Part 49

I have spoken of the quietness and steadiness with which people through the country seemed to me to be taking the call for troops in 1916 when I was on the Chautauqua circuit—of the conviction I had as I saw them in the Middle West on the declaration of war in April of 1917, that they had already made up their minds, were ready to go.

But I confess I was unprepared for what I everywhere met early in 1918, traveling chiefly in the South, the Middle West, and the Southwest. The country was no longer quiet, no longer reflective. On every street corner, around every table, it was fighting the War, watchfully, suspiciously, determinedly. All the paraphernalia of life had taken on war coloring; the platforms from which I spoke were so swathed in flags that I often had to watch my step entering and leaving. I found I was expected to wear a flag—not a corsage. At every lunch or dinner where I was a guest all declarations were red, white, and blue.

When you are on a lecture trip one of your few resources is the newsstand. I had the habit of searching the postal-card racks for local points of interest—local celebrations. But now all these had disappeared. The racks were filled with pictures of soldiers in all of their scores of operations, humble and otherwise—not only on parade, but on “spud duty.” There were thrilling pictures of cavalry charges, of marches across country, of aeroplanes directing field maneuvers, touching scenes in hospitals, cheering ones of games, endless sentimental ones to be sent to the boys.

A change had come over the literature of the newsstands. Serious magazines I had never before seen in certain southwestern towns were there now. “Anything that pertains to patriotism is a good seller,” a railroad station news agent told me. “Why, look at the books we carry!” And there they were, Hankey, Empey, Boyd Cable, disputing attention with “Slashaway, the Fearless,” “Gunpowder Jim,” “The Mystery of Demon Hollow.”

The libraries of scores of towns made a specialty of war books. At Council Bluffs—an old, large, rich, and cultivated town of course—I found on an open shelf beside the librarian’s desk Hazen’s “Modern European History,” John Masefield’s “Gallipoli,” “The Old Front Line,” André Chéradame’s essays, Hueffer’s “Between St. Denis and St. George,” and a score of others. They all showed signs of much reading.

As for the newspapers, they were given over to the war. It was my duty to make sure that they were giving the releases of our committee fair attention. They were—the local women were attending to that. Editors might and did grumble because Washington was swamping them with information and suggestions which often they felt were “old stuff,” repetition; but they sweated to do their part.

The editorial attitude was not characterized by excessive respect for great names, particularly if the great name was that of an enemy. I was in Texas when the Zimmermann note was given out by the President. Nothing could have been more amusing than the contemptuous attitude of the average Texan citizen whom I met. Some of the country newspapers did not even take the trouble to print the gentleman’s name, but called him “Zim.” You received the impression that a German-Japanese attack on our Southwest border would be a very simple matter for Texans to clean up. All they asked, I was told, was for Uncle Sam to keep his hands off. They would take care of it. There was little anger but much contempt.

Everywhere the boys were the absorbing interest. In the Southwest and along the Atlantic coast I practically lived with them. They crowded every railroad station, hustled into every train. There was rarely a night that I was not wakened by their demanding beds in already overflowing sleepers. Troop trains passed you en route, all sorts of slogans scribbled in chalk on the cars. From wherever they came they were sure to announce that they were bound for Berlin.

It is of course beside the truth to say that all young soldiers were big and cheerful and spirited and brave; but the total impression was certainly one of bigness, of freedom, and of exultation in the enterprise. One came to have a fierce pride in them, an impatience of any criticism of what they did, a longing to fight for them, since one could not fight beside them.

Crossing the Apache Trail in March of 1918, we picked up three silent, rough youths who had come from somewhere out of the desert, and were making for camp to enlist. They were fascinating traveling companions, shy, watchful, suspicious, discovering for the first time the ordinary arrangements of railroad life. I remember a wonderful young savage with whom I traveled for a day. We were depending on eating houses for food and woke up to find our train six hours late. This meant no breakfast until possibly eleven o’clock. Of course the boy was famished. He ate ravenously and then bought right and left sandwiches, pie, hard-boiled eggs, an armful of packages. You could almost hear him saying to himself, “They are not going to catch me again.” They had put one over on him, but next time he would be ready for them.

The interest of the boys in what was before them was unflagging. They were not afraid to talk about the worst. When the Tuscania went down, those bound for sailing points were not fazed in the least by the danger of the passage; but more than once I felt that the tragedy had whetted their desire to get at the enemy.

