THEY used to say--and how long ago it seems since they used to say
it!--that the world would never see another world war. They said that
the planet, being more or less highly civilised with regard to its
principal geographical divisions, and in the main peaceably inclined,
would never again send forth armed millions to slit the throats of yet
other armed millions. That was what they said back yonder in 1912 and
1913, and in the early part of 1914 even.
But something happened--something unforeseen and unexpected and
unplausible happened. And, at that, the structure of amity between the
nations which so carefully had been built up on treaty and pledge, so
shrewdly tongued-and-grooved by the promises of Christian statesmen, so
beautifully puttied up by the prayers of Christian men, so excellently
dovetailed and mortised and rabbeted together, all at once broke down,
span by span; just as it is claimed that a fiddler who stations himself
in the middle of a bridge and plays upon his fiddle a certain note
may, if only he keeps up his playing long enough, play down that bridge,
however strong and well-piered it is.
We still regard the fiddle theory as a fable concocted upon a hypothesis
of physics; but when that other thing happened--a thing utterly
inconceivable--we so quickly adjusted ourselves to it that at once
yesterday's impossibility became to-day's actuality and to-mor-row's
certain prospect.
This war having begun, they said it could not at the very most last more
than a few months; that the countries immediately concerned could not,
any of them, for very long withstand the drains upon them in men and
money and munitions and misery; that the people at home would rise in
revolt against the stupid malignity of it, if the men at the front did
not.
Only a few war-seasoned elderly men, including one in a War Office at
London and one in a General Staff at Berlin and one in a Cabinet Chamber
at Paris, warned their respective people to prepare themselves for a
struggle bloodier, and more violent and costlier, and possibly more
prolonged, than any war within the memories of living men.
At first we couldn't believe that either; none of us could believe it.
But those old men were right and the rest of us were wrong. The words of
the war wiseacres came true.
Presently we beheld enacted the intolerable situation they had
predicted; and in our own country at least the tallies of dead, as
enumerated in the foreign dispatches, began to mean to us only headlines
on the second page of the morning paper.
Then they said that when, by slaughter and maiming and incredible
exertion, the manhood of Europe had been decimated to a given point the
actual physical exhaustion of the combatants would force all the armies
to a standstill. But the thing went on.
It went on through its first year and through its second year. We saw it
going on into its third year, with no sign of abatement, no evidence
of a weakening anywhere among the states and the peoples immediately
affected. We saw our own country drawn into it. And so, figuring what
might lie in front of us and them by what laid behind, we might, without
violence to credibility, figure it as going on until all of Britain's
able-bodied adult male population wore khaki or had been buried in it;
until sundry millions of the men of France were corpses or on crutches;
until Germania had scraped and harrowed and combed her domains for
cannon fodder; until Russia's countless supply of prime human grist for
the red hopper of this red mill no longer was countless but countable.
There is a town in the northern part of the Republic of France called
Courney. Rather, I should say that once upon a time there was such a
town. Considered as a town, bearing the outward manifestations of a town
and nourishing within it the communal spirit of a town, it ceased to
exist quite a time back. Nevertheless, it is with that town, or with the
recent site of it, that this story purports to deal.
There is no particular need of our trying to recreate the picture of
it as it was before the war began. Before the war it was one of a vast
number of suchlike drowsy, cosy little towns lying, each one of them, in
the midst of tilled fat acres on the breasts of a pleasant land; a town
with the grey highroad running through it to form its main street, and
with farms and orchards and vineyards and garden patches round about
it; so that in the springtime, when the orchard trees bloomed and the
grapevines put forth their young leaves and the wind blew, it became a
little island, set in the centre of a little, billowy green-and-white
sea; a town of snug small houses of red brick and grey brick, with a
priest and a mayor, a schoolhouse and a beet-sugar factory, a town well
for the gossips and a town shrine for the devout.
Nor is there any especial necessity for us to try to describe it as it
was after the war had rolled forward and back and forward again over it;
for then it was transformed as most of those small towns that lay in the
tracks of the hostile armies were transformed. It became a ruin, a
most utter and complete and squalid ruin, filled with sights that were
affronts to the eye and smells that were abominations to the nose.
In this place there abode, at the time of which I aim to write, a few
living creatures. They were human beings, but they had ceased to exist
after the ordinary fashion of human beings in this twentieth century of
ours. So often, in the first months and the first years of the war, had
their simple but ample standards been forcibly upset that by now almost
they had forgotten such standards had ever been.
