NOTE XIV
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 toscold.Dear dead women, with such hair, too.—What’s become ofall the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms?
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart toscold.Dear dead women, with such hair, too.—What’s become ofall the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms?
“Dust and ashes!” So you creak it and I want the heart toscold.Dear dead women, with such hair, too.—What’s become ofall the goldUsed to hang and brush their bosoms?
“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 Cubanwomen. 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 thewestern 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 pointedgun, 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 theeyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one thing with thousands of others, with comrades.