Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack on Verdun--and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone now in his anxiety. Everybody _cared_. There was Patsy. Patsy was wild with fury and with dread. The day and night she had spent in Verdun in August, 1914--preceded and followed as it was by much looking at fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends and the officers who piloted them--had given Patsy a keen sense of what Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnability of the place when there--her sense of surprise that the French officers should look serious, even anxious--had been shattered by the events of Belgium's invasion. Did not Namur have encircling forts? Had she not seen their guns and heard tales of their strength, and had not the Germans _walked_ into Namur?
Oh, they would shatter Verdun and all its pleasant places. She would never do what she had dreamed--go when she was old and sit again in the garden of the little café by the Meuse, and reflect how here were things that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had seen--could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the highest tower of the Verdun citadel and looked over the town and country--and now, why now, those very buildings were many of them in heaps--all that fair country torn open, its great trees down, its farms desolate. The infamy of it!
Patsy lost no chance now to stir Sabinsport. In school, in her club, with her friends, she talked Verdun, and she asked tragically and constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium's relief, and that was, "_When_ are we going in? Are we going to let this thing go on? If Paris is to be ravished like Louvain, are we going to sit quiet?"
It was this unanswered question, stirring in Sabinsport's unsatisfied soul, that made her take so to heart her first war casualty. It came at the very start of the diversion by the English, the diversion on the Somme, which gave the first real hope of relieving Verdun.--Mikey, Katie's son, now Lieut. Michael Flaherty, if you please, went over the top--and Mikey did not come back.