To them yesterday was a dimming memory, and to-morrow a dismal prospect
without hope in it of anything better. To-day was all and everything to
them; each day was destiny itself. Just to get through it with breath
of life in one's body and rags over one's hide and a shelter above
one's head--that was the first and the last of their aim. They lived not
because life was worth while any more, but because to keep on living is
an instinct, and because most human beings are so blessed--or, maybe, so
cursed--with a certain adaptability of temperament, a certain inherent
knack of adjustability that they may endure anything--even the
unendurable--if only they have ceased to think about the past and to
fret about the future.
And these people in this town had ceased to think. They were out of
habit with thinking. A long time before, their sensibilities had
been rocked to sleep by the everlasting lullaby of the cannon; their
imaginations were wrapped in a smoky coma. They lived on without
conscious effort, without conscious ambition, almost without conscious
desire: just as blind worms live under a bank, or slugs in a marsh, or
protoplasms in a pond.
Once, twice, three times Courney had been a stepping-stone in the swept
and garnished pathways of battle. Back in September of 1914 the Germans,
sweeping southward as an irresistible force, took possession of this
town, after shelling it quite flat with their big guns to drive out the
defending garrison of French and British. Then, a little later, in front
of Paris the irresistible force met the immovable body and answered the
old, old question of the scientists; and, as the Germans fell back
to dig themselves in along the Somme and the Aisne, there was again
desperate hard fighting here, and many, very many, lives were spent in
the effort of one side to take and retain, and of the other to gain
and hold fast, the little peaky heaps of wreckage protruding above the
stumps of the wasted orchard trees.
Now, though, for a long time things had been quiet in Courney. Though
placed in debatable territory, as the campaign experts regard debatable
territory, it had lapsed into an eddy and a backwater of war, becoming,
so to speak, a void and a vacuum amid the twisting currents of the war.
In the core of a tornado there may be calm while about it the vortex
swirls and twists. If this frequently is true of windstorms it
occasionally is true of wars.
Often to the right of them and to the left of them, sometimes far in
front of them, and once in a while far back in the rear of them, those
who still abode at Courney heard the distant voices of the big guns; but
their place of habitation, by reasons of shifts in the war game, was no
longer on a route of communication between separate groups of the same
fighting force. It was not even on a line of travel. No news of the
world beyond their limited horizon seeped in to them. They did not know
how went the war--who won or who lost--and almost they had quit desiring
to know. What does one colony of blind worms in a bank care how fares it
with colonies of blind worms in other banks?
You think this state of apathy could not come to pass? Well, I know that
it can, because with my own eyes I saw it coming to pass in the times
while yet the war was new; while it yet was a shock and an affront to
our beliefs; and you must remember that now I write of a much later
time, when the world war had become the world's custom.
Also, could you have looked in upon the surviving remnant of the
inhabitants of Courney, you would have had a clearer and fuller
corroboration of the fact I state, because then you would have seen that
here in this place lived only those who were too old or too feeble to
care, or else were too young to understand.
All tallied, there were not more then than twenty remaining of two
or three hundred who once had been counted as the people of this
inconsequential village; and of these but two were individuals in what
ordinarily would be called the prime of life.
One of these two was a French petty officer, whose eyes had been shot
out, and who, having been left behind in the first retreat toward Paris,
had been forgotten, and had stayed behind ever since. The other had
likewise been a soldier. He was a Breton peasant. His disability seemed
slight enough when he sustained it. A bullet bored across the small
of his back, missing the spine. But the bullet bore with it minute
fragments of his uniform coat; and so laden with filth had his outer
garments become, after weeks and months of service in the field, that,
with the fragments of cloth, germs of tetanus had been carried into his
flesh also, and lockjaw had followed.
Being as strong as a bullock, he had weathered the hideous agonies of
his disease; but it left him beset with an affliction like a queer
sort of palsy, which affected his limbs, his tongue, and the nerves and
muscles of his face.
Continually he twitched all over. He moved by a series of spasmodic
jerks, and when he sought to speak the sounds he uttered came out from
his contorted throat in slobbery, unintelligible gasps and grunts. He
was sane enough, but he had the look about him of being an idiot.
Besides these two there were three or four very aged, very infirm men on
the edge of their dotage; likewise some women, including one masterful,
high-tempered old woman and a younger woman who wept continuously, with
a monotonous mewing sound, for a husband who was dead in battle and for
a fourteen-year-old son who had vanished altogether out of her life,
and who, for all she knew, was dead too. The rest were children--young
children, and a baby or so. There were no sizable youths whatsoever, and
no girls verging on maidenhood, remaining in this place.
