Some of their opponents
treacherously joined them, and turned upon the ambushers.
In the dusk the merry conflict waged up and down the snow-covered
lawn, and the combatants threw and threw, or surged back and forth, or
clenched and toppled over into snow banks, yet all coming to chant an
extemporized battle-cry in chorus, even as they fought the most wildly.
"Who? Who? Who?" they chanted. "Who? Who? _Who_ says there ain't goin'
to be no war?"
Chapter XVIII
So everywhere over the country, that winter of 1916, there were
light-hearted boys skylarking--at college, or on the farms; and in the
towns the young machinists snowballed one another as they came from the
shops; while on this Sunday of the "frat" snow fight probably several
hundreds of thousands of youthful bachelors, between the two oceans,
went walking, like Ramsey, each with a girl who could forget the
weather. Yet boys of nineteen and in the twenties were not light-hearted
all the time that winter and that spring and that summer. Most of them
knew long, thoughtful moments, as Ramsey did, when they seemed to be
thinking not of girls or work or play--nor of anything around them,
but of some more vital matter or prospect.
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