CHAPTER IX
It was this having so much to do that not only saved Dick, but it had saved Sabinsport, for Sabinsport had gone into the war without enthusiasm. She had accepted it fully as a thing she was obliged in honor to carry through, but Dick felt more and more that neither her heart was touched nor her spirit fired. He could not get over the chill that her reception of the news that war had been declared had given him—not a bell rang, not a whistle blew, not a man stopped work. “Well, we are in it,” they said as they met him on the street. “It’s all right.”—“Nothing else to do.”—“I’m for it.” That would be all, and the speaker would walk away with bent head.
How, Dick asked himself, a great wave of doubt coming over him, could a town so unmoved, even if so determined, ever carry out the prodigious piece of work which the Government asked of it, at the time the declaration was made? They were to put everything in—their sons, their money, their industries, were to be conscripted. They were to be asked to change all their ways of living, and to do it at once. How could it be that a town, seemingly so unstirred, would so completely strip itself as Sabinsport was asked to do? Could this determination, which he believed was in her, carry her through the period of sacrifice and effort? Was she to have none of the help of pride, the consciousness of a great cause? How far would Sabinsport go?
The first test came when the Government announced that we were to have an army of two million men, chosen on the principle of universal liability to service. “Never,” declared the Rev. Mr. Pepper, “would Sabinsport stand for that.” And there were not a few in mills and mines, not a few representatives of various peace parties, that gathered about him. They loudly declared in thePro Bono Publicocolumn of theArgusthat we had been plunged into war against our will, that it was still possible to negotiate, that the American people wanted to negotiate, that the President was playing a hypocrite’s part, that he was a puppet of Wall Street, whose only interest was to protect foreign loans and to carry on munition making. The Rev. Mr. Pepper, encouraged by the swift gathering of pacifists around him, engaged the Opera House and called for a great mass meeting of protest. Sabinsport should have a right to vote on our going into the war, if it had been denied to the rest of the country.
What would Sabinsport do? Dick asked himself the question a little anxiously. Would she foregather at the Opera House?
She would not. At eight o’clock on the evening that the meeting was called that great forum contained, not the whole town and the mines and mills, as the Rev. Mr. Pepper had been declaring all day that it would be, but, by actual count, just two hundred people, of whom the Rev. Richard Ingraham was one, for ever since the beginning of his life in Sabinsport, he had made it a practice not only to attend but to take part in all discussions, whether held in opera houses or on street corners.
But, as it turned out, the two hundred were not to be allowed to take their vote on peace or war in the orderly, quiet way which Dick himself insisted they should have, for, before nine o’clock, a great tramping was heard outside, and into the hall burst all of the active youth of Sabinsport and at least half of its middle aged. They carried banners on which were written in bold letters, “Right is more precious than peace,” “The world must be made safe for democracy,” “Germany is a menace to mankind,” “Germany wars against peace, we war against Germany.” They not only carried their banners, but they brought their orators, who, stationed in the galleries and on the floor, submerged the protests of the Rev. Mr. Pepper and friends and turned the gathering into a rousing declaration that, so far as Sabinsport was concerned, she was in the war to a finish.
Each successive task the Government set provoked a similar wave of protest. For days currents of unrest would run through the town, but when the moment of decision came always Sabinsport answered overwhelmingly in favor of the Government. There was the draft. As the day of registration approached, the Rev. Mr. Pepper and his friends prophesied riots; and, if not riots, at least a very general refusal to register—but every man appeared. They came from the shops and mines and banks and schools—a full quota. It was unbelievable. Why were there such alarms of revolt before, if in the end there was to be complete acceptance? Reuben Cowder had his theory.
“I tell you, Dick, the same gang are at work in this town that stirred up the feeling against munition-making, that brought that Peace Council here and so nearly put it over. I expect Pepper and his friends to protest. That’s all right, they belong here. That’s the way they feel. We can gauge what they say, answer back. I rather think they’re good for us, but it’s not Pepper that is making the stir now. There’s somebody spreading rumors of discontent that do not exist. Who printed those handbills that rained all over town the morning of Registration Day, denouncing the draft as a form of slavery? Pepper didn’t. He was as surprised as the police. Why can’t we get our fingers on them?”