So this small group was what was left of Courney. Their houses being
gone and family ties for the most part wiped out, they consorted
together in a rude communal system which a common misery had forced upon
them. Theirs was the primitive socialism that the cave dweller may have
known in his tribe. As I say, their houses were gone; so they denned in
holes where the cellars under the houses had been. Time had been when
they fled to the shelter of these holes as the fighting, swinging
northward or southward, included Courney in its orbit.
Afterward they had contrived patchwork roofage to keep out the worst of
the weather; and now they called these underground shelters home, which
was an insult to the word home. Once they had had horse meat to eat--the
flesh of killed cavalry mounts and wagon teams. Now perforce they were
vegetarians, living upon cabbages and beets and potatoes which grew half
wild in the old garden patches, and on a coarse bran bread made of a
flour ground by hand out of the grain that sprouted in fields where real
harvests formerly had grown.
The more robust and capable among the adults cultivated these poor crops
in a pecking and puny sort of way. The children went clothed in ancient
rags, which partly covered their undeveloped and stunted bodies, and
played in the rubbish; and sometimes in their play they delved too
deep and uncovered grisly and horrible objects. On sunny days the blind
soldier and the palsied one sat in the sunshine, and when it rained
they took refuge with the others in whichever of the leaky burrows was
handiest for them to reach. If they walked the Breton towed his mate in
a crippling, zigzag course, for one lacked the eyes to see where he went
and the other lacked the ability to steer his afflicted legs on a direct
line.
The wreckage of rafters and beams and house furnishings provided
abundant supplies of wood and for fires. By a kind of general assent,
headship and authority were vested jointly in the old tempestuous woman
and the blind man, for the reasons that she had the strongest body and
the most resolute will, and he the keenest mind of them all.
So these people lived along, without a priest to give them comfort by
his preaching; without a physician to mend their ailments; with no set
code of laws to be administered and none to administer them. Existence
for them was reduced to its raw elementals. Since frequently they heard
the big guns sounding distantly and faintly, they knew that the war
still went on. And, if they gave the matter a thought, to them it seemed
that the war always would go on. Time and the passage of time meant
little. A day was merely a period of lightness marked at one end by
a sunrise and at the other by a sunset; and when that was over and
darkness had come, they bedded themselves down under fouled and ragged
coverlids and slept the dumb, dreamless sleep of the lower animals.
Except for the weeping woman who went about with her red eyes
continually streaming and her whining wail forever sounding, no one
among them seemingly gave thought to those of their own kinspeople and
friends who were dead or scattered or missing.
Well, late one afternoon in the early fall of the year, the workers had
quit their tasks and were gathering in toward a common centre, before
the oncoming of dusk, when they heard cries and beheld the crotchety old
woman who shared leadership with the blinded man, running toward them.
She had been gathering beets in one of the patches to the southward
of their ruins; and now, as she came at top speed along the path that
marked where their main street had once been, threading her way swiftly
in and out among the grey mounds of rubbish, she held a burden of the
red roots in her long bony arms.
She lumbered up, out of breath, to tell them she had seen soldiers
approaching from the south. Since it was from that direction they came,
these soldiers doubtlessly would be French soldiers; and, that being
so, the dwellers in Courney need feel no fear of mistreatment at their
hands. Nevertheless, always before, the coming of soldiers had meant
fighting; so, without waiting to spy out their number or to gauge from
their movements a hint of their possible intentions, she had hastened to
spread the alarm.
“I saw them quite plainly!” she cried out between pants for breath.
“They have marched out of the woods yonder--the woods that bound the
fields below where the highroad to Laon ran in the old days. And now
they are spreading out across the field, to the right and the left.
Infantry they are, I think--and they have a machine gun with them.”
“How many, grandmother? How many of them are there?”
It was the eyeless man who asked the question. He had straightened up
from where he sat, and stood erect, with his arms groping before him and
his nostrils dilated.
“No great number,” answered the old woman; “perhaps two
companies--perhaps a battalion. And as they came nearer to me they
looked--they looked so queer!”
“How? How? What do you mean by queer?” It was the blind man seeking to
know.
She dropped her burden of beetroots and threw out her hands in a gesture
of helplessness.
“Queer!” she repeated stupidly. “Their clothes now--their clothes seemed
not to fit them. They are such queer-looking soldiers--for Frenchmen.”
