Sabinsport took the fate of Serbia more to heart because just before
Nikola came home in March of 1916, with his thrilling personal tales,
Verdun had knocked her growing hardness and indifference toward the war
to splinters. That sudden fierce flood, breaking at a point in the long
line of which she had never heard, threatening as it did to engulf the
defenders and sweep over Paris, marked an epoch in Sabinsport's war
history. Not since the invasion of Belgium had feeling run as high as
now. There was a keen personal anxiety lest her chosen side should be
beaten, for the attack revealed to Sabinsport that she had a chosen
side, that she cared--cared for the Allies; and, above all, cared for
France.
Verdun broke a crust that had formed over the town; a curious crust
which had grown thicker and thicker through the winter of 1915-16,
justifying much of Ralph's bitterness and filling Dick with increasing
dread. Half of this was reluctance to going into war--not fear, mind
you, not at all. There was no fear in Sabinsport's heart of anything
that she made up her mind she must do, but there was a strong feeling
that she ought not to have to go into this war, that it was not her
business, that there ought to be a way out. It was clinging to this
reluctance through a growing consciousness that the things which she
stood for were being attacked, that hardened her. She did not see
clearly yet, it is true, that it was her ideas of life that were at
stake on the earth; but she every day more strongly suspected that was
the case, and she was reluctant to admit it.
An element in the crust, and a hard one, was her desire not to be
disturbed in her prosperity. She was making money. The whole face of
Sabinsport had been changed in the year and a half since the war began.
The great wire mill had trebled its plant and was running in three
shifts, day and night. The old linoleum factory around the Point had
never stopped growing. There were 2,000 girls there now, the pick of
Sabinsport and all the country round. When you can make twenty to forty
dollars a week, for eight hours' work, as these girls were doing, you
can get pretty nearly any wage-earning woman that you want, so
Sabinsport had discovered. Teachers had left the schools throughout the
county, stenographers had left their desks, clerks had left the
counters, and the farmers' daughters for miles around had flocked into
the factory. This meant business for Sabinsport. Months before her
housing capacity had outrun the demand. The onrush of strange men and
women had raised a score of difficult and delicate problems; but it all
meant money. Never had the shops of Sabinsport made so much, never had
they charged so much. And this prosperity had made a new class in
Sabinsport, a new kind of rich--the munition rich they called them.
They succeeded the class whose fortunes had been made in the factories,
as that class had succeeded one whose fortunes came from franchises;
immediately back of which lay those made rich by coal, the successors
of the original land rich. And, like each successive new rich class,
they brought into the town an element of vulgarity which their
predecessors had been gradually living down, the kind of hard and
reckless vulgarity which the sudden possession of money almost
invariably causes. There were not a few in Sabinsport whose families
had outlived all this unpleasant phase of wealth, who felt and talked
very hardly of this class. There was no question that they helped in
the forming of the crust over Sabinsport's soul.
There was still another element, which had much to do, I am convinced,
with a certain tenaciousness in the crust, and that was the conviction
that Germany was bound to win; and all they wanted, since this was so,
was to see it over--stopped--get the sound of it out of their ears, the
stench of it out of their nostrils.
No, Germany could not be beaten. She had driven back Russia. She had
won at Gallipoli, she had stripped Serbia from its people and driven
king and army to take refuge on an island of the sea. She had devised
unheard of weapons of terror and destruction in the air and under the
water. She stood surrounded by enemies, but enemies divided by seas,
divided in command, untrained and unfurnished; sure, and daily more
brutal and fearful because so sure. Sabinsport did not believe she
could be conquered. She had a great distaste for the conclusion, but a
fact was a fact, and what reason had you to suppose she could be held
when once she advanced? She would not make a second mistake on the
Marne.
And if this was the truth, what was the use of Sabinsport's going in?
Of course there were those who said, "It will be our turn next." But
Sabinsport was very far, at this point, from believing this.
This crust over Sabinsport's soul had more and more discouraged Dick
through the winter. Hard as it was, however, he held on, in face of the
town's settled conviction, to his belief in final victory. He simply
could not see either England or France giving up. It wasn't possible.
