And his mother's grip had hurt his hand, and a lump had risen in his throat--as Dan, his oldest brother, had marched away with his company of New Hampshire mountain boys.
"We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more." Dan had been killed at Shiloh.
And it must be like that now in France.

No, he did not like the look which he had seen on Laura's face as she had talked about the war and the fat profits to be made.

Was this all we Yankees had to say to the people over in Europe?
Frowning and glancing at Deborah's back, he saw that she was tired.

It was nearly midnight, but still she kept working doggedly on, moving her shoulder muscles at times as though to shake off aches and pains, then bending again to her labor, her fight against such heavy odds in the winter just beginning for those children in the tenements.

He recalled a fragment of the appeal she had made to him only the month before: "Can't you see that we're all of us stunned, and trying to see what war will mean to all the children in the world?
And while we're groping, groping, can't we give each other a hand ?" And as he looked at his daughter, she made him think of her grandmother, as she had so often done before.