The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

II

But how far run the ways of nature from the devious ways of men! The ways of Mullein Hill from the ways of a military camp! The Great War came and passed and left the earth a vast human grave. But through it all seedtime and harvest came to Mullein Hill, leaving only more and more abundant life. The Great War is an illustration on the grandest scale of what man, departing from the simple ways of nature, will do to man. War is the logic of our present way of living. I am not concerned with war in this book, but with the sources of life and literature. I have a cure for war, however, here on Mullein Hill; and this cure is the very elixir of life and literature.

War could have destroyed, but it did not change, my going or coming here in the hills. My garden went on as it had for years gone on. There was a little more of it, for there was more need in the village; there was a little larger yield of its reasonableness and joy and beans. But I did not plough up my front lawn for potatoes. Years before I had provided myself with a back yard, and got it into tilth for potatoes, keeping the front lawn green for the cow.

Though she is only a grade Jersey, the cow is a pretty creature, and gives a rural, ruminant touch to our approach, along with the lilacs and the hens. Hitched here on the front lawn the cow suggests economy, too. She is more than a wagon hitched to a star. She is a mowing-machine, and a rake and tedder, and a churn. The gods with her do my mowing, gather up and cure my hay, and turn it into cream.

Every cow gives some skim milk—which we need for the chickens, for cooking, and cottage cheese. Life is not all cream. If I speak of gods doing my chores, I will say they do not milk for me in the mornings, and that it is one of the boys who milks at night. A cow clipping your lawn is poetry and cream too, but caring for the creature is often skim milk and prose. Milking ought to be done regularly. Get a cow and you find her cud a kind of pendulum to all creation, the time to milk being synchronized twice daily to the stars.

I did not plant war-potatoes on my front lawn, partly because they would not grow there, and partly because, in times of peace, I had prepared for war-potatoes; and partly because I think a front lawn looks better in cows than in potatoes. If thou shouldst

“So live, that when thy summons comes to join

The innumerable caravan ...

Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,

Scourged to his dungeon,”

—should we not all live so that, when war comes, we need not plough up the beds for potatoes where the portulaca and poppy ought to blow?

But what a confession here! When war comes! As if I expected war to come again! Many of us are fighting feebly against both the thought and the hideous thing. But many more are preparing for it. Our generals of the late war are going up and down the land preaching preparedness, as they always have. We learn nothing. They know everything. Their profession is war. Can a man lay down his life for a profession he does not believe in? The military men believe in war.

But so do we all as a people. War is the oldest, most honored profession in the world. In all of the fifty years of its history, the great University, of which, for almost half of that time, I have been a teacher, had never conferred an honorary degree. For fifty years it had carried a single laurel wreath in its hand to crown some honored head. Prophets came and went; poets came and went; scientists came and went; scholars came and went; but still the University, dedicated to life and learning, waited with its single wreath a yet more honorable brow.

Then came Foch, the professional soldier. Study for nearly ten thousand students was suspended; a holiday was proclaimed; a great assembly was called; and here, with speech and song and academic garb, with national colors mingling and waving palms, the laurel wreath was placed upon the soldier’s brow. And this University, founded in the name of the Prince of Peace, dedicated to Christian life and learning, crowned the profession of arms as it can crown no other profession, and gave its highest sanction to bloody war.

I do not fail of gratitude to Foch. I only stand in horror that he is, and had to be. I would have had the Nation at the pier to meet him, but clothed in sackcloth, and every citizen with ashes on his head. I, too, would have suspended study and work everywhere for an hour; and, stretching crape across the Arctic Circle till the sign of mourning hid Matamoras and Cape Sable, I would have called an assembly of the continent, and begged this half of the hemisphere to cry, “O God, the foolishness and futility of war!”

The Duty to Dig is older than the practice of war. It was designed to prevent war; and to-day it is the only biological remedy certain to cure war. I must not stop here to explain its therapeutics as applied to war, for I am dealing with another theme. But just before the war broke upon the world, I wrote an editorial for a paper I was serving, advocating that a hive of my bees be sent to the German Emperor and one also to the war lord of Austria. I had extra hives for the British Prime Minister, the Tiger of France, Mr. William Randolph Hearst, and Mr. Theodore Roosevelt. If I could have interested these gentlemen, and a few others, in bee-keeping, I could save the world from war.

The editorial and the offer of bees were both rejected by the careful editor. “I must stay strictly neutral,” was his timid excuse. At the very time I was writing, the Reverend Price Collier, a former Hingham preacher, was publishing a book called “Germany and the Germans,” in which he set forth the old theory of military preparedness as a preventive of war. Speaking of the German army (this was in 1913), he says:

It is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is a necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race; it is essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany together; it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people confidence; the poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps the level of social expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a material age, of men scorning ease for the service of their country; it keeps the peace in Europe; and until there is a second coming of a Christ of pity and patience and peace, it is as good a substitute for that far-off divine event as puzzled man has to offer.

It is a minister of the Gospel who makes this profound observation. But it sounds like our present Secretary of War, a banker, and like our present Commanding General, a professional soldier. Here is sure proof that the human race cannot learn the essential things, and so, is doomed.

But I wish I might try my bees. This old hoax of preventing war by preparing men to fight has been so often tried! And we are at it again. But no nation has tried my simple and inexpensive substitute of bees and plough-shares, and pruning hooks. They have tried, from time out of memory, to beat their swords and spears into garden tools, but a sword makes a mighty poor ploughshare. It has never been successfully done. The manufacturing process is wrong. It takes the temper out of good garden steel first to heat it in the fires of war. We must reverse the process: turn the virgin metal into garden steel first, and give every man a hoe, and a ploughshare, and a pruning hook; then he will never have need for sword and spear.