They weren't made that way. They would die and die and die but not
surrender; and it was this inner conviction that amounted to knowledge
that was both his support and his torture, for he did not fool himself
for a moment with any hopes of speedy victory. It would be long, long,
long years--and what years! Young men, boys, old men, steadily marching
to death, and always behind them others coming to fill their
places--the earth ravaged of its manhood. High hearts, great loves,
beautiful talents, beneficent powers, destroyed until the earth had
been stripped of its best. Women, steadfast and brave, giving lovers,
sons, friends--all that made life fruitful and lovely--giving them with
no waver in their heroic souls, the only outward sign their whitening
hair, their sinking cheeks, their anguished eyes. He saw the
destruction of the best work of men's hands, the stopping of kindly
industries, the making of things which brought comfort and health and
joy to men--all ended that every hand could be put to making that which
would best and quickest blow to pieces the largest number of human
beings or most certainly sink them to the secret bottom of the pitiless
ocean. He saw all this and still believed in victory.
We would go in. Dick never doubted it from the day that England's
ultimatum was given and refused. Our turn would come. It was the logic
of the struggle. Sabinsport would see its men march off to death and
mutilation, would see its women silently growing old, its works of
peace turned to works of war; all its healthy, daily life remolded to
serve the Great Necessity of conquering the Monster broken loose.
Most cruelly had he suffered through the days of Gallipoli, and in this
he was alone. It seemed to him sometimes that no one in Sabinsport ever
thought of what was going on in Gallipoli. The truth was the field of
the war had become too wide, too complicated, for Sabinsport to follow.
The war for her was the line from the Channel to Switzerland, and
particularly the part of it where the fighting of the moment was
liveliest, so she refused to consider Gallipoli.
Dick followed every detail of that cruel and valiant struggle. He had a
talent for the visualization of physical things which he had trained
until it was instinctive. Topography, contour, forests and fields,
towns, farms, churches, the turn of streets and the winding of rivers,
the look of shop fronts, the town square, its fountains and statues,
the town promenade, the costumes of men and women, the cattle they
prized, the horses they drove, the dogs at their heels--he saw them
all. It had been his play in travel to anticipate what he was to see,
and then to compare with what he found. With much travel, gaining
knowledge of things as they are and as the books say them to be, Dick
had grown amazingly clever in this play of construction.
But since the war this faculty had become a torture. It was so much a
part of him that he could no more prevent its operating than he could
prevent his mind from instinctively forming judgments. But never in the
war had he been so cruelly tormented as by the scenes which passed
before his eyes, as real as the streets of Sabinsport, every time that
he saw or heard the word "Gallipoli." True, his affections were deeply
touched. Some of the best friends of his Oxford days were there, and
one by one he learned they would never return. The sandy, burning,
treeless, waterless tongue of land, with its scanty footholds for the
English and its sheltered pits for the enemy that from over their heads
in the heights poured fire and death on them, to him seemed like some
hideous dragon--a dragon fifty-seven miles long, carrying on back and
in belly every weapon of destruction known to man and nature. He grew
sick and faint as he saw men he loved making their landings through
spitting shell and shrapnel, saw them crawling through mesquite and
sand to attack, saw them wounded and abandoned, going mad under the
burning sun or dying of pain and exhaustion where they lay on beach or
hillside. It was infernal; a mad, romantic adventure, gallantly,
chivalrously undertaken and carried on to its ghastly failure.
Dick could neither forgive nor forget Gallipoli. Then came the attack
on Verdun--and the crust broke in Sabinsport. He was no longer alone
now in his anxiety. Everybody _cared_. There was Patsy. Patsy was wild
with fury and with dread. The day and night she had spent in Verdun in
August, 1914--preceded and followed as it was by much looking at
fortifications and listening to much clear explanations by her friends
and the officers who piloted them--had given Patsy a keen sense of what
Verdun meant for both attacked and defenders. All that she had seen and
heard, all the confidence she had of the impregnability of the place
when there--her sense of surprise that the French officers should look
serious, even anxious--had been shattered by the events of Belgium's
invasion. Did not Namur have encircling forts? Had she not seen their
guns and heard tales of their strength, and had not the Germans
_walked_ into Namur?
