WAR

During the spring and summer of 1914 I put seventy acres of the valley under cultivation, added eight rooms to the old cabin, and wrote a serial. The inspiration of love or of any consuming ambition greatly augments the powers of even an ordinary person to achieve. This is the reason why men in love frequently accomplish so much for a time, then fall back into their former state of indolence. The illusion of love has failed. It is by nature a brief enchantment. This is the reason why the man fired by ambition frequently accomplishes prodigious tasks far beyond his normal capacity to achieve.

I was inspired at this time with the hope of winning a happy ending to what had been a harsh sentence in living. I was creating a very small world to fit me behind the world at large; and this period, I should say, was about the morning and evening of the third day at the business. Things were beginning to turn green. I could see my little herbs of the field glistening in the early morning dew, and my sun was shining. I remember a certain notion I had then, which has remained a part of my personal definition of the Lord--that besides being almighty and obviously beneficent He must be a happy God every time he created another world, divided the light from the darkness in that place and set up all the miracles of life there.

This notion was not so blasphemous as it sounds written out in words. One cannot copy His omniscience or His almightiness, but it does _not_ seem to me nearly so profane to give one’s self a few airs about having imitated Him in a small way that turns out green and triumphant like a field of corn, as it does to dig down and snoop the heavens with the idea of proving there is no God at all.

I had only to take a whiff around the farm in those days, have an altercation with the carpenters about another window needed to keep the cabin from looking too much like a fortress, then retire to my study upon the farther rim of the forest and copy the green leaves of my thoughts for the next chapter of the serial.

On the third day of August in that year the Great War began in Europe. The editor of ‘The Saturday Evening Post’ sent his first batch of war correspondents across the following week. I was to have been one of them, but I had promised another serial for another magazine which was still to be written. The editor would neither release me from the contract nor risk me in the war zone until this copy was delivered.

I suppose it would require one of those latest expositors of the mysteries human beings are, an alienist, to explain why disappointment over being detained brought on the first attack of hay fever I ever had. There is more psychology than pathology in our diseases.

But I was determined to go to France in 1914. I had been living at such a high tension nervously for some time that nothing short of a bloody war could have quieted me and reduced me to a normal condition. The motive here confessed was overlaid with the usual noble emotions; but this is a truthful record of my mind, which is sufficiently nearly related to human minds in general for me to risk the assertion that a great many other people did valiant service in France who were attracted there by a similar motive. We seek reactions from what we are in excitement. The use made of us under these circumstances proves the shrewd economies of Providence by employing our lower instincts to trap us into the performance of the greatest, most unselfish services, else very few men would volunteer for military service, and very few women would have volunteered for canteen service in France.

I hurried off somewhere, wrote that serial, returned to New York and sailed for Liverpool all within thirty days.

I have written briefly of my impressions during this harrowing period in ‘My Book and Heart.’ What we know now is that the most victorious battles and the most disastrous defeats never settle the issues involved. The Great War has increased our debts, doubled our problems and added incredibly to the moral confusion of our times. Still, if there should be a call to arms in this country to-morrow, I doubt if I could bear the mortal ignominy of being a pacifist.

There is no sense in war. It is the way we are made that brings on the red fury of arms. Neither the ambition of politicians nor the greed of financiers could draw a nation into war if the people were not so easily moved by an invitation to shed blood. It seems invariably to produce a state of terrific exaltation, similar to a religious revival. I doubt if this is due so much to the survival of brutal instincts in men as to some provision of Providence against the ultimate emergencies of mankind. When law, civilization and the artificial restraints of society fail him, he will still have his fists and a faculty for believing in God. These two capacities alone should reproduce men of better quality than the shrinking creeds of pacifism. Whatever we believe theoretically about peace, we should always be ready by nature to fight.

But another set of youths must grow into the pugilistic period now before we could actually stage another World War. My observation has been that the soldiers who fought in the recent one are more or less shell-shocked. I have employed more soldiers here than any other class of men since the war, because they are more intelligent and better trained; and no matter how brave the record is they have left behind them in the Saint-Mihiel drive or the Argonne Forest, they are more concerned than other men to avoid personal difficulties. One must think it out to understand them; their reputation for courage has been established beyond any shadow of a doubt so long as history lasts. There is no reason why a battle-scarred man should prove his courage, which is probably the chief reason why men fight. They are the only admirable pacifists in the world; and if it comes to the test, they will have more to do with keeping this nation out of war than a World Court or any other talking method we can devise, however wise or diplomatic.