“Oh, if only the good God would give me back my eyes for one little
hour!” cried the blind man impotently. Then, in a different voice, “What
is that?” he said, and swung about, facing north. His ears, keener
than theirs, as a blind man's ears are apt to be, had caught, above the
babble of their excited voices, another sound.
Scuttling, shuffling, half falling, the palsied man, moving at the best
speed of which he was capable, rounded a heap of shattered grey masonry
that had once been the village church, and made toward the clustered
group of them. His jaws worked spasmodically. With one fluttering hand
he pointed, over his left shoulder, behind him. He strove to speak
words, but from his throat issued only clicking, slobbery grunts and
gasps.
“What is it now?” demanded the old woman.
She clutched him, forcing him to a quaking standstill. He kept on
gurgling and kept on pointing.
“Soldiers? Are there more soldiers coming?”
He nodded eagerly.
“From the north?”
He made signs of assent.
“Frenchmen?”
He shook his head until it seemed he would shake it off his shoulders.
“Germans, then? From that way the Germans are coming, eh?”
Again he nodded, making queer movements with his hands, the meaning of
which they could not interpret. Indeed, none there waited to try.
With one accord they started for the deepest and securest of their
burrows--the one beneath the battered-down sugar-beet factory. Its
fallen walls and its shattered roof made a lid, tons heavy and yards
thick, above the cellar of it. In times of fighting it had been their
safest refuge. So once more they ran to hide themselves there. The
ragged children scurried on ahead like a flight of autumn leaves. The
very old men and the women followed after the children; and behind all
the rest, like a rearguard, went the cripple and the old woman, steering
the blind man between them.
At the gullet of a little tunnel-like opening leading down to the deep
basement below, these three halted a brief moment; and the palsied man
and the woman, looking backward, were in time to see a skirmisher in
the uniform of a French foot soldier cross a narrow vista in the
ruins, perhaps a hundred yards away, and vanish behind a culm of
broken masonry. Seen at that distance, he seemed short, squatty--almost
gnomish. Back in the rear of him somewhere a bugle sounded a halting,
uncertain blast, which trailed off suddenly to nothing, as though the
bugler might be out of breath; and then--pow, pow, pow!--the first shots
sounded. High overhead a misdirected bullet whistled with a droning,
querulous note. The three tarried no longer, but slid down into the
mouth of the tunnel.
Inside the cellar the women and children already were stretched close up
to the thick stone sides, looking like flattened piles of rags against
the flagged floor. They had taken due care, all of them, to drop down
out of line with two small openings which once had been windows in the
south wall of the factory cellar, and which now, with their sashes gone,
were like square portholes, set at the level of the earth. Through these
openings came most of the air and all of the daylight which reached
their subterranean retreat.
The old woman cowered down in an angle of the wall, rocking back and
forth and hugging her two bony knees with her two bony arms; but the
maimed soldiers, as befitting men who had once been soldiers, took
stations just beneath the window holes, the one to listen and the other
to watch for what might befall in the narrow compass of space lying
immediately in front of them. For a moment after they found their places
there was silence there in the cellar, save for the rustling of bodies
and the wheeze of forced breathing. Then a woman's voice was uplifted
wailingly: “Oh, this war! Why should it come back here again? Why
couldn't it leave us poor ones alone?”
“Hush, you!” snapped the blinded man in a voice of authority. “There are
men out there fighting for France. Hush and listen!”
A ragged volley, sounding as though it had been fired almost over their
heads, cut off her lamentation, and she hid her face in her hands,
bending her body forward to cover and shield a baby that was between her
knees upon the floor.
From a distance, toward the north, the firing was answered. Somewhere
close at hand a rapid-fire gun began a staccato outburst as the gun
crew pumped its belts of cartridges into its barrel; but at once this
chattering note became interrupted, and then it slackened, and then it
stopped altogether.
“Idiots! Fools! Imbeciles!” snarled the blind man. “They have jammed
the magazine! And listen, comrade, listen to the rifle fire from over
here--half a company firing, then the other half. Veterans would never
fire so. Raw recruits with green officers--that's what they must be....
And listen! The Germans are no better.”
Outside, nearby, a high-pitched strained voice gave an order, and past
the window openings soldiers began to pass, some shrilly cheering, some
singing the song of France, the Marseillaise Hymn. Their trunks were not
visible. From the cellar could be seen only their legs from the knees
down, with stained leather leggings on each pair of shanks, and their
feet, in heavy military boots, sliding and slithering over the cinders
and the shards of broken tiling alongside the wrecked factory wall.