Oh, they would shatter Verdun and all its pleasant places. She would
never do what she had dreamed--go when she was old and sit again in the
garden of the little café by the Meuse, and reflect how here were
things that did not change. She brought out the first long letter she
had sent after the war began and recalled details of what she had
seen--could it be but eighteen months ago that she climbed to the
highest tower of the Verdun citadel and looked over the town and
country--and now, why now, those very buildings were many of them in
heaps--all that fair country torn open, its great trees down, its farms
desolate. The infamy of it!
Patsy lost no chance now to stir Sabinsport. In school, in her club,
with her friends, she talked Verdun, and she asked tragically and
constantly the question that she had not asked often of herself or
others in the past, so absorbed was she in Belgium's relief, and that
was, "_When_ are we going in? Are we going to let this thing go on? If
Paris is to be ravished like Louvain, are we going to sit quiet?"
It was this unanswered question, stirring in Sabinsport's unsatisfied
soul, that made her take so to heart her first war casualty. It came at
the very start of the diversion by the English, the diversion on the
Somme, which gave the first real hope of relieving Verdun.--Mikey,
Katie's son, now Lieut. Michael Flaherty, if you please, went over the
top--and Mikey did not come back.
They left him in No Man's Land, with a bullet through his brain--a
clean, quick death, thank God--no writhing on live wires, no hours of
hideous, hopeless pain in the mire, uncared for, no slow dying--just
one quick stab when his blood was hot with the passion of war and his
heart was at the highest.
The news came straight to Dick, as Mikey had carefully planned it
should. Soon after he reached France he had written back, "If anything
should happen to me, Mr. Dick, I've fixed it so they'd tell you first,
and I know you'll make it as easy as you can for my mother. Not that
I'm worrying, but a fellow gets to looking out for things here."
Mikey's thoughtfulness was justified. As Dick held the message which
came to him at daybreak and tried to frame words which would be gentle
and merciful, he felt utterly helpless.
In the year that Mikey had been gone, Katie had become more and more
proud of him. She was confident he would return as a "gineral." And
Katie had a right to be proud. Mikey had done wonders. His strength,
his wit, his love of a fight, his proud conviction that he'd gone in
for Mr. Dick, all had made him a wonderful soldier. He had been
advanced, he was Lieutenant Flaherty by the spring of 1916, and Katie
had a picture of him in her pocket, familiar, indeed, to most of
Sabinsport because Ralph had printed it in the _Argus_. It had been
copied in a city Sunday supplement, much to the joy of Katie and the
pride of the Boys' Club and the War Board. At the latter place, in
fact, it had been given a place of honor on the wall opposite King
Albert and Papa Joffre, and underneath in big letters, printed
carefully by Captain Billy, were the words, "Lieut. Michael Flaherty,
Sabinsport, U.S.A."
And now he was dead. How, Dick asked himself, could he go to the woman
whose only son had given his life in doing his work? How could he
console poor Katie--he, the cause of her grief? An indirect and
unwilling cause, to be sure, but would Mikey have found his way to
France without him? he wondered now, as he sat miserably looking at the
yellow sheet in his hand. Katie had long ago worked it out that it was
the martial soul of the boy that had led him away. "He'd a gone without
you, Mr. Dick. He's a born soldier. He'd a gone wherever the war was in
the world if he'd never seen you." Would she still think so when he
told her?
He gathered himself up finally and went about his morning toilet. Katie
came at seven. His breakfast was always served at the stroke of eight.
He had only begun his dressing when he heard the distant click of her
door. He could hear her singing when, later, he gathered his resolution
and went to the kitchen. She was at the stove frying his bacon--she
turned a red and happy face to him.
"What's the matter, Mr. Dick, comin' in at this time of--" She
stopped--her frying pan high over the stove. "Is it Mikey you've news
of?" The dread anguish in the voice after the hearty cheer of a moment
before hurt Dick like a knife.
"Katie," he said, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder--"my poor
Katie!" and the tears came.
"He's hurt! He's dead!"
"He's dead, Katie."
She stood stock still, and slowly a look of fierce hatred came into her
face. "God pity the Germans that fought him. It don't say how many he
killed?" Then, dropping frying pan and bacon, and throwing her apron
over her head, she fell into a chair and rocking back and forth, cried
in her sorrow:
"O Mikey, Mikey! What's the use of it all? What's the use of it all?"
