JIMMIE HIGGINS WRESTLES WITH THE TEMPTER
I
Of course, not all the Socialists of Leesville had got the “military
bug” like Emil Forster. Late in the afternoon, Jimmie ran into
Comrade Schneider, on his way home from work at the brewery, and he
was the same old Schneider--the same florid Teuton countenance, the
same solid Teuton voice, the same indignant Teuton point of view.
All Jimmie had to do was to mention the name of Emil, and Schneider
was off. A hell of a Socialist he was! Couldn't even wait for the
drill-sergeant to come after him, but had to run and hunt for him,
had to go and put himself out in the public square, where the
town-loafers could watch him playing the monkey!
No, said Schneider, with abundant profanity, he had not moved one
inch from his position; they could send him to jail any time they
got ready, they could stand him up before a firing-squad, but they'd
never get any militarism into him. Pressed for an answer, the big
brewer admitted that he had registered; but he wasn't going to be
drafted, not on his life! Jimmie suggested that this might be
because he had a wife and six children; but the other was too much
absorbed in his tirade to notice Jimmie's grin. He blustered on, in
a tone so loud that several times people on the street overheard,
and gave him a black look. Jimmie, being less in the mood of
martyrdom, parted from him and went to see the Meissners.
The little bottle-packer was living in the same place, having rented
the upper part of his house to a Polish family to help meet his
constantly-rising expenses. He welcomed Jimmie with open
arms--patted him on the back with delight, and opened a bottle of
beer to treat him. He asked a hundred questions about Jimmie's
adventures, and told in turn about events in Leesville. The local as
a whole had stood firm against the war, and was still carrying on
propaganda, in the face of ferocious opposition. The working-classes
were pumped so full of “patriotic dope”, you could hardly get them
to listen; as for the radicals, they were marked men--their mail was
intercepted, their meetings were attended by almost as many
detectives as spectators. A number had been drafted--which Meissner
considered deliberate conspiracy on the part of the draft-boards.
Who had been taken? Jimmie asked. The other answered: Comrade
Claudel, the jeweller--he wanted to go, of course; and Comrade
Koeln, the glass-blower--he was a German, but had been naturalized,
so they had taken him, in spite of his protests; and Comrade
Stankewitz--
“Stankewitz!” cried Jimmie, in dismay.
“Sure, he's gone.”
“Was he willing?”
“They didn't ask if he was willing. They just told him to report.”
Somehow that seemed to bring the war nearer to Jimmie's
consciousness than anything that had happened so far. The little
Roumanian Jew had given him the greater part of his education on
this world-conflict; it was over the counter of the cigar-store that
Jimmie had got the first geography lessons of his life. He had
learned that Russia was the yellow country, and Germany the green,
and Belgium the pale blue, and France the light pink; he had seen
how the railroads from the green to the pink ran through the pale
blue, and how the big fortresses in the pale blue all faced towards
the green--something which Meissner and Schneider and the rest of
the green people considered a mortal affront, a confession of guilt
on the part of the pale blue people. Comrade Stankewitz's
wizened-up, eager little face rose before Jimmie; he heard the
shrill voice, trying to compose the disputes in the local.
“Comrades, all this vill not get us anyvere! There is but vun
question we have to answer, are we internationalists, or are we
not?”
“My God!” cried Jimmie. “Ain't that awful?”
He had got to the point where he was willing to admit that perhaps
the Kaiser had got to be licked, and maybe it was all right for a
fellow that felt like Emil Forster to go and lick him. But to lay
hold of a man who hated war with all his heart and soul, to drag him
away from the little business he had painfully built up, and compel
him to put on a uniform and obey other men's orders--well, when you
saw a thing like that, you knew about the atrocities of war!
II
Comrade Meissner went on. Worse than that---they had taken Comrade
Gerrity. And Jimmie stared. “But he's married!”
“I know,” explained Meissner, “but that ain't what counts. What you
got to have is a dependent wife. An' the Gerritys didn't know
that--Comrade Evelyn held on to her job as stenographer, and
somebody must have told on them, for the board jacked him up and
cancelled his exemption. Of course, it was only because he was
organizer of the local; they want to put us out of business any way
they can.”
“What did Gerrity do?”