Peering upward, trying vainly at his angled range of vision to see the
bodies of those who passed, the palsied man reached out and grasped the
arm of his mate in a hard grip, uttering meaningless sounds. It was as
though he sought to tell of some astounding discovery he had just made.
“Yes, yes, brother; I understand,” said the blind man. “I cannot see,
but I can hear. There is no swing to their step, eh? Their feet scuffle
inside their boots, eh? Yes, yes, I know--they are very weary. They have
come far to-day to fight these Huns. And how feebly they sing the song
as they go past us here! They must be very tired--that is it, eh? But,
tired or not, they are Frenchmen, and they can fight. Oh, if only the
good God for one little hour, for one little minute, would give me back
my eyes, to see the men of France fighting for France!”
The last straggling pair of legs went shambling awkwardly past the
portholes. To the Breton, watching, it appeared that the owner of those
legs scarcely could lift the weight of the thick-soled boots.
Beyond the cellar, to the left, whither the marchers had defiled,
the firing became general. It rose in volume, sank to a broken and
individual sequence of crashes, rose again in a chorus, grew thin and
thready again. There was nothing workmanlike, nothing soldierlike about
it; nothing steadfastly sustained. It was intermittent, irregular,
uncertain. Listening, the blind man waggled his head in a puzzled,
irritated fashion, and shook off the grasp of his comrade, who still
appeared bent on trying to make something clear to him.
With a movement like that of a startled horse the old leader-woman threw
up her head. With her fingers she clawed the matted grey hair out of her
ears.
“Hark! Hark!” she cried, imposing silence upon all of them by her hoarse
intensity. “Hark, all of you! What is that?”
The others heard it too, then. It was a whining, gagging, thin cry
from outside, dose up against the southerly wall of their underground
refuge--the distressful cry of an un-happy child, very frightened and
very sick. There was no mistaking it--the sobbing intake of the breath;
the choked note of nausea which followed.
“It is a little one!” bleated one woman.
“What child is missing?” screeched another in a panic. “What babe has
been overlooked?”
Each mother took quick and frenzied inventory of her own young, groping
out with her hands to make sure by the touch of their flesh to her
flesh that her offspring were safely bestowed. But when, this done,
they turned to tell their leader that apparently all of Courney had been
accounted for, she was gone. She had darted into the dark passage that
led up and outward into the open. They sat up on their haunches, gaping.
A minute passed and she was back, half bearing, half pulling in her arms
not a forgotten baby, but a soldier; a dwarfish and misshapen soldier,
it seemed to them, squatting there in the fading light; a soldier whose
uniform was far too large for him; a soldier whose head was buried under
his cap, and whose face was hidden within the gaping collar of his coat,
and whose booted toes scraped along the rough flagging as his rescuer
backed in among them, dragging him along with her.
In the middle of the floor she released him, and he fell upon his side
in a clump of soiled cloth and loose accoutrement; and for just an
instant they thought both his hands had been shot away, for nothing
showed below the ends of the flapping sleeves as he pressed his midriff
in his folded arms, uttering weak, tearful cries. Then, though, they saw
that his hands were merely lost within the length of his sleeves, and
they plunged at the conclusion that his hurt was in his middle.
“Ah, the poor one!” exclaimed one or two. “Wounded in the belly.”
“Wounded?” howled the old woman. “Wounded? You fools! Don't you see he
has no wound? Don't you see what it is? Then, look, you fools--look!”
She dropped down alongside him and wrestled him, he struggling feebly,
over on his back. With a ferocious violence she snatched the cap off his
head, tore his gripped arms apart, ripped open the coat he wore and the
coarse shirt that was beneath it.
“Look, fools, and see for yourselves!” Forgetting the danger to
themselves of stray bullets, they scrambled to their feet and crowded up
close behind her, peering over her shoulders as she reared back upon her
bent knees in order that they might the better see.
They did see. They saw, looking up at them from beneath the mop of
tousled black hair, the scared white face and the terror-widened eyes of
a boy--a little, sickly, undernourished boy. He could not have been more
than fourteen--perhaps not more than thirteen. They saw in the gap of
his parted garments the narrow structure of his shape, with the ribs
pressing tight against the tender, hairless skin, and below the arch of
the ribs the sunken curve of his abdomen, heaving convulsively to the
constant retching as he twisted and wriggled his meagre body back and
forth.
“Oh, Mother above!” one yowled. “They have sent a child to fight!”
As though these words had been to him a command, the writhing heap half
rose from the flags.
