NOTE XV
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 ofladies’ 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 notconvince 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 Americanswere 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 thousandsof 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 citiesladies 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 theweakness 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.
Beyond him not the ghost of shores,Beyond him only shoreless seas.
Beyond him not the ghost of shores,Beyond him only shoreless seas.
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.
Fours right into line—Fours right into line.
Fours right into line—Fours right into line.
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 allright,” 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 amfilled 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?