The interest of older men in the young soldier was inexhaustible. They were like the little boys in that. Little boys could not resist a soldier. It was startling to see a baby of three years slip away from his mother, walk down the aisle to where a soldier boy was sitting, watch him silently with wide-open eyes, get a little bolder, stretch out his hand and stroke his clothes, get a little bolder still and ask him if he might put on his cap.

Soldier or not soldier, however, the men talked war, talked it all the time when they were not reading their newspapers. How the news filtered to them in certain remote spots, it was hard to understand. In crossing the Apache Trail I was startled to see a man rise from the desert, as it seemed, and ask if we had any more news about “them big guns,” if anybody had found out “how they do it.” We gave him all the papers we had, and the passengers freely aired their theories of the mystery.

With the inexhaustible interest went a fierce determination to see that every suggestion of the Government was carried out. When the Third Liberty Loan opened I was traveling in a section where there were many German settlers.

“What is their attitude?” I asked a woman active in the work of our committee.

“We have but one family in this town,” she said. “After being waited on by five of our leading citizens they took $10,000 of Liberty Bonds.”

I do not know whether these citizens carried ropes in their hands when they made the call, but I did see in one town a detachment of citizens parading with ropes on the pummels of their saddles and banners marked “Beware.”

It had been agreed by all concerned that I talk on what was doing in Washington as I had been seeing it. Now and then I was “lent” by my sponsor to aid in a drive of one kind or another. Once I spoke from the platform of “Oklahoma Billy Sunday,” a picturesque and highly successful revivalist who patterned his campaigns after those of his great namesake. A liberty loan drive was on, and no gathering, not even a revival, certainly not a lecture, was allowed in the town which did not share its time with the grim banker heading the local committee. He opened the meeting and left me shivering with what might happen to those who differed with him about the size of their purchase. Then came boisterous singing and praying, broken to let me tell my story. How dull and uninspired it sounded, sandwiched between this goading and inflaming!

I realized more and more as I went on that I did not really know much more of my subject than they did in Bisbee, Arizona, or Little Rock, Arkansas, so persistently did they tap every source of information; but I certainly knew fewer things that were not so. It was inevitable that, stirred to their depths by the continuous flow of all this young life towards the battle fields of Europe, they should “see red,” hate, suspect. I could neither give them the inside information they craved nor stir them to the hate of which they had absolute need, I sometimes felt, to keep up their courage.

“Are you a pacifist?” a stern citizen on a Missouri railway platform asked me one morning as I was leaving a town where I had spoken the night before, and where I had deplored the will to hate I was sensing.

“Well,” I parried, “I am for winning this war.”

“Did you sign this?” He pulled out a prewar list of names, a peace society list where my name appeared. It was headed by Jane Addams—“that woman,” he called her.

“I am proud to be classed with ‘that woman,’” I said indignantly. “She is one of the world’s greatest, and if the world could or would have heeded her counsels you boys would not be dying in France.”

There was no time for argument or arrest, for my train came. I took it, followed by the black looks of more than one listener.

But it was the boys that were doing this. They had given of their blood, and their hearts went with the gift. They were all like an old fellow that I heard cry out one day, “I can’t bear to think of one of Ours gettin’ hurt.”

It would be idle of course to pretend that in the territory over which I traveled between the break with Germany and the Armistice—in twenty-five different states, something like twenty-five thousand miles—there were no indications of revolt; but, as I saw them, they were infrequent and never in public. Now and then I came upon a man or woman who dared to say to me when he had me in a corner: “I am a pacifist. We must find another way.” With which I so heartily agreed. But that man or woman would not have said that on the street corner without danger to his life.

People generally did not have much interest in what was to happen after the War was ended. They took it for granted that Germany would be driven back. That was what they were working for. But how the adjustments were to be made—that did not deeply concern them. What they wanted was to have it over and get the boys back. That done, they were willing to forget, pay the bill—but there must be no more of this senseless business in the world. Even the most violent occasionally confided that to you.

All these observations—of which I talked, I am afraid too much, to the members of the committee when I came back—strengthened my conviction that, whatever it cost, there was no doubt that the country would insist on seeing it through. That conviction was never stronger than when the Armistice was suddenly signed.