But clever as he was, he did not get his fingers on them. Waves of discontent, threats of riots and strikes, protests against liberty loans and food laws, continued to agitate the town, filling it with anxiety and irritation. They kept her distrustful of herself, unhappy in her undertaking, but never did they turn her from her resolve to do her full part. Indeed, it seemed to Dick sometimes as if the direct result was to drive those of the town who felt the deepest foreboding, the gravest doubt, to work the harder, thus really increasing the amount accomplished. It was this that explained why, in this admixture of irritation, Sabinsport almost always did more than her part. The rumors and prophecies that she would not respond this time nerved her to fuller efforts.
Just how things would have worked out in Sabinsport, just when and how the war would have found its way to her heart and she would have come to have the supporting uplift of realizing the greatness of the enterprise to which she was pledged, Dick never quite decided, for what did happen was so largely shaped by the news that came to them in the end of June that, in the country twenty-five miles away, the Government had decided to place one of the sixteen great cantonments in which the boys that had been drafted were to be trained into an army.
Sabinsport herself had had nothing to do with securing the cantonment. It was the only thing that had happened in that part of the State in the last two or three decades in which neither Cowder nor Mulligan had had a hand. It was certain shrewd and powerful gentlemen of the City that had persuaded the authorities that this was the most perfect spot in the Union in which to place 50,000 men.
Luckily, it was a very good spot, though probably if it had been very bad, it would have been selected, given the power that was behind its support. The land was rolling, naturally drained, the river which flowed close by gave, by filtering, a splendid water supply. An important trunk line ran within five miles of the camp, making almost ideal transportation conditions possible, and this same trunk line ran through Sabinsport.
It was announced that the camp was to be ready in twelve weeks for 40,000 men. The town, accustomed to building in a fairly large scale, gasped in amazement. Some jeered, others protested. It couldn’t be done. It would take twelve months, not weeks, to make the place habitable.
All through the summer the town watched the growing cantonment to see how things were going. The highway which ran within a short distance of the selected land was worn smooth with the cars which went back and forth. The Sunday trains were often crowded with workmen and their wives and sweethearts, and all they saw increased their skepticism. So far as they could make out, it was only a great confusion of lumber, ditches, turned-up earth, scattered skeletons of buildings; no evidence of planning. More than one observer came back to say, sagely, “They don’t know what they are about. It will never be a place in which men can live. And as to being ready in September, that is nonsense.”
But ready or not, they found that the cantonment was to be occupied at the time set, and to their anxiety over the incompleteness of the camp, there now was added a new concern—a doubt which was hardly voiced but which gave the keenest anxiety. It was the doubt of the recruits that began to appear. “How could you ever make soldiers of such material?” It was her own first contingent that had awakened this alarm. The town had made an effort to do the proper thing when the boys went off. They were to leave on an afternoon train, and there was a luncheon given them and a little parade through the streets. But the pathetic thing was that these lads, who so often shambled, so many of whom were poorly dressed, all of whom were a little shamefaced at this effort to do them honor, did not look like soldiers. Sabinsport had had so little experience with armies that she could not visualize these country lads, these stooped clerks, these slouching workmen, as soldiers. She went back home not a little unhappy. How were we ever going to make an army from such stuff in time to do anything? That was becoming her engrossing thought. How are we ever going to do anything in time? Her pride was touched. And there was a real but unspoken fear in Sabinsport’s heart lest we were not going to come up to the mark before the world.
There were just two people in Sabinsport—that is, two who talked and were listened to, that were not worried about the camp or the making of an army—Captain Billy and Nancy Cowder. To Uncle Billy, all these boys were the boys of ’61, and every train load side-tracked on the numerous switches that the main line had provided on the edge of Sabinsport in preparation for the handling of men and materials for the camp—every train load filled him with more and more confidence. “You’ll see,” he said. “We were like that—just you wait.”
As for Nancy, she was amazing to Dick. She was one of those rare beings of unquenchable faith. With it went an almost universal sympathy. Dick had expected to find her as obsessed with the cause of Serbia as Patsy had always been with that of Belgium, as deaf to other calls, as impatient with Sabinsport’s diffused interest as Patsy was. But he discovered at once that her heart was open to every cry, and that her hand instinctively reached out to aid any human being that needed help.
