Last fall when the great air battles were being fought out over England
and the first full reality of the bombed torment that was London’s
came over the cables to us in America, there grew in me an almost
overpowering urge to be there amidst it all. To this day I cannot
quite put into words just what my feelings were. I am a professional
traveler, but it was not curiosity “to see what it was like” that
made me want to go. And I am a newspaperman, yet the “story” I might
send back hardly entered my mind at all. I simply wanted to go
privately--just inside myself I wanted to go.
For it seemed to me that in London there was occurring a spiritual
holocaust--a trial of souls--that never again in our day could be
reenacted. I felt that to live your span in this time of ours, and to
detour around an opportunity of sharing in the most momentous happening
of that time, was simply to be disinterested in living. It seemed to me
somehow that anyone who went through the immersion into fear and horror
of the London bombings, could not help but be made fuller by it.
So I went. Things didn’t turn out just as I had expected. For one
thing, it never seemed dramatic to me when I was there. All the
elements I had visioned were there, yet apparently I had not the
capacity for being erupted by them up into a great new nobleness of
mind and heart. What I mean is that, so far as I can analyze myself, I
feel no different than before I went. I don’t feel cleansed in spirit
or exalted in stature. I merely toasted my shins awhile before the
grate of war; they--the people of England--are the embers and coals and
licks of flame that constitute the very fire itself. We who go and come
away again cannot be other than small beside them.
* * * * *
From the day war was declared, I felt keenly for the side of Britain.
But I am no intellectual curator of the world’s morals; the thinkers
who take up the war as a “cause” leave me bewildered. I simply wanted
England to win because it seemed to me safer and sounder for England to
be running the world than for Germany to run it. And now that I’ve been
there, I still feel exactly the same about it.
Somehow it seems inevitable that there shall be one dominant nation
in the world. I guess it’s just the same principle that makes Ivory
Soap float, or that makes one horse, instead of all the entrants, win
a race. Whichever nation is dominant sets the tempo for a good part of
the world. And if the tempo-setter must be either England or Germany,
it seems to me simple sanity that England should continue to be that
nation.
The actual policy of a world rule is formed not so much by the leaders
and individual representatives of a country as by the background of
basic character of the whole people. And if I had never known it
before, I discovered this winter that the national character of the
British is a noble character. Sure, there are things about them we
despise; there are intolerable Englishmen by the scores of thousands.
Yet if you judge them by their massed heart and their massed way of
dealing with life--which you must do if you’re deciding who is to
dominate the rest of the world--then the English seem to me to come off
as leaders more nearly perfect than any other nation on earth.
I have almost no feeling at all against the Germans. I never did, and I
still don’t today, even after they had filled the sky with bombs above
my own private and precious head. I don’t see how anyone can blame
Germany for wanting to be Mr. Big in this world. Doesn’t England want
to be Mr. Big too? And does America want to play second fiddle to Italy
or Germany or Japan? Of course not.
You cannot help but be anguished at death and destruction, and
sometimes you sink into a despair of abysmal hopelessness when you
stand in the center of a complete ravage--and yet it’s war and I can’t
blame Germany for fighting nor England for fighting back. They’re both
in there punching, and may the best man win. And if England isn’t the
best man, may she win anyhow, dammit.
* * * * *
As for my own case history, in the event you care, I’m a farmer who has
forgotten how to farm, and a newspaperman of so many years’ tenure that
I no longer know how to do anything else on earth but work on and write
for newspapers. I can’t even sew on a button anymore.
It has been eighteen years since I quit school and went to work on a
small Indiana daily, and every minute of that time has been spent on
newspapers. I’ve run the gamut, as they say. I’ve worked every job on a
newspaper from cub reporter to managing editor.
Nearly all of those eighteen years have been with the Scripps-Howard
Newspapers. I doubt there has ever been a happier association
with a business institution than mine. I’ve never had a boss who
wasn’t a gentleman; never had a superior who wasn’t also my friend.
Scripps-Howard has always been good to me, and liberal too. It was a
nutty idea when I began pestering them, some six years ago, to let me
cut loose from the desk and start wandering around in my car, writing
a daily column about anything that popped into my head.
But they said okay, go ahead and try it. Since then I’ve covered
200,000 miles and been on five of the six continents and crossed both
oceans and delved into every country in the Western Hemisphere and
written upward of 1,500,000 words in that daily column.
It has been a joyous life. I’ve gone down the Yukon River on a
stern-wheeler, and lived with the lepers in Hawaii, and petted llamas
in the high Andes, and reveled in the strange lazy beauties of Rio.
There isn’t a state of the Union we haven’t been in at least three
different times.
By “we” I mean the other half of this gypsy combination, who is known
to the readers of the column as “That Girl.” Almost everywhere I have
been, she has been too. She uses up her time by reading books and
working Double-Crostix puzzles and absorbing knowledge and keeping me
from jumping out of my skin. In all our little triumphs and all our big
despairs, she has been along.
And then came England. That was different. The government wouldn’t let
her go. Hers was the far greater task of staying and waiting. But now
the “Great Experience” is over, and we have hit the trail together
again, in the old fashion, just wandering around talking to people and
writing about the rain and things. At least I think we have. But maybe
we’re only fooling ourselves. Maybe we’re just pretending that we’ve
picked up the world where we left it last fall. For there is probably
something to the theory that our lives, in common with all others, can
never again be just as they were before 1940.