WAR, leisure and the South!
The leisure was not too much cut across by the hours spent in drills
and manœuvres and the other duties of a soldier. Here was a life
in which everything was physical, the mind on a vacation and the
imagination having leisure to play while the body worked. One’s
individuality became lost and one became part of something wholly
physical, vast, strong, capable of being fine and heroic, capable of
being brutal and cruel.
One’s body was a house in which had lived two, three, perhaps ten
or twelve personalities. The fancy became the head of the house and
swept the body away into some absurd adventure or the mind took charge
and laid down laws. These then were in turn driven out of the house
by physical desire, by the lustful self. Dumb nights of walking city
streets, wanting women, wanting to touch with the hands lovely things.
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart
to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too.--What’s become of
all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?
All gone now, that kind of imaginings, for the time anyway. In the
distance, beckoning, the women of the southern island, the dark Cuban
women. Would they like us when we came, we American lads, in our brown
clothes? Would they take us as lovers, we the land’s deliverers?
Long days of marching. We were in a forest of the South where once our
fathers had fought a great battle. Everywhere camps among the trees and
the ground worn hard as bricks by the constant tramping of feet. In
the morning one awoke with five other men in a tent. There was morning
roll call standing shoulder to shoulder. “Corporal Smith!” “Here!”
“Corporal Anderson!” “Here!” Then breakfast out of flat tin dishes and
the falling into line for hours of drill.
Out from under the trees into a wide field we went, the southern sun
pouring down on us and presently the back tired, the legs tired. One
sank into a half-dead state. This did not signify battles, killing
other men. The men with whom one marched were comrades, feeling the
same weariness, obeying the same commands, being molded with oneself
into something apart from oneself. We were being hardened, whipped into
shape. For what? Well, never mind. Take what is before you! You have
come out from under the shadow of the factory, the sun shines. The tall
boys marching with you were raised in the same town with yourself. Now
they are all silent, marching, marching. Times of adventure ahead. You
and they will see strange people, hear strange tongues spoken.
The Spaniards, eh! You know of them from books? Stout Cortez, silent
upon his peak in Darien. Dark cruel eyes, dark swaggering men--in
one’s fancy. In the fancy picture ships coming suddenly up out of the
western seas, bearing gold, bearing dark, adventurous men.
Is one going to fight such men, with one’s comrades, some thousands
of such men? Tall boys from an Ohio town, baseball players, clerks in
stores, Eddie Sanger over there who got Nell Brinker into trouble and
was made to marry her at the point of a shotgun; Tom Means, who was
once sent to the state reform farm; Harry Bacon, who got religion when
the evangelist came to preach in the Methodist Church but got over it
afterward--are these men to become killers, to try to kill Spaniards,
who will try to kill them?
Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long
hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been
groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to
man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the
flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put
out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is
something special. This is something felt.
Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting
himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the
weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring
with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the
others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and
of oneself too?
Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One
gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come.
Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk
and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed
gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a
statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an
army of which you are a part.
There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that
you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure
you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become
as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The
army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The
state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your
own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of
yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of
the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain
tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand
strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too
long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh
and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching--the
army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single
head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?
All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about
the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal
voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a
thousand men. “Fours right into line.”
“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for
it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire
to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and
seen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the
eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one
thing with thousands of others, with comrades.