She had not been at home a fortnight before she was busy planning with Ralph and Dick and her father for better housing for the girls in the factory around the Point; with Jack Mulligan for better schools at the mines. When war came she was as sensitive as Dick to what the town was going through. She realized, even better than he, how utterly Sabinsport was cut off from all outward manifestation of war, how she saw and heard none of its martial sights and noise. She was obliged to re-create without the help of outward things. It made the girl extraordinarily sympathetic. Indeed, in all Sabinsport at this period of uncertainty and alarms there was no one who kept so confident and serene an attitude or who treated with more humor and commonsense the rumors and fears that ran the streets or saw with more practical eye the things to be done.
It was Nancy who first realized what a camp twenty-five miles from Sabinsport might mean to the town—the opportunity and the threat that were in it. Nancy, it will be remembered, had been in London when the war broke out. She had seen Kitchener’s army grow. She had lived with soldiers, too, in hospitals and in camps, and she quickly realized that Sabinsport had a part to play. It was to Dick that she swiftly went for consultation.
“They will be twenty-five miles away,” said Dick.
“Oh, yes,” said Nancy, “but what is twenty-five miles with our factories full of girls, and the town wide open? With all their homesickness and their need of friends and life, we must get ready for them.”
“But how?” said Dick. “What shall we do?”
“Well,” said Nancy, practically, “we women must have our canteen ready for their passing through.”
But all that Nancy could say at the start had no effect upon Sabinsport. Nothing in her experience could give her an inkling of what it would mean to have a camp of 50,000 men twenty-five miles away. The distance was prohibitive. What would they have to do with Sabinsport, with the City within five miles? It was the City’s business to take care of the camp, not hers.
It was November before Sabinsport began to feel any responsibility about the camp. By that time, the boys had discovered the town. Naturally, it was the City so near them that had drawn them first, and that continued to draw them in the largest numbers. And it was the City which from the start had accepted the responsibility of guarding the boys who came to her. The City had formed great committees of men and women. She had passed ordinances, she had opened canteens. Hundreds of her homes were open to the boys, her clubs and churches and halls regularly on the Wednesdays and Saturdays when they were off. The City did wonderfully well from the start, and the commanding officer had applauded the coöperation that she gave him.
In all this activity, Sabinsport, twenty-five miles away, had not been asked to help. It was natural enough. The City always had ignored Sabinsport. To be sure, she was a nice little country town and had a quaint hotel, with a wonderful cook; the best place in the country round to motor out for supper. Sabinsport had always resented this attitude. She was the older, she had never quite gotten over feeling that she should have been the City; she who was there so many years before, and who was responsible for the discovery and first development of this wealth which now the City handled and from which she so wonderfully profited. That is, Sabinsport was jealous of the City, her patronage, the fact that she was never taken in. It was partly this that made her unresponsive to all the pressure that Dick and Nancy brought upon her in the early days of the camp, to organize, to look after the soldiery that they felt inevitably would seek the town. Always the same answer came back: “Let the City look after them. She has not asked us to help. It’s her business.”
But, little by little, she discovered that, although she might make no overtures to the camp, the camp had found her out and was making good use of all she had to offer in the way of pleasure and freedom. The boys had discovered two things in Sabinsport, the two that Nancy had predicted: that she had factories full of attractive girls and that her saloons were wide open. The better sort had discovered the Paradise and High Town.
The consequence of Sabinsport’s blindness and her refusal to accept responsibility heaped up every day—the girl question, as they called it. There were sudden marriages which shocked and distressed her. There were no marriages, that horrified her even more. A new type of women began to appear in the streets. And again and again on Saturday afternoons soldiers were taken back to camp, but not to barracks—to the guard house. Irritation and disgust with the camp grew in the town, and then, late in November, sickness began. It ran rampant through the camp, still insufficiently equipped with hospitals and doctors and nurses to handle anything like an epidemic. Heartbreaking tales of deaths, from lack of care, it was charged, filled the town. Nancy who, from the opening of the camp, had given practically all of her time to whatever service she could put her hands to, and who by her common sense, her skill, her sweetness, had won completely officers, doctors, and nurses, now gave herself up to regular nursing, coming back only once a week for a half-day’s rest—on Monday afternoon always, though nobody at the time thought about that.
