The war arrives on Main Street

An intercalary chapter on how the war reached Salinas. The town believed every American was a rifleman by birth and worth ten or twenty foreigners, a myth Pershing's expedition after Villa briefly punctured — Mexicans could shoot straight, they outrode and outambushed Black Jack, and dysentery finished the job — before it was quietly restored for the Germans. War was for other people until the telegrams began sneaking in: Marty Hopps dead, the handsome Berges boy from across the street blown to bits. The draftees shuffled down Main Street with their suitcases behind the Salinas Band while their families walked beside them crying, and would not look at their mothers. In the poolrooms the same men who had boasted of one American to twenty Germans whispered that our troops were being sent in without guns. British purchasing men, many of them crippled, bought beans at twelve and a half cents a pound, and farmers regretted the contracts they had signed at two cents above market. The songs changed from hanging the Kaiser to a baby's prayer at twilight.

The town's mood is tracked by what it sings, which lets the chapter cover two years in a page and a half. Twelve-and-a-half-cent beans are dropped in among the deaths without comment, so the reader converts Cal's scheme into money at the same moment the mothers appear on Main Street. The narrator drops back into "we" and names the neighbours' boys, which is what stops the essay becoming a lecture.