“I am no child!” he cried, between choking attacks of nausea. “I am
as old as the rest--older than some. Let me go! Let me go back! I am a
soldier of France!”
For all his brave words, his trembling legs gave way under him, and he
fell again and rolled over on his stomach, hiding his face in his hands,
a whimpering, vomiting child, helpless with pain and with fear.
“He speaks true! He speaks true!” yelled the old woman. Now she was on
her feet, her lean face red and swollen with a vast rage. “I saw them--I
saw them--I saw those others as I was dragging this one in. He speaks
true, I tell you. There was a captain--he could not have been more than
fifteen. And his sword--it was as long as he was, nearly. There are
soldiers out there like this one, whose arms are not strong enough
to lift the guns to their shoulders. They are children who fight
outside--children in the garb of men!”
The widow, who continually wept, sprang forward. She had quit weeping
and a great and terrible fury looked out of her red-lidded eyes. She
screeched in a voice that rose above the wails of the rest:
“And it was for this, months ago, that they took away from me my little
Pierre! Mother of God, they fight this war with babies!”
She threw herself down on all fours and, wriggling across the floor upon
her hands and knees, gathered up the muddied, booted feet of the boy
soldier and hugged them to her bosom.
In the middle of the circle the old woman stood, gouging at her hair
with her hands.
“It is true!” she proclaimed. “They are sending forth our babies to
fight against strong men.”
The palsied man twisted himself up to her. He shook his head to and fro,
as if in dissent of what she declared. He pointed toward the north; then
at the sobbing boy at his feet; then north again; then at the boy;
and, so doing, he many times and very swiftly nodded his head. Then he
repeated the same gesticulations with his arms that he had made at the
time of giving the first alarm of the approach of the enemy. Finally he
stooped his back and shrank up his body and hunched in his shoulders
in an effort to counterfeit smallness and slightness, all the while
gurgling in a desperate attempt to make himself understood. All at once,
simultaneously his audience grasped the purport of his pantomime.
“The Germans that you saw, they were children too--children like this
one?” demanded the old woman, her voice all thickened and raspy with her
passion. “Is that what you mean?”
He jerked his head up and down in violent assent, his jaws clicking and
his face muscles jumping. The old woman shoved him away from in front of
her.
“Come on with me!” she bade the other women, in a tone that clarioned
out high and shrill above the sobbing of the boy on the floor, above the
gurgling of the cripple and the sound of the firing without. “Come on!”
They knew what she meant; and behind her they massed themselves, their
bodies bent forward from their waists, their heads lowered and their
hands clenched like swimmers about to breast a swift torrent.
“Bide where you are--you women!” the blinded man commanded. He felt his
way out to the middle of the room, barring their path with his body and
his outspread arms. “You can do nothing. The war goes on--this fight
here goes on--until we win!”
“No, no, no, no!” shouted back the old beldam, and at each word beat her
two fists against her flaccid breasts. “When babies fight this war this
war ends! And we--the women here--the women everywhere--we will stop it!
Do you hear me? We will stop it! Come on!”
She pushed him aside; and, led by her, the tatterdemalion crew of them
ran swiftly from the cellar and into the looming darkness of the tunnel,
crying out as they ran.
Strictly speaking, the beginning of this story comes at the end of it.
One morning in the paper, I read, under small headlines on an inner
page, sandwiched in between the account of a football game at Nashville
and the story of a dog show at Newport, a short dispatch that had been
sent by cable to this country, to be printed in our papers and to be
read by our people, and then to be forgotten by them. And that dispatch
ran like this:
BOYS TO FIGHT WAR SOON
Germany Using Some Seventeen Years Old.
Haig Wants Young Men
London--The war threatens soon to become a struggle between mere boys.
The pace is said to be entirely too fast for the older men long to
endure. It is declared here that by the middle of 1917, the Entente
Allies will be facing boys of seventeen in the German Army.
General Sir Douglas Haig, commanding the British Expeditionary Forces,
is said to have objected to the sending out of men of middle age. He
wants young men of from eighteen to twenty-five. After the latter year,
it is said, the fighting value of the human unit shows a rapid and
steady decline.... The older men have their place; but, generally
speaking, it is said now to be in “the army behind the army”--the men
back of the line, in the supply and transport divisions, where the
strain is not so great. These older men are too susceptible to trench
diseases to be of great use on the firing line. England already is
registering boys born in 1899, preparatory to calling them up when they
attain their eighteenth year.
So I sat down and I wrote this story.