As Dick recalled the miserable hour later, there was one strong and
uplifting thing in it--the woman's brave efforts to control her grief
and attend to his morning wants.
"The likes of me," she said, fighting back her tears, "forgettin' you
like this. Ye'll forgive me, Mr. Dick?" Dick begged her not to mind
him, to let him wait on himself--she wouldn't hear of it, but went
through the round. Never for an instant, Dick knew, did she have a
thought of holding him responsible. Never for a moment did she think of
neglecting him. Only once more did she completely break down.
It was when, in reply to her sudden question, "When will I be gettin'
my body, Mr. Dick!" he had been forced to tell her that even that poor
comfort was denied. Then again the apron went over her head, and again
that pitiful wail, "O Mikey boy! O Mikey boy! What's the use of it all?
What's the use of it all?"
Sabinsport took Mikey's death to heart. The boy had long been a town
character. From the time he had first appeared--freckled, red-headed,
round as a tub--on the seats of the Primary Department, his elders had
been forced to take account of him. The well of vitality in him bubbled
from morning until night. His pranks followed one another in a stream
no punishment could more than momentarily check. For originality and
unexpectedness, no mischief known to Sabinsport's School Board and
school teachers had ever touched Mikey's. It had a mirth-provoking
quality, too, which made it hard to be dealt with adequately. He did
"the last thing you'd think of"--the kind of thing which was passed
from mouth to mouth and set the men, particularly, to grinning. The
women took it more seriously--they had to deal with him. Katie "licked"
him, as she called it, faithfully and hard; and Mikey took it manfully
as part of the order of things. He had his philosophy: "If you don't
have no fun you don't git licked." He preferred fun, and hardened his
soul to punishment.
He had grown up decent as could be expected, and so merry that
everybody loved him. He was in the way of becoming a crack in the wire
mill when the _Lusitania_ outrage came, and he ran to join the avengers
as quickly as from childhood he had always jumped into any fight in
alley or street, in school or shipyard, when his queer sense of justice
was aroused. He was always a "grand fighter," Katie often said, when
townspeople congratulated her on the part he had taken with the
Canadians. There was no doubt but that Sabinsport followed more
carefully the famous fights of the English because Mikey Flaherty was
with them. The Boys' Club, the War Board, the _Argus_, Katie's friends,
Patsy at the High School and in the Women's Clubs--all watched for the
reports of what the Canadians were doing--talked them over, and
wondered first if Mikey, and later if the Lieutenant, was there. It was
the idea that somebody they had always known was living in the trenches
that gave an interest and a reality to mud and rats and cooties, which
grew with what they heard. Mikey's letters were read and re-read and
printed in the _Argus_ "by request."
Ralph grumbled at the abnormal curiosity, as he called it, for horrors,
and again quarreled with Patsy for cultivating the love of war among
her pupils, to which Patsy hotly replied that she'd never, as long as
she lived, cease to cultivate hatred of Germany and her kind of war.
And then for days there would be coldness between them. Patsy would cry
herself to sleep, and Ralph would go about glum and self-accusing, save
now and then when he would burst into cursing at war and all its
horrible effects. "If it wasn't for the war, I'd have friends in
Sabinsport," he told Dick.
If there was no one else in Sabinsport by the summer of 1916 to whom
the war had brought the same anguish as to Katie Flaherty, there was a
constantly larger number to whom it was bringing dread and pain. The
war--this war which did not concern them, continued to reach its long
and cruel tentacles across the sea and every now and then literally
lift a member from some apparently somnolent family. There was Young
Tom, as all Sabinsport called the eighteen-year-old son of Tom and Mary
Sabins. Young Tom had come home from school in the fall of 1915 and
announced that he had volunteered for ambulance service in France, and
that if they didn't do the square thing and let him go, he'd run away.
And they knew he would do it. Tom took it squarely and with inward
pride, but Mary Sabins' world toppled on its foundations when she heard
his ultimatum and realized that for some reason unknown to herself her
husband actually sympathized with the boy.
"But why? Why? It's not your country. You have no right to go. You're
my son. I will not consent."
"Mother," said Young Tom, with the cruel finality of youth that nothing
but its own wish moves, "I'm going. This is the biggest scrap the world
ever saw, and you needn't think I'm going to miss it."
