The girls rushed away to put on their wraps.
"May we stop for Sheila?" called Pat over the banister.
"Of course!" assented Penelope, glad that Pat wanted to share all her joys with her friends.
By the time they reached the downtown section the walks were thronged with people and the streets had been cleared of traffic for the marching hosts. The girls found a place on the curb. It seemed to them as though everyone had gone mad all at once and that they were as mad as anyone else! At every corner processions were forming, headed by any sort of a makeshift band and where not even a drum could be commandeered, tin pans and pails had been pressed into service! And through it all the incessant, deafening tumult of whistles!
Everyone was smiling! The sun had burst through the accumulated clouds of long years of war!
A group of men and girls from a shipyard marched by. Some of them were drawing a huckster's wagon they had seized and upon its load of potatoes and apples and cabbages they had placed a big ship's bell! One of their number rode on the wagon and with a huge sledge pounded the bell at regular intervals. They were all carrying flags, big and small, and one grimy man had a baby in his arms! The crowd on the curb cheered wildly and the man held the baby high in the air!
The marchers had to halt and while the man with the bell rested, they sang the Star Spangled Banner. Others took it up--it was carried down block after block, a rising wave of sound, a chorus of triumph! Pat and Sheila and Renée sang lustily and as they sang Pat felt her hand suddenly caught in a warm, tight clasp! It was her neighbor, a little bent woman with the dark eyes of the Italian race and a worn shawl over her head and shoulders. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but through them she was smiling like the others! Pat was too young to guess the tragedy of sacrifice that might lie behind those tears, but she was not too young to sense the common joy and thankfulness and privilege they shared! So she squeezed the worn fingers and smiled back into the little old woman's face!
"Here come the men from the Works!" cried Aunt Pen, standing on tiptoe to look over the crowd. The shipbuilders had passed on. Along surged the approaching host, fifteen thousand strong, men and women! They had stripped the works of flags and carried them now high in the air with arms that could not tire! The discordant blasts of their band was heavenly music to their ears! Old men stepped along like boys; scattered through the lines were hundreds of girls in their working overalls and caps.
Renée was puzzled. These men, many of them, did not look like the Americans she had seen! One of them shouted out in a strange tongue, but he carried a banner that said "We are for the U.S.A." Perhaps, like herself, he had come to America for refuge and was giving now of his strength and loyalty to the mother country he had sought.
"Can't we march, too, Aunt Pen?" cried Pat.