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Bessy was wild to abandon herself to she knew not what. Some glint of
intelligence, some force of character as exceptional in her as it was
wanting in Lorna, some heritage of innate sacredness of person, had
kept Bessy from the abyss. She had absorbed in mind all the impurities
of the day, but had miraculously escaped them in body. If her parents
could have known Bessy as Lane now realized her they would have been
horrified. But Lane's horror was fading. Bessy was illuminating the
darkness of his mind.
To understand more clearly what the war had done to Bessy Bell, and to
the millions of American girls like her, it was necessary for Lane to
understand what the war had done to soldiers, to men, and to the
world.
Lane could grasp some infinitesimal truth of the sublime and horrible
change war had wrought in the souls of soldiers. That change was too
great for any mind but the omniscient to grasp in its entirety. War
had killed in some soldiers a belief in Christ: in others it had
created one. War had unleashed the old hidden primitive instincts of
manhood: likewise it had fired hearts to hate of hate and love of
love, to the supreme ideal consciousness could conceive. War had
brought out the monstrous in men and as well the godlike. Some
soldiers had become cowards; others, heroes. There were thousands of
soldiers who became lions to fight, hyenas to snarl, beasts to debase,
hogs to wallow. There were equally as many who were forced to fight,
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who could not kill, whose gentleness augmented under the brutal orders
of their officers. There were those who ran toward the front, heads
up, singing at the top of their lungs. There were those who slunk
back. Soldiers became cold, hard, materialistic, bitter, rancorous:
and qualities antithetic to these developed in their comrades.
Lane exhausted his resources of memory and searched in his notes for a
clipping he had torn from a magazine. He reread it, in the light of
his crystallizing knowledge:
"Had I not been afraid of the scorn of my brother
officers and the scoffs of my men, I would have fled
to the rear," confesses a Wisconsin officer, writing
of a battle.
"I see war as a horrible, grasping octopus with
hundreds of poisonous, death-dealing tentacle that
squeeze out the culture and refinement of a man,"
writes a veteran.
A regimental sergeant-major: "I considered myself
hardboiled, and acted the part with everybody,
including my wife. I scoffed at religion as unworthy
of a real man and a mark of the sissy and weakling."
Before going over the top for the first time he tried
to pray, but had even forgotten the Lord's Prayer.
"If I get out of this, I will never be unhappy again,"
reflected one of the contestants under shell-fire in
the Argonne Forest. To-day he is "not afraid of dead
men any more and is not in the least afraid to die."
"I went into the army a conscientious objector, a
radical, and a recluse.... I came out of it with the
knowledge of men and the philosophy of beauty," says
another.
"My moral fiber has been coarsened. The war has
blunted my sensitiveness to human suffering. In 1914 I
wept tears of distress over a rabbit which I had shot.
I could go out now at the command of my government in
cold-blooded fashion and commit all the barbarisms of
twentieth-century legalized murder," writes a Chicago
man.
A Denver man entered the war, lost himself and God,
and found manhood. "I played poker in the box-car
which carried me to the front and read the Testament
in the hospital train which took me to the rear," he
tells us.
"To disclose it all would take the genius and the
understanding of a god. I learned to talk from the
side of my mouth and drink and curse with the rest of
our 'noble crusaders.' Authority infuriated me and the
first suspicion of an order made me sullen and
dangerous.... Each man in his crudeness and lewdness
nauseated me," writes a service man.
"When our boy came back," complains a mother, "we could hardly
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recognize for our strong, impulsive, loving son whom we had
loaned to Uncle Sam this irritable, restless, nervous man
with defective hearing from shells exploding all about him, and
limbs aching and twitching from strain and exposure, and with
that inevitable companion of all returned oversea boys, the
coffin-nail, between his teeth."
"In the army I found that hard drinkers and fast
livers and profane-tongued men often proved to be the
kindest-hearted, squarest friends one could ever
have," one mother reports.
So then the war brought to the souls of soldiers an extremity of
debasement and uplift, a transformation incomprehensible to the mind
of man.
Upon men outside the service the war pressed its materialism. The
spiritual progress of a thousand years seemed in a day to have been
destroyed. Self-preservation was the first law of nature. And all the
standards of life were abased. Following the terrible fever of
patriotism and sacrifice and fear came the inevitable selfishness and
greed and frenzy. The primitive in man stalked forth. The world became
a place of strife.
What then, reflected Lane, could have been the effect of war upon [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]