"But wait--wait until you're twenty-one," she urged. "You must finish
college. You might be killed."
"Sure, I might--but I won't be. If I wait I'll miss it. It will be
over. Can't you understand, Mother, why a fellow wants to get into the
big things? And then, darn it, Mother, haven't you any feeling for
France? Why, France helped us when we were up against it, and we owe
her one."
But to Mary Sabins the appeal was empty. It reached neither her mind
nor her heart. Young Tom was part of _her_ world--her own private
affair. What right had the war to touch it? What could ail him that he
should do this mad thing? She had all her plans made for him--they had
money to carry them out. This spoiled everything.
Mary fought with all her strength, employed all the resources for
persuading she had developed. It was pitiful how few they were, how
defenseless she was. She who had always had what she wanted, she whom a
father first and then a husband had delighted to serve. She had no
weapons for fighting, she realized, because she had never needed them.
To ask had been all she had ever done, and here was their lad, her son,
failing her, defying her, unhearing when she cried, disobeying when she
ordered. She was horrified by the hopelessness of her resistance, and
shocked no less by the knowledge that Tom himself did not agree with
her; that he even rejoiced in the boy's daring.
There were women, too, who said, "How proud you must be, Mary." The boy
had gone early in 1916. She heard from him regularly, but she was
bitter in her heart, and for the first time in her life did not find
full satisfaction in her busy days of planning and buying for herself
and household, in keeping immaculate her luxurious home, in
entertaining and being entertained in the lively Sabinsport group in
High Town.
In her grief Mary had had but one real comforter--Katie Flaherty. It
was Katie's pride in her soldier that had persuaded Dick, soon after
Young Tom left, that she might at least help reconcile Mary Sabins to
the boy's adventure. And Katie asked nothing better than to talk.
"Don't you be worryin' about your by, Mrs. Sabins," she said. "Don't I
know all about it, and me a widder and him me only one? But I'm that
proud of him now I can't sleep o' nights sometimes. The pluck of
him--to get up in the night and go, fearin' I wouldn't let him. Sure,
and your by never did the likes o' that. He told you square and you
could say good-by and get his picture and go to the train and see him
off. What'd you done if you'd got up in the mornin' and found him gone
and nothin' but a letter left? God help me, Mrs. Sabins, it was the
first time since he was laid in me arms the hour after he was born,
that I hadn't waked him--and sometimes bate him to get him up to
breakfast. To call him, and call him and get no answer, to go scoldin'
in to shake him and find he'd niver been in the bed at all, and a
letter on his pillow--no, ma'am, you hadn't that. You saw him off. An'
he's doin' fine over there. Think of the good he'll be doin', haulin'
the boys that gets hurt to the doctor--that's what Mr. Dick says he
doin'. And fine work it is. Don't you think I'm easier in my mind for
knowin' there's ambulancers like him to pick up my Mikey if a dirty
German sticks him? Sure I am. You ought to be that proud not to be
mother to a coward." And so on and on Katie talked, and somehow Mary
Sabins always was for a time less bitter after hearing Katie.
And then news came of Mikey's death. It was the first time since Young
Tom had left that Mary had quite forgotten herself in sympathy for
somebody else. Dick telephoned her, and she had hurried to the rectory
where in Katie's kitchen the two women cried on each other's shoulders,
entirely unconscious of the difference in station that ordinarily kept
one standing while the other sat! It was the beginning of one of the
most wholesome and steadying friendships Mary Sabins had ever had.
But while Mikey and Young Tom were the two best known figures now "in
the war," they were by no means the only ones. There was John A.
Papalogos. He had called Dick in one morning soon after the first
revolutionary outbreak in Greece. His face was ablaze with joy. "It's
come," he said. "It's come--no more kings for Greece--we'll have our
Republic. I go to fight for Greece free. I go now, but what I do with
my place?" and he looked blankly at the full shelves of "fancy goods"
and the stock of fruits and candies.
"I'll look after it," said Dick, promptly. "Go as soon as you please,"
and John A. Papalogos, radiant with relief, had departed twenty-four
hours later, leaving a fruit store on Dick's hands--a fruit store with
a primitive set of accounts in the drawer and written instructions to
close it out and give the proceeds to the Boys' Club in case of his
known death.
