MORNING
I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your children?”
The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.
I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”
“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality! These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel-foundry.”
“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said moderately.
“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women.
“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”
“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the nationality of the cannon about us.)
“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on public view.”
“Vegetarianism, next?”
“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the steers killed.”
“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a traditional right to be illogical, but really.... Did you, or did you not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war? It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same thing.”
“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our street. Who wouldn’t feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (and our own men among them) we must change the organization of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches about the dishpan.”
My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand. Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning, high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every man (and that means love of force and submission to force—you must swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”
I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course ... but.... There is a horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to hold it in check it might be necessary ...