Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/130

Counter-Currents, in which battle-loving knights rode prancing and curveting to the fray. It was the older and simpler story of a land swept by invasion, and of men fighting and dying for all that belonged to them on earth. Do the American women who prate about the wrong done to womanhood by war ever reflect that it is for wife and child, as well as for home and country, that men are bound to die? What history do they read which does not teach them this truth, which does not tell it over and over again, to interpret the story of the nations?

In the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, where was shed the first blood spilled in the Revolution, there slept peacefully on the morning of April 19, 1775, a young man named Jonathan Harrington. To him in the early dawn came his widowed mother, who aroused him, saying, "Jonathan, Jonathan, wake up! The Regulars are coming, and something must be done." The 114