The Tin Soldier Part 69

"'If you think,' she said, 'that you suffer--what in G.o.d's name will you think before the war is over? It hasn't touched you. You won't know what suffering means until your men begin to come home. You talk about hardships; not one of you has gone hungry yet--and the men over there may be cut off at any moment from food supplies, and they are always at the mercy of the camp cooks, who may or may not give them things that they can eat. And they lie out under the stars with their wounds, and if any of you has a finger ache, you go to bed with hot water bottles and are coddled and cared for. But our boys,--there isn't anyone to coddle them--they have to stick it out. And we've got to stick it out--and not be sorry for ourselves. Oh, why should we be sorry for ourselves!' The tears were streaming down her cheeks when she finished, and a gray-haired woman who had wept with the others got up and came over to her. 'My dear,' she said, 'I shall never pity myself again. My two sons are over there, and I've been thinking how much I have given. But they have given their young lives, their futures--their bodies, to be broken--' And then standing right in the middle of the Toy Shop that mother prayed for her sons, and for the sons of other women, and for the husbands and lovers, and that the women might be brave.

"Oh, it was wonderful--as she stood there like a white-veiled prophetess, praying.

"Yet a year ago she would have died rather than pray in public. She is a conservative, aristocratic woman, the kind that doesn't wear rings or try to be picturesque--and she has always kept her feelings to herself, and said her prayers to herself--or in church, but never in all her life has she been so fine as she was the other day praying in the Toy Shop.

"Yet in a way I am sorry for myself. Not for me as I am to-day, but for the Jean of Yesterday, who thought that patriotism was remembering Bunker Hill!

"Of course in a way it is that--for Bunker Hill and Lexington and Valley Forge are a part of us because our grandfathers were there, and what they felt and did is a part of our feeling and doing.

"I have always thought of those old days as a sort of picture--the embattled farmers in their shirt-sleeves and with their hair blowing, and the Midnight Ride, and the lantern in the old North Church--and the Spirit of '76. And it was the same with the Civil War; there was always the vision of cavalry sweeping up and down slopes as they do in the movies, and of the bugles calling, and bands playing 'Marching through Georgia' or 'Dixie' as the case might be--and flags flying--isn't it glorious to think that the men in gray are singing to-day, 'The Star Spangled Banner' with the rest of us?

"But my thoughts never had anything to do with money, though I suppose people gave it then, as they are giving now. But you can't paint pictures of men and women making out checks, and children putting thrift stamps in little books, so I suppose that in future the heroes and heroines of the emptied pocket-books will go down unsung--.

"It isn't a bit picturesque to give until it hurts, but it helps a lot.

I saw Sarah Bernhardt the other day in a wonderful little play where she's a French boy, who dies in the end--and she dies, exquisitely, with the flag of France in her arms--the faded, lovely flag--I shall never forget. The tears ran down my cheeks so that I couldn't see, but her voice, so faint and clear, still rings in my ears--

"If she had died clutching a Liberty Bond or wearing a Red Cross b.u.t.ton, it would have seemed like burlesque. Yet there are men and women who are going without bread and b.u.t.ter to buy Liberty Bonds, and who are buying them not as a safe investment, as rich men buy, but because the boys need the money. And there ought to be poems written and statues erected to commemorate some of the sacrifices for the sake of the Red Cross.

"Yet I think that, in a way, we have not emphasized enough the picturesque quality of this war, not on this side. They do it in France--they worship their great flyers, their great generals, their crack regiments, everything has a personality, they are tender with their shattered cathedrals as if something human had been hurt, and the result is a quickening on the part of every individual, a flaming patriotism which as yet we have not felt. We don't worship anything, we don't all of us know the words of 'The Star Spangled Banner'; fancy a Frenchman not knowing the words of the 'Ma.r.s.eillaise' or an Englishman forgetting 'G.o.d Save the King.' We don't shout and sing enough, we don't cry enough, we don't feel enough--and that's all there is to it. If we were hot for the triumph of democracy, there would be no chance of victory for the Hun. Perhaps as the war comes nearer, we shall feel more, and every day it is coming nearer--"

It was very near, indeed. Thousands of those gray sheep were lying dead on the plains of Picardy--the Allies fought with their backs to the wall--Americans who had swaggered, secure in the prowess of Uncle Sam, swaggered no longer, and pondered on the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins.

Slowly the nation waked to what was before it. In America now lay the hope of the world. The Wolf must be trapped, the sheep saved in spite of themselves, those poor sheep, driven blindly to slaughter.

The General was not quite sure that they were sheep, or that they were being driven. He held, rather, that they knew what they were about--and were not to be pitied.

Teddy, considering this gravely, went back to previous meditations, and asked if he prayed for his enemies.

"Bless my soul," said the old gentleman, "why should I?"

"Well, Mother says we must, and then some day they'll stop and say they are sorry--"

The General chuckled, "Your mother is optimistic."

"What's 'nopt'mistic?"

"It means always believing that nice things will happen."

"Don't you believe that nice things will happen?"

"Sometimes--"

"Don't you believe that the war will stop?"

"Not until we've thrown the full force of our fighting men into it--at what a sacrifice."

"Can't G.o.d make it stop?"

"He can, but He won't, not if He's a G.o.d of justice," said this staunch old patriot, "until America has brought them to their knees--"

"Will they say they are sorry then?"

"It won't make very much difference what they say--"

But Teddy, having been brought up to understand the things which belong to an officer and a gentleman, had his own ideas on the subject.

"Well, I should think they'd ought to say they were sorry--."

CHAPTER XXVII

MARCHING FEET

The end of April brought much rain; torrents swept down the smooth streets, and the beauty of the carefully kept flower beds in the parks was blurred by the wet.

The General, limping from window to window, chafed. He wanted to get out, to go over the hills and far away; with the coming of the spring the wander-hunger gripped him, and with this restless mood upon him he stormed at Bronson.

"It's a dog's life."

"Yes, sir," said Bronson, dutifully.

"It is dead lonesome, Bronson, and I can't keep Jean tied here all of the time. She is looking pale, don't you think she is looking pale?"

"Yes, sir. I think she misses Mr. Derry."

"Well, she'll miss him a lot more before she gets him back," grimly.

"He'll be going over soon--"

"Yes, sir."

"I wish I were going," the old man was wistful. "Think of it, Bronson, to be over there--in the thick of it, playing the game, instead of rotting here--"

It was, of course, the soldier's point of view. Bronson, being hopelessly civilian, did his best to rise to what was expected of him.

"You like it then, sir?"

"Like it? It is the only life. We've lost something since men took up the game of business in place of the game of fighting."

"But you see, sir, there's no blood--in business." Bronson tried to put it delicately.

"Isn't there? Why, more men are killed in accidents in factories than are killed in war--murdered by money-greedy employers."

"Oh, sir, not quite that."

"Yes, quite," was the irascible response. "You don't know what you are talking about, Bronson. Read statistics and find out."

"Yes, sir. Will you have your lunch up now, sir?"

"I'll get it over and then you can order the car for me."