The boys lingered a little while, looking up at the soft radiance of the sky.  There was not a cloud anywhere, and the low glimmer in the fields had imperceptibly changed to full, pure moonlight.  Presently the two wagons began to creep along the white road, and on the backless seat of each the driver sat drooping forward, lost in thought.  When they reached the corner where Ernest turned south, they said goodnight without raising their voices.  Claude’s horses went on as if they were walking in their sleep.  They did not even sneeze at the low cloud of dust beaten up by their heavy foot-falls,—­the only sounds in the vast quiet of the night.

Why was Ernest so impatient with him, Claude wondered.  He could not pretend to feel as Ernest did.  He had nothing behind him to shape his opinions or colour his feelings about what was going on in Europe; he could only sense it day by day.  He had always been taught that the German people were pre-eminent in the virtues Americans most admire; a month ago he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for.  The invasion of Belgium was contradictory to the German character as he knew it in his friends and neighbours.  He still cherished the hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid people would apologize and right itself with the world.

Mr. Wheeler came down the hill, bareheaded and coatless, as Claude drove into the barnyard.  “I expect you’re tired.  I’ll put your team away.  Any news?”

“England has declared war.”

Mr. Wheeler stood still a moment and scratched his head.  “I guess you needn’t get up early tomorrow.  If this is to be a sure enough war, wheat will go higher.  I’ve thought it was a bluff until now.  You take the papers up to your mother.”

IX

Enid and Mrs. Royce had gone away to the Michigan sanatorium where they spent part of every summer, and would not be back until October.  Claude and his mother gave all their attention to the war despatches.  Day after day, through the first two weeks of August, the bewildering news trickled from the little towns out into the farming country.

About the middle of the month came the story of the fall of the forts at Liege, battered at for nine days and finally reduced in a few hours by siege guns brought up from the rear,—­guns which evidently could destroy any fortifications that ever had been, or ever could be constructed.  Even to these quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking.  They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster, like tidal waves, earthquakes, or the eruption of volcanoes.