Dick practically spent his days and nights in service. He, too, had from the start been received by officers and doctors as one of those rare civilians who can be allowed the freedom of a camp and really help, not hinder, its work.
But Sabinsport was not rallying to the efforts of Nancy and Dick. The town was horrified at the things that she saw going on. She bitterly blamed the commanding officer, the War Department, the Government. She resented the intimations that she had had from both the authorities in the City and in the camp that her failure to deal resolutely with her saloons and with the strange women who were finding shelter within her limits, was a menace to the boys. Matters were not at all helped by the kind of agitation which had begun in the town, with the hope of controlling the situation. The center of this agitation was Mrs. Susan Katcham, president of an old-time temperance organization—a good, aggressive, tactless woman, whose main effect upon Sabinsport had always been to steel even the sober to the support of the saloon.
Mrs. Katcham now had no need to argue about the disastrous effects of the open saloon. Every day was demonstrating it, to the disgust and shame of the town. There was just one man everybody knew that could put a stop to this thing, and that was Jake Mulligan, for Jake controlled the police, and Jake owned half or two-thirds of the property in Sabinsport on which liquor was sold. Mrs. Katcham went for him openly and viciously, hammer and tongs; and all she did was to make him take a terrible oath that he would not budge an inch in the matter; that it was the business of the camp to keep its soldiers at home, and not his to run Sunday schools for the protection of grown men.
The tragic thing to Dick was that he saw growing in Sabinsport out of this clash, an increasing distaste for a soldier.
“Never, never,” he said, “would the heart of Sabinsport be reached until this was blotted out.” But what was to be done. He took it to the commanding officer himself, and between them they laid out a plan for capturing Sabinsport’s heart.
“It’s melodrama,” said Dick.
“It will do the work,” said the General.
But that was to be done.
The execution of the plan, which the General and Dick had agreed upon for the siege and capture of Sabinsport’s heart, was not easy, in the pressure and anxiety which the epidemic in the camp had brought, and its probable effect seemed to both men more and more doubtful as the friction between the town and camp grew.
It was on Christmas night that it was to be carried out. The Sunday night before Dick came home, white with weariness and despondency. He had had a day too hard for him, that he knew; one which his physician would have called dangerous. But how could it be helped? At daybreak a doctor at the camp had telephoned that Peter Tompkins couldn’t live, that he had asked for the “minister.” Would he go down? “Be there in an hour,” Dick had answered—and he was. The poor lad was almost gone. Dick sat with him to the end, took his last message—winced, wondered, and bowed his head at the sheer, cheerful bravery with which the boy took what he called faintly his “medicine.” “Didn’t take care like they told me,” he said. “Tell Mother they’ve done the best they could.” But Dick knew that while the loyal fellow might take upon himself the cause of his own death, blundering orders and unthinking friends were responsible. The boys had been told to bring as little as possible to camp—only a suit case which could be sent back with the clothes they wore. Peter, like hundreds of others in that cruel month of December had started from his home in his oldest, thinnest clothes, without an overcoat. He was going to throw everything away, he said, and not trouble to send anything back; and there had been nobody in the town with sufficient forethought and authority to prevent the risk he took. He had reached camp chilled to the bone. The supply of clothing was short. He had to go about for days in his thin, old garments. He could not get warm, exercise as he would, hug the fire as he would.
In the tremendous pressure of preparation and organization, it was impossible that the physical condition of each boy should be known to his officers. Peter had to shift for himself in those first days. He was shy and homesick. It was Dick, who was making a specialty of the homesick, who had discovered how serious his condition was and who had seen to it that he was sent to the hospital; and it was Dick who had given him the care which the one doctor and one nurse in a ward where there were two hundred very sick boys could not possibly give.
It was too late. Peter was dead, and, two hours before, Dick had seen his rough pine coffin on the platform, ready for the journey home. A clumsy wreath had been laid upon it by some sorrowing “buddy,” at its foot stood a cheap suitcase, containing all the boy’s few belongings. At the head a soldier kept guard. Dick’s heart ached for the mother who must receive the pitiful box. And he groaned as he thought of the many, very many, he feared, that would follow it.
