SAINTS AND SINNERS
Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by
thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom.
Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would
have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult
way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here.
"What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its
daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the
whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a
new adaptation of living to dying--a new Death?" is the way one of them
expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or
old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that
any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading.
The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of
immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity
as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the
allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists.
Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle
profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it
kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual
and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall,
particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess
and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more
efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of
the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The
philosopher accepts it as a part of God's programme: some he allows to
succumb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he
accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their
course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all
mankind, the greatest safety.
We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even
in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the
mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more
were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events
of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for
work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded
of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres,
concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places
generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse
either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so constituted that he must
display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is
chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he
come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy
tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so
pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days
of the war?
The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from
felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The
thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the
paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between
preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the
fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful--that
is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp.
But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the
professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by
its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of Assisi, to
which the professing or professional Christian conforms even
approximately; and because his fellow man, prostituting it in some
similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him,
he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as
infidel and unbeliever.
I have no intention of prophesying whether the church will weather the
storm in which it is now floundering or not. I think very likely it
will. One reason for so thinking is that it has weathered all previous
storms; one of them five hundred years ago was of severity that will
never be forgotten. Since then education and enlightenment have lifted
man from the supine obedience and resignation of the domestic animal,
and he has demanded, and in a measure obtained, his worldly rights. This
encourages me to believe that he may soon demand his spiritual rights:
liberation from the tyranny imposed upon his mind by the Junkers of the
church, freedom to look upon God as the fountainhead of wisdom, mercy,
and love who mediates succor to the poor, the mourning, and the meek
more willingly than to the rich, the joyous, and the arrogant; liberty
to live according to the mandates of Christ and to die in confidence
that his pledges will be redeemed. Another reason is that man must have
a religion. Individual man can live without it, but collective man
cannot, and there is not the slightest sign of the second coming of
Christ. Religion was never so openly repudiated as during the Great War,
and it never wielded as little influence on the determinations of man's
conduct as it does to-day. Those who convince themselves otherwise make
themselves immune to the teachings of experience.
The paucity of men who have the capacity for constructive statesmanship
is pitiable, but how trifling is such a capacity compared with that
required to formulate the tenets of a livable new religion! The
practices of the church to-day are not those of the thirteenth,
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was steeped in every
conceivable kind of depravity, licentiousness, simony, wealth, power,
arrogance, avarice, and flattery; when it betrayed its mission to
protect the weak; when it fornicated with the princes of the world; when
it crucified Jesus in the name of egoism. But in what way has it
espoused the sacred cause of the lowly, the best-beloved of Him who died
that eternal happiness might be vouchsafed us? If Christ's vicar could
remain silent without being called to account as was the case a few
years ago when we were offering our fathers on the sacrificial altar for
the liberation from slavery of God's ebony image, it is not likely that
he will be called on to explain a similar silence during the Great War.
I do not profess to say, not even to know, the attitude of the hierarchy
which governed the Roman Catholic church toward the war. If it was
Germanophile or Austrophile, it was more wicked than the harlot of
Babylon. I should say the same had it been Anglophile or Francophile.
The man who can believe that the temporal head of the church is the
infallible spiritual guide of her adherents cannot believe that it
should take sides against any of her own people. "The house divided
against itself must fall." What I should like from the church is a
definition of her attitude toward war. She teaches her children what
their conduct should be about indulging their genesic extent, about the
property and person of their fellow men, about intemperance of language
and of appetite. Why not about war? What troubles me with the church is
not so much the determination to keep her children in ignorance, nor
that she has her back to the door which opens upon a vista of the
world's progress and advance, hoping that she may keep it closed in the
face of the divine forces of evolutionary progress which are seeking to
push it open. That might be tolerated, but not her arrogation of
self-sufficiency, her assumption of self-satisfaction, her boasted
immutability, her sanctimonious semblance of resignation, her mumblings
of archaic sayings in a language that neither its votaries nor one-half
its priests understand, her profession to protect the weak and aid the
poor while at the same time she bends the knee to the rich and traffics
with emperors.
Though I lived nearly two years in the city where the church's mediæval
gorgeousness is more striking than in any other city of the world, and
where its chief stronghold is, it was rarely that its practices or its
preachings disturbed my spiritual equanimity, my belief in God, or my
fathomless faith. Nearly every day my duties took me through the Piazza
of St. Peter and along the Vatican Gardens, and my thought was more
often of his mediæval predecessors than of the voluntary "prisoner" who,
while occupying the sumptuous palace, eats out his heart because he is
not allowed to be a temporal sovereign--in other words, to be the
antithesis of Him whose vicar he claims to be.
One morning, after I read the communiqués and had that glow of
satisfaction in the accomplishments of my fellow men, that feeling of
pride which every ally had during the last weeks of the war, I turned
the paper and saw the arresting headline, "Translation of the Bones of
St. Petronius," and I read:
"This morning at eight o'clock the Holy Father, accompanied by the
pontifical court, repaired to the Sistine Chapel, where were
gathered the residents of Bologna who had come to Rome for the
occasion. The pope, clad in sacred vestments, celebrated the mass
and gave communion to those present. After the mass Cardinal
Gusmimi, Archbishop of Bologna, gave a brief discourse, while the
pope sat on the throne. The pope then responded, recalling the
religious glory of Bologna and the life of the sainted Bishop
Petronius. He then covered himself with other sacred vestments
appropriate for the occasion and assisted the archbishop of Bologna
in taking from the provisory urn the bones of that saintly man who
had yielded this life for a place in the heavenly hierarchy many
years ago, and placed them in the urn offered by the Bolognese;
having done this, he placed the urn on the altar. The ceremony
lasted upward of two hours."
