In the Town no new railway station raised its splendors because in those
years the Town and the Mills were too busy making money. In all the
haste even the new railway station was forgotten. The deserted park
became a storing place for the shells which the Mills turned out in
amazing numbers. Gas shells, high explosives, shrapnel cases ... all
these things were piled high along the brick paths where delphiniums and
irises once flourished. Even the Venus of Cydnos and the Apollo
Belvedere, cracked and smudged in the niches of the dead hedge, were
completely buried beneath munitions. Because somewhere in the world men
were being killed, the Mills did an enormous business. The Town grew as
it had never before grown. Prices were tremendous. The place reeked with
prosperity and progress. People even said that the war would finish
Germany, that no longer would she be able to compete in the great steel
markets of the world. And that, of course, meant more prosperity, more
riches.
The flames leapt high above the furnaces. The great sheds echoed with
such a pounding as had never before been heard upon this earth. Girls in
gas masks worked long hours filling shells with corroding acids which
turned their faces haggard, and yellow as the aprons they wore. Little
clerks acquired automobiles. Men who dealt in real estate grew rich.
Every one would have been content, save for an insatiable appetite for
even greater wealth.
Once, to be sure, there occurred an explosion which was for all the
world like the end of everything. Forty-seven blackened bodies were
carried out under white sheets which clung to the scorched flesh. Of
seventeen others nothing at all was found save a few bones, a hand or a
foot, a bit of blackened skin; and from these it was impossible to
construct any thing. So they were dumped into great trenches, and when
the earth had covered them, the world rushed merrily on. The flames
leapt higher and redder than ever. The sheds fairly split with the sound
of hammering. The little clerks dashed about madly in the sudden luxury
of their motors. Every one had money. The Town was prosperous. It grew
until it was the biggest in the state. Progress rattled on like
everything, so nothing else mattered.
In Paris the war came to an end. One or two statesmen and a whole flock
of politicians, after swooping about for a time, descended upon the
peace.
In those days Paris acquired an insane and desperate gaiety such as it
knew neither before nor since. The bright boulevards swarmed with the
soldiers of fourteen nations clad in ten times as many gay uniforms. It
became gay and frantic with the neurotic excitement of a madhouse.
Street walkers from the provinces, even from Italy and England and
Spain, rushed to Paris because business there was so good. In dives and
cabarets a barbaric abandon reigned. Every one learned new vices and
depravities. Brutes, vulgarians, savages stalked the avenues. Overnight
boys became old men, burdened with a corroding wisdom which otherwise
they might never have known.
And in the Town people shook their heads sagely and said that war was a
great thing when it was fought in a just cause. “It purifies!” they
said. “It brings out the finest side of men!”
What was prosperous was right. Wasn’t success its own vindication? About
this there could be no argument. Money talks, my boy! Money talks! What
is successful is right, Germany, the bully among nations! Germany, the
greedy materialistic Germany, was done in forever.
Of course it may have been that when they spoke of War as the Great
Purifier, they were thinking of the vast army of the Dead.