Sabinsport’s temper at the moment weighed even more heavily upon Dick that night than the sickness at the camp. The inevitable scandal, that both he and the General had feared, had come the night before. Twenty boys, off for their Saturday holiday, had slipped into Sabinsport for what they called a “blow out.” They had gone to Beefsteak John’s, one of the cheap workmen’s hotels, had taken rooms, laid off their uniforms, put on pajamas and called up the barkeeper. Of course he could give them what they wanted, for they were not in uniform! And he had done it.
The scandal had been made worse by the introduction of a half dozen of the strange women who had taken up their dwelling in Sabinsport. Before morning the crowd was on the streets, rioting madly. The boys had been arrested and were in jail. The whole story was in the City’s Sunday morning paper. Sabinsport was disgraced before the world.
The General and Dick had talked the matter over in the hour after he had closed poor Peter’s eyes, and both had agreed that this probably put an end to their Christmas celebration. “You can see,” the General had said, “how impossible it will be for me to do my part unless I know that every saloon in Sabinsport is absolutely closed. That’s my ultimatum. They tell me that there’s a man by the name of Mulligan that controls the town. Could you get at him?”
“I could,” said Dick, “but I don’t know whether it would do any good. Mulligan is obstinate. I am sure I could have persuaded him long ago to close every house he owns in Sabinsport and willingly have stood his losses if it had not been for Mrs. Katcham. So long as she continues in the field, he will keep everything open to spite her.”
“I don’t wonder,” said the General, sympathetically. “Same here. She’s been trying to force me to appoint a mother for every fifty boys. Let ’em live in the camp. Thinks I’m in league with the liquor interests because I refuse—told me so to my face. You can’t do anything with such women. But you must stop the liquor selling there some way unless you want me to appeal to Washington.”
Dick had come back to town anxious and disheartened. “It’s a nice situation, and Christmas only two days away.” He was sitting perplexed and weary before his fire, when who should come in but Mulligan himself.
“Can you give me a few minutes, Reverend?” he called, in his hearty voice.
Dick stared in amazement. “Of course,” he said. “Come in.” He helped him with his coat, stirred the fire, offered him a cigar, and sat down.
“See here, Dick,” Mulligan began. “I wouldn’t come telling anybody in this town I’m ashamed of myself but you—I am. That thing last night was my fault. If I’d ever given the boys round town a hint that they weren’t to sell booze to soldiers, they’d never done it, uniform or no uniform; but I never batted an eye at ’em. I’ve known all along they got stuff whenever they wanted it. I never tipped the police not to see things, but I never tipped ’em to see ’em, and that’s what they was waitin’ for. If it hadn’t been for that Katcham woman, I’d ’a’ done it. I’m that mean I couldn’t stand it to see her get her way. Now, she’s gettin’ up a mass meetin’ for Christmas—think of that, a mass meetin’ on Christmas. Well, I’m goin’ to beat her to it.
“I control ten saloons in this town—all except the pikers—I’m closing every blamed one of them to-day—canceled the leases. I’ll turn out every doggone man that don’t shut down. And I’m warnin’ the little fellows that they’ve got to follow suit. They’re howling, but let ’em. I have told them I’d treat them square, pay them for six months. They know me. Let them sue if they want to. They know that I can prove that they’ve been selling to the boys. There’s not a jury in the State that would give them damages. The bar at Beefsteak Jim’s is closed now. I’m going to make this town clean, so clean that the boys can play dominoes without being laughed at.
