|If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see
her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”
He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
towers of Princeton.
And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
“how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
minute record of the game.
The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”
And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of
musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity
and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.
“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New
York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand
America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
[Illustration: 0095]
[Illustration: 0096]