And Jim was beginning to find
himself a new ambition and a new circle of friends.
CHAPTER XV
Jim was becoming quite the military man. His new passion took him
away from womankind, saved him from temptation, and freed his
thoughts from the obsession of either Kedzie or Charity. The whole
nation was turning again toward soldiering, drifting slowly and
resistingly, but helplessly, into the very things it had long
denounced as Prussianism and conscription. A universal mobilization
was brewing that should one day compel all men and all women, even
little boys and girls and the very old, to become part of a giant
machinery for warfare.
England, too, had railed at conscription, and when the war smote her
had seen her little army of a quarter of a million almost annihilated
under the first avalanche of the German descent toward Paris. England
had gathered volunteers and trained them behind the bulwark of her
navy and the red wall of the bleeding French nation. And England had
given up volunteering and gone into the business of making everybody,
without distinction of sex, age, or degree, contribute life and
liberty and luxury to the common cause.
Behind the bulwark of the British fleet and the Allied armies
the United States had debated, not for weeks or months, but for
years with academic sloth the enlargement of its tiny army. It had
accomplished only the debate, a ludicrous haggle between those who
turned their backs on the world war and said that war was impossible
and those who declared that it was inevitable.
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