“And I’ve seen the Chief. I’ve told him if his men so much as wink at a glass of beer sold to a soldier, I’ll fire him. I’ve told him he’s to run out any shady woman that shows her bleached head in this burg, and put the camp onto any boy that tries to sneak into any mischief. I’m goin’ to make this town clean, Dick, so clean all these doggone camp towns around the country that are rolling up their eyes at Sabinsport’s wickedness and calling attention to how good they are and rejoicing that we’ve got it in the neck, will sing another song. I’ll show them. And what tickles me most is getting ahead of the Katcham woman. She’s not going to spoil our Christmas by her mass meetin’. When the town gets up to-morrow morning, they will find that things are shut down. I have seen to it that it gets out. Everybody will know without waiting for theArgus, and you ought to see what’s going in theArgusto-morrow night. I’m letting it be known that the landlords in this town made a voluntary agreement—note that, Reverend, voluntary agreement, for the good of the army and the good of Sabinsport, not to sell another glass of beer as long as this war lasts. Don’t that sound noble? Won’t that shut up those neighborhoods in the State that are taking pains to say how depraved this burg is?
“I don’t want you to tell anybody I had a hand in this, Reverend. Just tellin’ you because I care about whatyouthink, and because I want you to know the straight goods. It’s goin’ to be done, and so you can stop worryin’. That’s got me more than once—see you lookin’ so anxious. And then there’s Jack. I hate to have him know over there in France what happened Saturday night. I’m sending him the paper and along with it a copy of the agreement. That’s all. I’m not going to havehistown disgraced again. So long, Reverend, and get some sleep. You need it.”
There were tears in Dick’s eyes as he wrung Mulligan’s hand. “You better believe I’ll sleep,” he said. “Now, we’ll have our festival, and I’m counting on your being there. The General and his staff are coming, and we’ll have a surprise which couldn’t have been sprung if it hadn’t been for what you’ve done. You’ve saved Sabinsport more than once, Mulligan, but you never did it so good a turn as to-day.”
“Nothing in that, Reverend. Thank the Katcham woman. I had to beat her to it.”
Dick went back to his pipe. He was too happy to sleep. He remembered a remark of Katie’s, made months ago, and he repeated it aloud, “The Lord sure is a wonder!”
For several years now Sabinsport had had a Christmas tree on the square at fiveP. M.of Christmas eve, with carols and prayers and the free distribution to all the children of large and enticing stockings filled with candies. At six, almost every house in town had lighted candles in its windows. This year they were to have their Christmas tree as usual, but, in deference to Mr. Hoover, the candies and candles were to be saved. At nine o’clock on Christmas night, there was to be a community celebration, the details of which nobody seemed to know, but the program had been hinted at in every quarter of the town in such a mysterious way that the anticipation was high.
Dick and Nancy had been responsible for drawing everybody in. The mines and mills, as well as High Town, had representatives. Every quarter knew that somebody from its ranks was to do something, though what that something was was an entire secret.
Sabinsport had a wonderful place for a great community celebration—the Opera House. When Mulligan and Cowder planned the Opera House they had been in their most optimistic mood. They wanted it big—big enough for conventions and expositions—“a stage on which you could have a circus,” was Jake’s idea. The result was a great, gaudy barn with a stage which would have done for a hippodrome. Financially, the size of the thing had defeated its purpose, but for a great town celebration it was magnificent. It was none too big for the affair in which Dick was interested.
By seven o’clock of Christmas night, the Opera House was packed. At seven-thirty the program began—songs and tableaux and speeches and impersonations. It went without a hitch—swift, compelling, and, oh, so merry. In an hour after it began the house was a happy, cheering crowd, helped not a little in their joyfulness by the presence of scores upon scores of soldiers, guests from the camp, and by the aid which the applause was getting from two boxes filled with officers, the General among them.
The program was almost finished—all but a single number which appeared simply as Music and Tableaux. If the audience had not been so interested, it would have noticed that up to this point there had been but the scantiest of reference to army or navy, to war or country. The very absence of these topics hushed them to silence when suddenly the orchestra broke into “Over There.”
It was like a call, penetrating, stirring. It hushed and thrilled them beyond applause. The hush deepened when suddenly, across the long drop curtain there flashed the words:—
SOMEWHERE IN FRANCE
The orchestra played on, every brain fitting the words to the notes:
“Over there, over there,Send the word over there,That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.So prepare, say a pray’r,Send the word, send the word to beware,We’ll be over, we’re coming over,And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
“Over there, over there,Send the word over there,That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.So prepare, say a pray’r,Send the word, send the word to beware,We’ll be over, we’re coming over,And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
“Over there, over there,Send the word over there,That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.So prepare, say a pray’r,Send the word, send the word to beware,We’ll be over, we’re coming over,And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
“Over there, over there,
Send the word over there,
That the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
The drums rum-tumming ev’rywhere.