In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those
whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being
slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in
hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable
discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate,
what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he
loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do
to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more
worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his
reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness,
what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed
a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to
another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches
itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of
Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better
account of their stewardship to their Master were they to devote their
time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the
physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken
unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon--a trainload of men who had
been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to
die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those
insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians?
I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that
afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous
hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used
for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from
the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted
sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy
restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of
Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized.
When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured
in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through
starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this
hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently
nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable
to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of
two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in
a dying state. As a rule, they had been _en route_ for a week, and,
though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to
make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little
evidence of their efforts was to be seen.
Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The
train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway
and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of
autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in
a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was
as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them
by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an
American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her
physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally
the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal
secretions that give elasticity to the skin, lustre to the hair, sparkle
to the eye, and appearance of health to the _tout ensemble_. She but
heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while
displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the
aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I
looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato,"
"Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, farò la sua fotografia." The ways of
the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let
these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence,
voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were,
shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator.
They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the
white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of
the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to
descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still
others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an
orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one
would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile,
but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope,
who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over
the portal, "_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate_." It is some such
procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his passage
through the infernal regions. "_Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonchè
di posa, ma di minor pena._" Not only did their faces reveal absolute
despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that
they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti
afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per
cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of
them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were
bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth
shoes with wooden soles, gave the finishing touch to what seemed to be
animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked
in putrid oil. After those who were able to get on their feet had passed
out came those who were practically in the throes of death, and those
whose minds had been dethroned by suffering and privation. One was able
to keep the sob in his throat until _they_ appeared, and then the effort
to suppress it was impotent. Indeed,
They had a rendezvous with death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair,
and they are reconciled that he shall take their hands and lead them
into his dark land, as Alan Seeger said in those precious lines which
will ornament his memory for many a day.
The procession slowly wound its way within the gates, and I supposed
that they would be conducted and helped lovingly and tenderly to the
pavilions ready to receive them; that they would be undressed and given
hot, stimulating nourishment by nurses and orderlies recruited, perhaps,
from those who had come before and whom nature had been kind enough
partially to restore. But immediately they were confronted with a
species of Italian bureaucracy which hindered their progress toward this
haven of rest and of solace toward which they had been looking forward
for many days, perhaps months. They were segregated in a large, barnlike
structure a few yards within the gate, permitted to sit on rude,
unbacked, uncomfortable benches, and compelled to await their turn until
their names and their histories and an enumeration of their possessions
could be recorded. I felt that God would have been kind if he had
stamped across their brows the letter V to stand for virtue and valor,
as he stamped the letter A upon the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale to
testify to the people of New England the frailty of that Puritan parson,
which was revealed to his parishioners when they gathered together to
listen to the confession of his sins and to decide his punishment. There
they sat, inanimate, inert, resigned, awaiting what the Italian
Government might have in store for them with the same indifference as
they awaited that which nature had in store for them.
Never again shall I believe that the victim of tuberculosis is
optimistic and hopeful. It may be that their obvious and striking
forlornness was the expression of starvation and not of disease. Only
about thirty per cent of them, I am told, showed signs of active
tuberculosis after the ravages of inadequate and unsuitable food have
been overcome. I saw and talked with many of their predecessors, and
especially those who had been there a number of weeks, sufficiently long
for them to have gained in weight and in strength, but even they were
still branded with that expression which hopelessness comes nearest to
describing.
It occurred to me that perhaps these were the men who sat down on the
sides of the road and in the fields before that great disaster in the
Friuli and were resigned to being taken captive, and that the
resignation which they then displayed had been stamped on them gradually
day after day since then, until now it had become indelible. Life had
had no joy or poetry for them. Neither the present nor the future
had been tinctured with pleasure nor flavored with hope, and since
that day they had been silently awaiting that which now seemed
imminent--translation.
I could not but contrast the event of the morning with that of the
evening. Probably every one of these boys and men had been brought up in
the faith which the Holy Father claims is the only true one. They had
been taught that God is Justice. They had been imbued since earliest
infancy with the belief that, next to loyalty to God, their most sacred
duty was to their country. In their own way they had done their best for
both, and this was their reward. Their expressions of despair, their
manifestations of hopelessness, their silent portrayal of their
abandonment needed no explanation. The saint in the Vatican was having
his reward on earth, and the sinners in Forte Tiburtino looked for
theirs only in heaven.
"Ahi giustizia di Dio! tante chi stipa
Nuove travaglie e pene, quanto io viddi?
E perchè nostra colpa si ne scipa?"
"Ah, Justice Divine! who shall tell in few the
Many fresh pains and travails that I saw?
And why does guilt of ours thus waste us?"