“He refused to serve, and they sent a squad of men after him and
dragged him away. They took him to Camp Sheridan, and tried to put
him in uniform, and he refused--he wouldn't work, he wouldn't have
anything to do with war. So they tried him and sentenced him to
twenty-five years in jail; they put him in solitary confinement, and
he gets nothin' but bread and water--they keep him chained up by his
wrists a part of the time--”
“Oh! OH!” cried Jimmie.
“Comrade Evelyn's most crazy about it. She broke down and cried in
the local, and she went around to the churches--they have women's
sewing-circles, you know, and things for the Red Cross, and her and
Comrade Mary Allen gets up and makes speeches an' drives the women
crazy. They arrested 'em once, but they turned 'em loose--they
didn't want it to get in the papers.”
Comrade Meissner could not have foreseen how this particular news
would affect Jimmie; Meissner knew nothing about the strange
adventure which had befallen his friend, the amatory convulsion
which had shaken his soul. Before Jimmie's mind now rose the lovely
face with the pert little dimples and the halo of fluffy brown hair;
the thought of Comrade Evelyn Baskerville in distress was simply not
to be endured. “Where is she?” he cried. He had a vision of himself
rushing forthwith to take up the agitation; to raid the church
sewing-circles and brave the wrath of the she-patriots; to go to
jail with Comrade Evelyn; or perhaps--who could say?--to put about
her, gently and reverently, a pair of fraternal and comforting arms.
Jimmie had the temperament of the dreamer, the idealist, to whom it
is enough to want a thing to see that thing forthwith come into
being. His imagination, stimulated by the image of the charming
stenographer, rushed forth on the wildest of flights. He realized
for the first time that he was a free man; while, as for Comrade
Evelyn, suppose the worst were to happen, suppose Comrade Gerrity
were to perish of the diet of bread and water, or to be dragged into
the trenches and killed--then the sorrowing widow would be in need
of someone to uphold her, to put fraternal and comforting arms about
her--
“Where is she?” Jimmie asked again; and Comrade Meissner dissipated
his dream by replying that she had gone off to work for an
organization in New York which was agitating for humane treatment
for “conscientious objectors”. Meissner hunted up the pamphlet
published by this organization, telling most hideous stories of the
abusing of such victims of the military frenzy; they had been
beaten, tortured and starved, subjected to ridicule and humiliation,
in many cases dragged before courts-martial and sentenced to
imprisonment for twenty or thirty years. Jimmie sat up a part of the
night reading these stories--with the result that once more the
feeble sprout of patriotism was squashed flat in his soul!
III
Jimmie went to the next meeting of the local. It was a slender
affair now, for some of the members were in jail, and some in the
training camps, and some afraid to come for fear of their jobs, and
some discouraged by incessant persecution. But the old war-horses
were there--Comrade Schneider, and gentle old Hermann Forster, and
Comrade Mabel Smith, with an account of her brother's mistreatment
in the county jail, and Comrade Mary Allen, the Quaker lady. This
last was still taking it as a personal affront that America should
be going into the bloody mess, in spite of all her denunciations and
protests; she was even paler and thinner than when Jimmie had seen
her last--her hands trembled and her thin lips quivered as she
spoke, you could see that she was burning up with excitement over
the monstrous wickedness of the world's events. She read to the
local a harrowing story of a boy who had registered as a
conscientious objector in New York, and had been taken out to a
training-camp and subjected to such indignities that he had shot
himself. Comrade Mary had no children of her own, so she had adopted
these conscientious objectors, and as she read of their experiences,
her soul was convulsed with a mingling of grief and rage.
Jimmie went back to the Empire Shops and applied for a job. They
needed thousands of men, so the Herald declared--but they did not
need a single one like Jimmie! The man to whom he applied recognized
him at once, and said, “Nothin' doin'.” For the sake of being nasty,
Jimmie went to the headquarters of the newly-formed union, and asked
them to force old Abel Granitch to give him work, according to the
terms of the agreement with the government. But the union secretary,
after thinking the matter over, decided that the provision against
black-listing applied only to men who had been out on the last
strike, not to the strikers of a couple of years before. “There was
no use going out of one's way to look for trouble,” said this
secretary. Jimmie went away jeering at the union, and damning the
war as heartily as ever.