So prepare, say a pray’r,
Send the word, send the word to beware,
We’ll be over, we’re coming over,
And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.”
Slowly the curtain rose on a scene that much looking in the last few months at photographs and picture papers had made familiar to them—a French town, the kind they knew the boys were billeted in, with its long row of gray-faced houses, its red-tiled roofs, its quaint church with its simple, very simple statue of Joan of Arc; and behind, rising perpetually, mountains, along which ran a highway, climbing up and up. A company of boys in khaki swarmed over the place. They were resting on their arms, waiting orders. They hung out of the windows, sat in the doorways, grouped carelessly in the roadway, swarmed over the pedestal up to the very feet of the figure of Joan.
The house watched the scene with swelling heart. Then from an upper window, there suddenly came a clear baritone. A boy, leaning out, his eyes on the little statue, began to sing a song new to Sabinsport. Alone he sang through the first verse, then the wonderful refrain was taken up,
“Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Do your eyesFrom the skiesSee the foe?Don’t you see the drooping fleur-de-lis?Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Let your spirit guide us through,Come, lead your France to victory.Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you.”
“Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Do your eyesFrom the skiesSee the foe?Don’t you see the drooping fleur-de-lis?Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Let your spirit guide us through,Come, lead your France to victory.Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you.”
“Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Do your eyesFrom the skiesSee the foe?Don’t you see the drooping fleur-de-lis?Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,Let your spirit guide us through,Come, lead your France to victory.Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you.”
“Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Do your eyes
From the skies
See the foe?
Don’t you see the drooping fleur-de-lis?
Can’t you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Let your spirit guide us through,
Come, lead your France to victory.
Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you.”
It was but the beginning. It had put the waiting boys in the mood for song, and the appealing refrain had scarcely died away when the tension was broken by a merry voice starting, “Where do we go from here, Boys? Where do we go from here?” From gay they swung to grave, and then back to gay. “The Star Spangled Banner” brought everybody to their feet. “I don’t want to get well, I don’t want to get well,” set everybody to laughing. Then came “Christmas Night” and then—“Home, Sweet Home.” It was almost too much for the singers themselves, for more than one lad on the stage dropped his head, unable to go on. As the song rose, so sweet, and familiar, so ladened with memories, the audience sat with quivering faces and eyes grown wet. If it had not been for the emotion which had seized it, it would have been sooner conscious that there was an unusual accompaniment to the words, a rhythmical beating, which grew louder and louder until it became a steady tramp. It had grown so near that it would have broken the spell which held the house, if suddenly a bugle had not sent every man on the stage to his feet.
They fell in line, and just as the outside tramp came too distinct to be mistaken, an order, “Forward, March,” came quick and sharp. They filed out and behind them came others, an interminable stream, across the stage, only to reappear, mounting upward along the road in the background. And as they started upward, at the right and top of the height, a great luminous American flag was suddenly flung out. It waved and waved as if in salute to the mounting men. They went up, up. Their young faces, turned to their banner, wore looks of such resolve, such exultation, that the hearts of the men and women watching, breathless below, swelled with pride and hope.
The host came on, wave after wave; the orchestra played on the wrought up audience as on a viol. They broke into cheers, dropped into silence, sobbed, then cheered and cheered and cheered; and when the light gradually faded, the curtain slowly dropped, the music little by little subsided; they sat unstrung, listening to the tramping grow dimmer and dimmer until it was lost in the sounds of the town.
It was a new Sabinsport that went home that night. Whatever might happen, never again would she doubt, or close her heart to the soldier. She was his. The General, waiting in his box for Dick, said as he grasped his hand, “That’s settled, Ingraham. We’ll have no more trouble with this town.”
But if Sabinsport had been chastened and her heart opened, she still had to grope her way into the organized service that alone could restore her hurt pride and give her some realizing sense of being a part of the great undertaking; and it was a hard moment for that.
