I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners
and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back
into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the
freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice
within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe
there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read
about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor
old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering
giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to
face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days
of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to
assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like
robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The
newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding
Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion
of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was
afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To
the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus
to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells
on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of
ladies’ bedrooms at night.
America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so
I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my
rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off
a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on
a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a
hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare
so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with
whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I
were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station
twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat,
neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I
had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s
call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and
why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I
achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.
I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had
a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company,
I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire
town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and
old veterans of the Civil War--they had known that of battles we would
never know--stood with tears in their eyes.
To the young factory hand of the cities--that was myself, as I now
remember myself at that moment--it was grand and glorious. There has
always been a kind of shrewdness and foxiness in me and I could not
convince myself that Spain, clinging to its old traditions, old guns,
old ships, could offer much resistance to the strong young nation now
about to attack and I could not get over the feeling that I was going
off with many others on a kind of glorious national picnic. Very well,
if I was to be given credit for being a hero I could not see why I
should object.
And then the camp at the edge of a southern city under forest trees,
the physical hardening process that I instinctively liked. I have
always enjoyed with a kind of intoxicating gusto any physical use of
my body out in the sun and wind. In the army it brought me untroubled
sleep at night, physical delight in my own body, the drunkenness of
physical well-being and often in my tent at night, after a long day
of drilling and when the others slept, I rolled quietly out under the
tent flap and lay on my back on the ground, looking at the stars seen
through the branches of trees. About me many thousands of men were
sleeping and along a guard line, somewhere over there in the darkness,
guards were walking up and down. Was it a kind of vast child’s play?
The guards were pretending the army was in danger, why should not my
own imagination play for a time?
How strong my body felt! I stretched and threw my arms above my head.
For a time my fancy played with the notion of becoming a great general.
Why might not Napoleon in his boyhood have been just such a fellow
as myself? I had read somewhere that he had had an inclination to be
a scribbler. I fancied the army, of which I was a part, hemmed in on
all sides by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards. No one could think
what to do and so I (Corporal Anderson) was sent for. The Americans
were in the same position the French revolutionists had been in when
young Napoleon appeared and with “a whiff of grapeshot” took the
destinies of a nation in his hands. Oh, I had read my Carlyle and knew
something also of Machiavelli and his Prince. Aha! In fancy also I
could be a great and cruel conqueror. The American army was surrounded
by untold thousands of fierce Spaniards but in the American army was
myself. This was my hour. I sat up on the ground outside the tent
where my comrades were sleeping and in the darkness gave quick and
accurate orders. Certain ones of my soldiers were to make a sortie.
I did not quite know what a sortie was but anyway why not have one
made? It would create a diversion, give my marvelous mind time to
work. And now it was done and I began to fling bunches of troops here
and there. My courier sprang upon a swift horse and rode away in the
darkness. In his tent the Spanish commander was feasting--and here
I, being a true Anglo-Saxon, must needs make out that the imaginary
Spaniard was something of a monster. He was half drunk in his tent and
was surrounded by concubines. Ah! he is sure to have concubines about
and is proud and sure of victory but little does he know of me, the
sleepless one. Grand phrases, grand ideas, flocking like birds! Now the
Spanish commander has shown his true nature. A young boy comes to bring
him wine and trips, spilling a little of the wine on the commander’s
uniform. He arises and unsheathing his sword plunges it into the little
boy’s breast. All are aghast. The Spaniards all stand aghast, and at
that very moment I, like an avenging angel, and followed by thousands
of pure clean-living Americans (Anglo-Saxon Americans, let it be
understood), I swoop down upon him.
* * * * *
At the time of which I am writing America had not learned as it did
during the World War that in order to stamp out brutal militarism it is
best to adopt brutal militarism, teach it to our sons, do everything
possible to brutalize our own people. During the World War I am told
boys and young men in the training camps were made to attack with
the bayonet dummy figures of men and were even told to grunt as they
plunged the bayonet into the figure. Everything possible was done to
brutalize the imaginations of the young men, but in our war--“my war” I
find myself calling it at times--we had not yet carried our education
that far. There was as yet a childish belief in democracy. Men even
supposed that the purpose of democracy was to raise free men who could
think for themselves, act for themselves in an emergency. The modern
idea of the standardization of men had not taken hold and was even
thought to be inimical to the very notion of democracy. And we had not
learned yet, as we did later, that when an army is to be organized you
must split your men up, so that no man knows his fellows, that you must
not have officers coming from the same towns as their soldiers, that
everything must be made as machine-like and impersonal as possible.