He was in no hurry to get work, having still some money in his
pocket, and being able to live cheaply with the Meissners. He went
again to watch young Forster drilling, and went home with him and
heard an argument with old Hermann. You could see how this family
had been split wide open; the old man ordered his traitorous son out
several times, but the mother had flung herself into the breach,
pleading that the boy was going away in a few days, and perhaps
would never return. The evening that Jimmie was there, the paper
printed a speech of the President, outlining his purposes in the
war, the terms of justice for all peoples, a league of nations and
universal disarmament. Emil read this triumphantly, finding in it a
justification of his support of the war. Wasn't it a great part of
what the Socialists wanted?
Hermann answered grudgingly that the words were all right, but how
about the deeds? Also, how about the other Allies--did the President
imagime he could boss them? No--to the imperialists of England and
France and Italy those fine words were just bait for gudgeons; they
would serve to keep the workers quiet till the war was won, and then
the militarists would kick out the American President and pick the
bones of the carcass of Germany. If they really meant to abide by
the President's terms, why didn't they come out squarely and say so?
Why didn't they repudiate the secret treaties? Why didn't England
begin her career in democracy by setting free Ireland and India?
So it went; and Jimmie listened to both speakers, and agreed with
both alternately, experiencing more and more that distressing
condition of mental chaos, in which he found himself of two
absolutely contradictory and diametrically opposite points of view.
IV
All winter long the papers had been full of talk about a mighty
German offensive that was coming in the spring. The German people
were being told all about it, and how it was to end the war with a
glorious triumph. In America nobody was sure about the matter; the
fact that the attack was boldly announced seemed good reason for
looking elsewhere. Perhaps the enemy was preparing to overwhelm
Italy, and wished to keep France and England from sending troops to
the weakened Italian line!
But now suddenly, in the third week of March, the Germans made a
mighty rush at the British line in front of Cambrai; army upon army
they came, and overwhelmed the defenders, and poured through the
breach. The British forces fell back--every hour it seemed that
their retreat must be turned into a rout. Day by day, as the
dispatches came in, Jimmie watched the map in front of the Herald
office, and saw a huge gap opening in the British line, a spear-head
pointing straight into the heart of France. Three days, four days,
five days, this ghastly splitting apart went on, and the whole world
held its breath. Even Jimmie Higgins was shaken by the news--he had
got enough into the war by this time to realize what a German
triumph would mean. It took a strong pacifist stomach indeed to
contemplate such an issue of events without flinching.
Comrade Mary Allen had such a stomach; to her religious fervour it
made no difference whatever which set of robbers ruled the world.
Comrade Schneider had it also; he knew that Germany was the
birth-place and cradle of Socialism, and believed that the best fate
that could befall the world was for the Germans to conquer it, and
let the German Socialists make it into a co-operative commonwealth
by and by. Comrade Schneider was now openly gloating over this new
proof of German supermanity, the invincibility of German discipline.
But most of the other members of the local were awed--realizing in
spite of themselves the seriousness of the plight which confronted
civilization.
Jimmie would inspect the bulletin board, and go over to watch the
drilling, and then to Tom's “Buffeteria” with Emil Forster. He had
always had an intense admiration for Emil, and now the young
designer, distressed by the strife at home, was glad of someone to
pour out his soul to. He would help Jimmie to realize the meaning of
the British defeat, the enormous losses of guns and supplies, the
burden it would put upon America. For America would have to make up
these losses, America would have to drive the Germans out of every
foot of this newly-conquered territory.
Jimmie would listen and study the matter out on the map; and so
gradually he learned to be interested in a new science, that of
military strategy. When once you have fallen under the spell of that
game, your soul is lost. You think of men, no longer as human
creatures, suffering, starving, bleeding, dying in agony; you think
of them as chess-pawns; you dispose of them as a gambler of his
chips, a merchant of his wares; you classify them into brigades and
divisions and corps, moving them here and there, counting off your
losses against the losses of the enemy, putting in your reserves at
critical moments, paying this price for that objective, wiping out
thousands and tens of thousands of men with a sweep of your hand, a
mark of your pencil, a pressure on an electric button! Once you have
learnt to take that view of life, you are no longer a human heart,
to be appealed to by pacifists and humanitarians; you are a machine,
grinding out destruction, you are a ripe apple, ready to fall into
the lap of the god of war, you are an autumn leaf, ready to be
seized by the gales of patriotism and blown to destruction and
death.