COMMON CAUSE A Novel of the War in America By Samuel Hopkins Adams With Illustrations by Arthur William Brown Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company 1919 [Illustration: 0001] [Illustration: 0006] [Illustration: 0007] [Illustration: 0351] COMMON CAUSE PART I CHAPTER I DEUTSCHLAND, Deutschland über alles!” Three thousand voices blended and swelled in the powerful harmony. The walls of the Fenchester Auditorium trembled to it. The banners, with their German mottoes of welcome, swayed to the rhythm. “Über alles in der Welt!” The thundering descent of the line with its superb resonances was as martial as a cavalry charge. Three thousand flushed, perspiring, commonplace faces above respectable black coats in the one sex and mildly ornate blouses in the other, were caught by the fire and the ferment of it and grew suddenly rapt and ecstatic. Wave after wave of massed harmonies followed in the onset. One could feel, rather than hear, in the impassioned voices a spirit instantly more fanatic, more exotic, a strange and exultant note, as of challenge. It was inspiring. It was startling. It was formidable. It was anything for which young Mr. Jeremy Robson, down in the reporters’ seats, might find an adjective, except, perhaps, American. Yet this was the American city of Fenchester, capital of the sovereign State of Centralia, in the year of grace and peace, nineteen hundred and twelve, half a decade before the United States of America descended into the Valley of the Shadow of Death to face the German guns, thundering out that same chorus of “Germany over all in the world!”