In all the war there was not a month more difficult than January of 1918. The camp and the town were in the clutch of the most cruel weather that part of the world had ever seen. Again and again in these weeks, the miles of switches and sidings in the valley were blocked with long trains of cars filled with coal, with every conceivable kind of freight for the camp, as well as with materials needed for the shipyards and overseas. Although every effort was made to keep tracks clear for troop trains, every now and then, one filled with tired and shivering men would be held up. They sang—oh, yes, they always sang; but you could not go among them and not know that the singing often hid frightened and homesick hearts.
The town itself, surrounded as she was by mines underlaid with coal, was suffering. Sabinsport was startled to find some of her own families in actual danger of death by freezing. In a town which all its life had been accustomed to wait until the last minute and then call up and ask that a load of coal be delivered at once, and to get it as it would get its roast from the butcher’s, it was natural that many prosperous families were low in fuel supplies.
It was hard for the man of influence then not to throw aside all sense of responsibility for anybody but his family. Queer stories of the tricks that men played in order to get coal, headed for their neighbors, were told. And as for the poor, they waited in long lines, with pails and scuttles, to get their little lot, and many a time went home without it.
Unreasonably enough, storm and snow classed themselves in Sabinsport’s mind as part of the war, and her uneasiness grew. Was it all to be like this—failure, sorrow, shame, suffering? Was she never to see anything orderly, sufficient, successful? Was there nothing in war that was brave, glorious and stirring? Sabinsport was seeing only the fringe of the great undertaking, and it looked ragged enough in the early part of 1918.
In all this, Dick was going from depth to depth of discouragement. Inveterate believer that he was in this town, which he had come so to love, in the country in whose institutions he so believed, doubt and despair of the outcome of the great undertaking grew upon him. We were not going to be able to handle even the physical side of it. It was not alone what he saw at home; it was what he heard from his friends in Washington. Their letters, once hopeful, became despairing. “It looks to me to-day,” one of them wrote him along in the middle of January, “as if the whole war machine had broken down. I have believed and believed, but the fact is we are not getting men over. It’s all nonsense about our having 400,000 on the other side; there are not over 100,000. It’s all nonsense about our building ships—the whole business is simply tangled up. It’s an awful, humiliating failure, I am afraid, Dick. The men at the top are camouflaging the whole situation. I cannot endure it that we men back here should fail the fine fellows who gave themselves so utterly, so fearlessly.”
This letter was the last straw to Dick’s despair. He was overwhelmed with the futility of all the gigantic effort, sickened by the inability of Sabinsport properly to even take care of its own in a stress of weather, sickened by what he saw in the camp. Sabinsport was failing, the camp was failing, the country was failing. And why should he expect anything else? What was the human race, after all, but a set of selfish, limited bunglers?
And so, night after night, he tossed and groaned, and slept fitfully. Things grinned at him. He wakened feverish and worn. In the day things said, “What’s the use? Why talk about democracy? Why talk about ideals?” And he? Why, he was an utter failure. To get into it, to have a turn in the trenches, to be soaked with filth, to be broken with fatigue, to struggle to his feet, to feel a blessed death wound—that, that was the only thing that would count.
He worked, of course; wore every day his mask of courage and good cheer; but day by day it was growing harder to keep it on. Day by day his strength was failing, for Dick, for the first time in his life, was recklessly disobeying the boundaries which had been set for his physical existence. The over-fatigue which he had always conscientiously avoided he not only sought but coveted; the strains which he had been told might at any time be fatal to him, he took almost gladly. Finally his friends among the physicians at the camp warned him, “You will break down, Ingraham, as sure as the world if you don’t take things easier.” His friends grew worried. Nancy came to him and begged him to stop, to go away for a while; but he laughed at them all. In the bitterness of his soul he had come to feel that here was his way out; he could give himself here.
The break came suddenly in the hospital at the camp; one day he collapsed utterly and was taken home unconscious. An almost superhuman effort of doctors and nurses brought him around, and a month later, very white and humble, he was taken from Sabinsport to the South by Reuben Cowder himself.
His desire to die had left him. He was his normal self, save for his physical weakness. He meant to get well and come back to Sabinsport—Sabinsport, whose grief and anxiety over his illness had touched him to the heart? And he did his part. Three months later he came back—a little thinner, a little quieter, but quite himself again and capable of steady effort.