If other reinforcements were hurrying up to take their places on the firing line, the boys did not happen to meet them on this road. It seemed to be given over almost entirely to vehicles of every description speeding forward to carry off the bleeding forms of those whose lives might yet be saved. There were some queer-looking vans among the rest, for every available motorcar had been pressed into the service of removing the injured to Dunkirk and Calais, where later on they could be transported to Havre and across the Channel.
“I was just wondering,” Amos remarked after some time had elapsed, “why both Germans and the Allies seem to set so great a store on the holding of Ypres. From all the information[185] I’ve been able to pick up, as a place it doesn’t amount to a row of beans. And yet, Brussels, Antwerp and a whole lot of other cities fell without one-quarter of the fighting that’s been taking place around here. How do you make it out, Jack?”
“The only thing I can see,” replied the other, “is that it must be a railroad center, and from Ypres there’s a good road to Dunkirk and Calais. You know how set the Kaiser has been right along on getting his big guns stationed on the French coast, where the Channel is only twenty miles across. He’ll never be happy until he can watch one of those monsters hurling shells that fall on England’s shore.”
“And the British are just as bent on keeping him from doing it, seems like,” observed Amos. “Queer how a little thing like that brings about many desperate fights. Tens of thousands of Germans have been killed, wounded or captured just because of a pet whim of the Kaiser’s; for I don’t believe anything very great would come of it even if they did take Calais. The British[186] battleships would pour in such a smashing amount of shells that they’d wreck any gun emplacement the Germans might build.”
“It’s a queer war all around, I think,” said Jack. “It started with a match in the powder magazine, when that murder occurred in Servia; and by degrees it’s getting to be the most terrible thing that ever happened on this old earth, barring none. We’re living in wonderful times, Amos.”
“Seems so, Jack, when you stop to think of all that’s being done, in the air with dirigibles and aeroplanes, and under the sea with the submarines.”
“Our fathers laughed at Jules Verne when they read some of his books,” ventured the other boy, seriously; “but let me tell you most of what he described there has already come to pass. We may live to see his account beaten to a frazzle, as Teddy says, the way things are going on nowadays.”
“It’s a blessed good thing that America’s three thousand miles away, and that the whole big[187] Atlantic Ocean rolls between,” remarked Amos, reflectively.
“By which you mean we’re not likely to get into this scrap, I take it,” said his cousin. “Just go a little slow there, my boy.”
Amos stopped short to look at him in wonder and uneasiness.
“Whatever do you mean, Jack?” he started to say. “From the way you speak it looks as if you wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the United States get mixed up in this awful business, after all.”
“Which would be what I meant,” explained Jack, soberly, “much as I hate to admit it. Stop and think for a minute, no matter how much the main body of Americans may want to keep out, remember that we’ve got some six millions of Germans who are supposed to be naturalized citizens, but whose hearts still beat fondly for the Fatherland. Besides, there might be a whole lot of reasons why Germany would really want to see war declared between herself and our country.”
[188]
“Why, they must be crazy to want that, Jack! We have a hundred million people, and could do them all sorts of harm.”
“Could we?” asked Jack, shrewdly. “In what way, I want to know? As there isn’t any vessel today carrying food or anything else from America to Germany they wouldn’t feel it there. We wouldn’t send an army over, nor yet our battleships to take chances of being torpedoed. We might send forty or eighty torpedo boats and destroyers, but that is all. Can’t you see that if our country were at war it would shut off the great supply of arms and ammunition that is flowing across to Great Britain and Russia and France? We’d need it all at home for six months.”
Amos stared as well he might. He had not bothered looking below the surface when he figured that war with the United States would mean the overwhelming of the Teutonic race. It took Jack to consider what lay underneath the exterior, and see signs of a deep game wonderfully played by the Kaiser’s Strategy Board.
[189]
“If that ever happens,” reflected Amos, “it’s bound to be a world war in............