Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/327

 come I feel, like Gertrude, that I cannot endure any longer this awful and ominous hush before the coming storm.”

March 23rd, 1917

“Armageddon has begun!—‘the last great fight of all!’ Is it, I wonder? Yesterday I went down to the Post Office for the mail. It was a dull, bitter day. The snow was gone but the grey, lifeless ground was frozen hard and a biting wind was blowing. The whole Glen landscape was ugly and hopeless.

“Then I got the paper with its big black headlines. Germany struck on the twenty-first. She makes big claims of guns and prisoners taken. General Haig reports that ‘severe fighting continues.’ I don’t like the sound of that last expression.

“We all find we cannot do any work that requires concentration of thought. So we all knit furiously, because we can do that mechanically. At least the dreadful waiting is over—the horrible wondering where and when the blow will fall. It has fallen—but they shall not prevail against us!

“Oh, what is happening on the western front tonight as I write this, sitting here in my room with my journal before me? Jims is asleep in his crib and the wind is wailing around the window; over my desk hangs Walter’s picture, looking at me with his beautiful deep eyes; the Mona Lisa he gave me the last Christmas he was home hangs on one side of it, and on the other a framed copy of ‘The Piper.’ It seems to me that I can hear Walter’s voice repeating it—that little poem into which be put his soul, and which will therefore live forever, carrying Walter’s name on