War, however victoriously ended, is not a profitable subject to discuss in the retrospect. It dies down in the emotions of men and passes into history. After that, the next generation reads history and discovers what burdens and strange defeats were entailed upon their future by these victories. But I am setting down one incident in connection with my experiences in France by way of proving a theory I have--that merely by living we fulfil more prophecies than the seers of the Old Testament ever dreamed of. We are becoming terrible predicators of the future.

It was in October of 1914. A clear starlit night. A battle was on. News from the front ran through Paris in whispers all day. Now darkness and silence. No one could sleep. I came down from my room in the old Saint James Hotel and stood in the street, reaching a long look through this tomb of terrors that had been the gayest city in Europe three months ago. Not a soul in sight, not the sound of a voice or the rumble of a wheel, peopled now only with the shadows of great shapes. Yet in this fearful stillness these very palaces and spires seemed to listen, to be waiting for something about to happen.

Then from the high distances came a rhythmic sound, thunder throttled down, stars purring, a pulse beating faster in the heavens. Now the ominous roar of motors. Swift as swallows in flight, I saw them rise above the horizon and flash by like great silver birds through the searchlights above the city--German aeroplanes coming to drop bombs on Paris! Red blasts, earth-rocking detonations! This tomb of terrors gave up its dead, a frightful population of men and women rushed half clad and disheveled from their hiding places into the open street. They shrieked, babbled, waved their arms, milled and circled, frenzied with fear and hate.

I stood aside like a mere leaf of life not yet caught in this whirlwind of dreadful passions. The scene was no longer linked in my mind with war, but with something else far back in memory, associated with quietness and peace. Then it came back to me, that night so many years ago, the world not yet in sight, the quiet heavens, father thrusting his arm out in a gesture like a scythe aimed at all the spaces overhead; the child I was then, bare feet resting staunchly upon the toes of his boots, clinging to him, face upturned to him, feeling like any other young bird about to be borne aloft upon magnificently gesticulating wings.

Through all this uproar of a panic-stricken people, in a strange city on the other side of the world, forty years later, I heard again the very tones of father’s voice: ‘You will live to see airships up there flying like a flock of birds.’ Then mother’s sharper tones breaking in upon this rumbling prophecy: ‘Come in and go to bed,’ calling me away from the temptation of so great an imagination, anxious lest I should be birthmarked mentally with that mad passion to fly which had frequently cropped out in father’s family.

Well, I had lived to see his prophecy fulfilled. But what a fulfillment! This happens frequently to the best efforts made by seers. The world twists the tail of their prophecy and makes it come true like a disaster.

On the twenty-third day of December in this same year of 1914 I was at home again in the valley, sitting beside my own log fire, very quiet, but not serene. I was suffering from a curious pallor of the mind, not due entirely to the dreadful scenes I had passed through in the war zone. We were homeward bound from Liverpool when the boat struck a mine off the coast of Ireland. This catastrophe happened in the middle of the night, and I was still convalescing from the peculiarly sickening sensation of suddenly standing on my head in the berth with no such acrobatic intentions. I could not forget the tremors which passed through that ship as if it had been a living body pierced to the heart, the awful heaviness with which it settled back into the sea, the moments like ages of dreadful silence that followed, then the roar and confusion on deck, the sibilant sounds of many voices hushed to whispers by fear, the rush of bare feet along the corridors inside as the passengers fled for the lifeboats, which were not needed after all. And I shall never entirely recover from the recollection of that jagged hole in the side of the boat, so frailly mended, nor from the sound of the water pouring in and the rhythmic strokes of the pumps upon which our lives depended.

I am wondering if the critics who found ‘My Book and Heart’ the record of a narrow and monotonous existence can claim one year filled with so many varied activities as the year 1914 was for me. And I am merely offering it as a sample of my years in general.