Page:Cornelia Meigs--The island of Appledore.djvu/177

Rh daily news. For nearly three years the war had waged in Europe, a war far too big to realize, far too distant to be very disturbing  to a schoolboy’s daily life. But now war was coming near, the war with Germany that every  one suddenly discovered had been inevitable  from the first, yet for which every one had  been too busy to get ready. It was the week before Easter, the season of that April session  of Congress when the war-bill slowly but surely made its way through Senate and  House, and the possibility of a struggle became a final reality.

The party of boys reached Chicago on Monday, and played their basket-ball game that evening. For a moment the victory that was so hardly but so triumphantly won by their  team, blotted out in Billy’s mind the memory  of what was stirring the whole world outside. Yet even on the way back to the hotel he felt the thrill in the air, he saw crowds gathering  about the bulletin boards and heard some one  say, “The President is addressing Congress  now.”

He went to bed clinging somehow to the obstinate thought,

“There can’t be war, there can’t. Things