“You ought to get your wife to try this, Carter,” he broke out one day. “It’s a new recipe for cake without sugar, wheat or butter. Ellen made some last night and you couldn’t tell it from the real stuff.”
“What do you call the real stuff?” demanded Carter.
“Why, the cake we used to get before the war.”
“And you mean to say you can’t tell the difference?”
“Well, of course this isn’t quite so tasty, but it’s a darned good substitute.”
Newell appeared astonished. Later he repeated the conversation to Manson, and concluded: “Do you know, if the beggar didn’t have a boy in the Marines I’d say he was pro-German.”
“Well, he wasn’t any too keen about the Second Liberty Loan when I saw him. He only took a thousand.”
“So? I thought he’d be good for five, anyway.”
The Government was already beginning to talk about the Third Liberty Loan. Somewhat fretfully Carter read the preliminary announcements. Where was this thing going to stop, anyway? He was not any more than keeping even with the game now. And even so, he was not getting so much out of life as he had been getting before.
On top of that they sent the boy across. After an interval of silence Carter received a cable one day announcing his safe arrival at a port in France. It took the starch all out of him. It was like one of those nightmares he used to suffer when he dreamed of the boy in some great danger and was forced to stand by, dumb and paralyzed, powerless to help. It was like that exactly, only this was reality. Day by day and mile by mile this intangible merciless power called war was dragging the boy nearer and nearer his destruction. It was barbaric. It was wrong. This boy was his.
Now he was at a port in France. Until the last few years that would not have been anything to worry about. He had wished the boy to travel. France had always stood to Carter as a land of sunshine and holidays—a sort of pre-honeymoon land to the more fortunate. To-day a port in France seemed like a port in hell.
On the eight-ten they kept asking about the boy, and when Carter told Barclay that Ben was over there, Barclay answered: “Lucky dog. That ought to make you proud.”
Carter made no reply. That was in March, just before the big Hun offensive. When that broke Carter did not dare read the papers for a while. Those were bad days. America had then been in the war nearly a year, and yet it was possible for those gray hordes to dash at and into the allied lines. They did it again and again, until the world stood aghast and Carter himself stood aghast. It made no difference whether he read the papers or not, for hourly bulletins were passed round the office and scarcely anything else was talked of.