But the matter could not be left here. The Boche had laid a terrible stake on the table, and was bound to redeem it or perish. Plainly he would try again—maybe at some fresh point; but again. Already there were mutterings of trouble on the French Front. That he would break the line—the line which he had failed to break at Verdun in 1916, and at Ypres in 1914—seemed incredible; but he might succeed in straining it beyond the limits of perfect recovery; and if that happened, Ludendorff’s boast that America would arrive too late might be justified. Hence the present Armada. It is only one of many. Transports have been crossing the Atlantic for months now, but never upon such a scale as this. There are thousands of soldiers in this convoy alone—men physically splendid, with nearly a year’s training behind them. They are going over—Over There—in answer to the call. Russia has stepped out of the scale, so America must step in at once if Prussianism is to kick the beam. Here they are—a sight to quicken the pulse—the New World hastening to redress the balance of the Old. CHAPTER TWO SHIP’S COMPANY However, we have not reached our destination yet; which is just as well, for at present we are fully occupied in assimilating our new surroundings. To tell the truth, some of us have a good deal to assimilate. There is young Boone Cruttenden, for instance. Little more than a year ago he was preparing to settle down in his ancestral home in Kentucky, there to prop the declining years of an octogenarian parent, Colonel Harvey Cruttenden, known in far-back Confederate days as one of General Sam Wheeler’s hardest-riding disciples. But President Wilson had upset the plans of Boone Cruttenden for all time, by inviting him and certain others to step forward and help make the World Safe for Democracy. Boone was one of the first to accept the invitation. Several strenuous months at a training-camp of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps followed, and in due course he found himself, with a gilded metal strip on either shoulder, communicating his slender knowledge of the art of war to drafted persons who possessed no knowledge of the subject at all—just as thousands of other young men of the right spirit were doing all over the country, and just as thousands of other young men of similar spirit had been doing for more than three years in another country three thousand miles away. “It was something fierce at first,” he confided to Miss Frances Lane, a United States Army nurse, proceeding, in company with ninety-nine others, to a Base Hospital in France.