning seemed to say, “Soon, soon, you will go, you will go, you will go—­”

To Derry, listening, it seemed the echo of the fairy trumpets, “Trutter-a-trutt, trutter-a-trutt, you will go, you will go, you will go—­”

It was strange how the thought of it drew him, drew him as even the thoughts of Jean his bride did not draw—.  He remembered that years ago he had smiled with a tinge of tolerant sophistication over the old lines: 

  “I could not love thee, dear, so much,
  Loved I not honor more—­”

Yet here it was, a truth in his own life.  A woman meaning more to him than she could ever have meant in times of peace, because he could go forth to fight for her, his life at stake, for her.  It was for her, and for other women that his sword was unsheathed.

“If only they could understand it,” he wrote to Jean.  “You haven’t any idea what rotten letters some of the women write.  Blaming the men for going over seas.  Blaming them for going into it at all.  Taking it as a personal offense that their lovers have left them.  ’If you had loved me, you couldn’t have left me,’ was the way one woman put it, and I found a poor fellow mooning over it and asked him what was the matter.  ’It isn’t a question of what we want to do, it is a question of what we’ve got to do, if we call ourselves men,’ he said.  But she couldn’t see that, she was measuring her emotions by an inch rule.

“But, thank God, most of the women are the real thing—­true as steel and brave.  And it is those women that the men worship.  It is a masculine trait to want to be a sort of hero in the eyes of the woman you love.  When she doesn’t look at it that way, your plumes droop!”

And now the bugles rang with a clearer note—­not, “You will go, you will go—­” but, “Do not wait, do not wait, do not wait.”

The cry from abroad was Macedonian.  “Come over and help us!” It was to America that the ghosts of those fighting hordes appealed.

  “Take up our quarrel with the foe,
  To you from falling hands we throw
  The torch—­be yours to hold it high. 
  If ye break faith with us who die,
  We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
  In Flanders’ field—­”

Gradually there had grown up in the hearts of simple men a flaming response to that sacred charge.  Men whose dreams had never reached beyond a day’s frivolity, found springing up in their souls a desire to do some deed to match that of the other fellow who slept “in Flanders field.”