War Impressions
Florence Kiper Frank
Wesat at a moving-picture show. Over a little bridge streamed the Belgian refugees, women, children, boys, dogs, horses, carts, household goods—an incongruous procession. The faces were stolid, the feet plodded on—plodded on!
“See!” said my friend, “sometimes a woman turns to look at a bursting shell.”
I murmured, “How interesting!”
And my soul shuddered. It shuddered at sophistication.
The man who had taken the pictures told us about them. He had been not more than three weeks ago in Belgium....
“Huzza!” sang my ancestor of five thousand years back. He led a band of marauders into an enemy’s village. They ripped things up and tore about the place singing and looting. There was nothing much left to that village by the time they got through with it.
But the people many miles away did not behold his exploits. Alas, there were no moving-picture shows in those days!
There was a Modern Woman with a sense of humor.
“I shall,” she said, “teach to women the absurdity of bearing children to be killed by cannon.”
“The absurdity!” exclaimed the men of the State, aghast at levity.
“Yes,” answered she, “it isn’t worth the trouble!” And she lifted her eyebrows and smiled, but in her eyes there was Knowledge.
And the men of the State were more terrified by the phenomenon of The Modern Woman with a Sense of Humor than by any phenomenon that had before confronted them.
The year was again a-foot on the incredible adventure of Spring. The earth broke into blossoming, and the nights were moon-drenched and astirwith the whisperings of wet winds. It was a really thrilling time of the year to be alive—and therefore, besides all these breathless and miraculous adventures of the grass and flowers, many innocent and unsuspecting souls had started out on the incredible adventure of being born.
But the war-writers kept on writing that for man to reach true exaltation and vibrancy of spirit, he must blow out the brains of as many people as possible.
He has builded him machines—man the Maker—using great cunning of hand and of brain. And has not Bergson told us that thus has he evolved that tool, the Intellect—through the dim ages of his making!
He has builded him states, politics, all the intricate architecture of institutions.
Now who would think that what he himself has builded—builded through the thousands of years of endeavor—should thus turn about, ungrateful, to destroy and to rend him?
“We shall not, this year,” said my rich friend—a Lady—“while the people of Europe are starving and fighting—we shall not this year have our large annual banquet.”
But had she walked not a mile from her home, she would have seen in her own city men starving, and fighting because of the terrible dread of starving. And not this year alone had they been doing it, but for many years of large banquets.
However, if all Ladies and Gentlemen felt acutely all these matters, what would become of our institution of Large Banquets—or, indeed, of the Divine Privileges of Monarchs!
“War,” wrote the journalists, “reveals what a veneer is civilization. Man’s real emotions, instinctive, primitive, brutal, leap to ascendency.”
But I did not believe the journalists, because I knew better men’s emotions. Indeed, what tore asunder my heart was the depth and beauty of the emotions of men and women. There was nothing—at least very little—the matter with their emotions.
But with their thinking apparatus—ah, that is a different story!