And so there we were, just boys from an Ohio country town with officers
from the same town in a wood in the South being made into soldiers and
I am much afraid not taking the whole affair too seriously. We were
heroes and we accepted the fact. It was enough. In the southern cities
ladies invited us to dine at their houses on our days off in town. The
captain of our company had been a janitor of a public building back in
Ohio, the first lieutenant was a celery raiser on a small farm near our
town and the second lieutenant had been a knife grinder in a cutlery
factory.
* * * * *
In the camp I marched with the others for several hours each day and in
the evening went with some other young soldier for a walk in the wood
or in the streets of a southern city. There was a kind of drunkenness
of comradeship. So many men so like oneself, doing the same thing
with oneself. As for the officers--well, it was to be admitted that
in military affairs they knew more than ourselves but there their
superiority ended. It would be just as well for none of them to attempt
to put on too much side when we were not drilling or were not on actual
military duty. The war would soon be over and after a time we would all
be going back home. An officer might conceivably “get away” with some
sort of injustice for the moment--but a year from now, when we were all
at home again.... Did the fool want to take the chance of four or five
huskies giving him a beating some night in an alleyway?
The constant marching and manœuvring was a kind of music in the legs
and bodies of men. No man is a single thing, physical or mental. The
marching went on and on. The physical ruled. There was a vast slow
rhythm, out of the bodies of many thousands of men, always going on and
on. It got into one’s body. There was a kind of physical drunkenness
produced. He who weakened was laughed at by his comrades and the
weakness went away or he disappeared. One was afloat on a vast sea of
men. There was a kind of music on the surface of the sea. The music was
a part of oneself. One was oneself a part of the music. One’s body,
moving in rhythm with all these other bodies, made the music. What was
an officer? What was a man? An officer was but one out of whose throat
came a voice.
The army moved across a great open field. One’s body was tired but
happy with an odd new kind of happiness. The mind did not torture the
body, asking questions. The body was moved by a power outside itself
and as for the fancy, it played freely, far, freely and widely, over
oceans, over mountain tops too.
Beyond him not the ghost of shores,
Beyond him only shoreless seas.
And now the voice and the words, caught up and repeated by other
voices, harsh voices, tired voices, thin high pitched voices.
Fours right into line--
Fours right into line.
* * * * *
Three young men having run the guard line, together are walking along
a dark road toward a southern city. In the city and later when they
have stood on street corners and walked through the section of the
city where only Negroes live--being Ohio boys and fascinated by the
strangeness of the notion of a race thus set aside--they go into a
saloon where they sit drinking beer. They discuss their officers, the
position of the officer in relation to his men. “I think it’s all
right,” says a doctor’s son. “Ed and Dug are all right. They have to
live off by themselves and act as though they were something special,
kind of grand and wise and gaudy. It’s a kind of bluff, I guess, that
has to be kept up, only I should think it would be kind of tough on
them. I should think they might get to feeling they were something
special and get themselves into a mess.”
And now Ed, the raiser of celery, comes into the saloon. He is saving
all he can of his officer’s pay hoping to buy a few additional acres of
land when he gets back home and he doesn’t much like spending money. He
sees the three sitting there and wants to join them but hesitates. Then
he calls to me and he and I go off together along a street and into
another saloon.
The celery raiser is a devout Catholic and he and I get into a
discussion. I have some money and am buying the beer and so it goes on
for a long time. I speak of the feeling I have when I have marched for
a long time in rhythm with many other men and Ed nods his head. “It’s
the same way I feel about the Church,” he says. “That’s just the way we
Catholics get to feeling about the Church.”
At the camp Ed, being an officer, can walk boldly in but I, being but
a corporal and having gone off to town without leave, must creep along
the guard line to where a fellow from my own town is stationed. “Who
goes there?” he demands sternly; and “Ah, cut it Will, you big boob.
Don’t make such a racket,” I answer as I go past him and creep away in
the darkness to my tent.
And now I am in the tent, awake beside five sleeping men and I am
filled with drinks and thinking of war. What a strange idea that men
should need a war to throw many of them for a time into a common
mood. Is there unison only in hatred? I do not believe it but the
idea fascinates me. Men form a democracy but in the end must throw
the democracy aside in order to make the army that shall protect and
preserve democracy. The guard and myself creeping past him to my tent
are as soldiers a little absurd. Is all feeling of comradeship, of
brotherhood between many men, a little absurd?