"The war certainly is getting its hands on you, all right," said Ralph
when Dick told him of his new care. "You needn't worry about your bit."
But Dick only gulped.
There were others from Sabinsport gone overseas--men hardly known to
the town, and yet their going was swelling constantly the town's
interest, knowledge, sense of connection--these were men from mines,
factories, mills, men who picked up and left without even a notice in
the _Argus_--to join the Canadians--the English, the Foreign Legion.
They were of many nations--and months later--long after their going had
been forgotten save by a few, word sometimes came from them by more or
less accident to their friends--"Lost a leg at Vimy"; "Decorated at
Verdun"; "Killed at Messine Ridge." Their number was so considerable
that it finally led Ralph to investigate, and Sabinsport was deeply
stirred to read one night the names of fifty men whom the European war
had taken--twenty-five were foreigners, but twenty-five were Americans.
"It's getting us," Ralph said, again and again. "It's getting us." And
it was getting them. Dick, who at times watched almost breathless with
desire that Sabinsport should understand, and who again and again
groaned, "God! how slow she is to see it," began to take heart. So
deeply was the town engaged in thought and feeling that not even the
coming of a war of her own detached her interest. Indeed, it was a
little difficult for her to take the trouble with Mexico very
seriously, not being able to stretch her imagination to the point where
Mexico could be anything more serious to the United States than a
nuisance. Yet it did make a difference in things. When the call came in
June a hundred men and boys suddenly appeared in khaki on the streets,
making for the rendezvous. They came from the towns and surrounding
country, and passed through the town so quietly and swiftly that
Sabinsport gasped with amazement. She had not realized that she and the
neighborhood had soldiers.
It disturbed things some. A thriving little grocery closed its doors
because the young proprietor was among the called. His wife with her
baby went home to her father and mother. It was hard; but all she said
was, "It's war." Dick started when they repeated the incident to him.
"That was what returning Americans never ceased to marvel at in French
and Belgian women--their quiet answer to every hardship, every
sorrow--'_C'est la guerre_.'" That was what had amazed Patsy at Namur.
And here was a commonplace little woman in this land, which the
returning Americans always insisted was utterly lost in selfishness and
cowardice, giving up her home and all her dawning hopes, with the same
simple, "It's war."
Was war one of the universal facts accepted by simple people, to whom
life is all reality and almost nothing of speculation and theory? Was
it something they knew by instinct to be one of the inevitable
tragedies of human existence, like sickness and death, storms and
pests? Did all natural people take war this way, neither revolting nor
lamenting? Could it be that Americans, trained to despise and hate war
as a lower form of energy, an appeal only for those people who were
ruled by tyrants and forbidden to express their will, to use their
brains and self-control in finding peaceful conclusions for all
misunderstandings--could it be that they, too, accepted it with this
simple, "It is war"?
If the Great War came to the country, as Dick believed it must soon,
would Sabinsport take it as she was taking the Border Trouble--send her
men, readjust her affairs, go on with her daily duties? He wondered,
but he was comforted; and as he watched the way Sabinsport took the
successive steps of the Mexican difficulty, he gathered more and more
hope. She watched every day's events, discussed, criticized, condemned,
approved. She knew as much of the essentials as the metropolis, though,
as he realized, the metropolis was loudly proclaiming that Sabinsport
did not even know there was a war either with Mexico or in Europe; that
she was simply a sample of all of the United States outside of a
portion of the Atlantic Coast, lost in money-making and comfort-seeking.
Dick said little, but more and more he became convinced that Sabinsport
was taking the thing quite as seriously, if less noisily, than that
portion of the Atlantic Coast that felt that all loyalty and
understanding was centered in itself. She had her losses. The little
grocer never came back--shot in a riot. Two farmers' boys died of
fever, and Sabinsport buried them in pride and sorrow. "She takes it so
straight," he thought. "I wonder if it will be like this when the great
thing comes."
The great thing was coming, he felt, and he felt that Sabinsport
vaguely knew it--was only waiting to be sure. To him it all depended on
Sabinsport whether we went into the war--not on the Administration, not
on Congress, not on the angry, indignant voices that hurled cries of
scorn at her. We would go in when Sabinsport was sure! Sure of what?
When she was sure that we could no longer do business with Germany.