The City of Comrades

by Basil King

Now that I came to notice it, I saw a change as perceptible as that in the wind in the whole American national position. As silently as the wind shifts to a new point of the compass a hundred millions of people had shifted their point of view. They were moving it onward day by day, with a rapidity of which they themselves were unconscious.

The titanic facts were to the undercurrent of events but as the volcano to the fire at the heart of the earth. The heart of all human life being now ablaze, there was here and there a stupendous outburst which was but a symptom of the raging flame beneath. There was the U-boat blockade of Great Britain, endangering all the maritime nations of the world. There was the American diplomatic break with Germany. There was the guarding of the German ships interned in American ports. There was the torpedoing of an American steamer off the Scilly Isles. There was Mr. Wilson’s invitation to the neutral nations to join him in the breach with the German Emperor. And then on the 26th the President went in person before Congress to ask authority to use armed force to protect American rights.

These, I say, were but volcanic incidents. The impressive thing to me was the transformation of a people by a process as subtle as enchantment.

Two months earlier they had been neutral, and sitting tight on their neutrality. The war was three thousand miles away. It had been brewed in the cursed vendettas of nations of some of which the every-day American hardly knew the names. It was tragic for those peoples; but they whose lives were poisoned by no hereditary venom were not called on to take part. Zebulun and Naphtali from sheer geographical position might be obliged to hazard their lives to the death; but Asher could abide in his ports, and Gilead beyond Jordan. That had been the kind of reasoning I heard as late as the time of my arrival.

On my return to New York in November, I found a nation holding its judgments and energies in suspense. What by the end of February interested me most was the spectacle of this same people urging forward, surging upward, striving, straining toward a goal which every one knew it would take strength and sacrifice to reach.

Between this approach to war and that of any of the other great powers there was this difference: They had taken the inevitable step while in the grip of a great stress. They sprang to their arms overnight. They had no more choice than a man whose house is on fire as to whether or not he will extinguish it. Out of the bed of their luxurious existence they were called as if by conflagration. Whether they would lose their lives or escape with them was a question they had no time to consider. They went up to the top notch of the heroic in an instant, not knowing the danger they were facing or the courage they displayed.

Here, on the other hand, was a people who saw everything from a long way off. For nearly three years their souls had been sickened with the tale of blood. Gilead might abide beyond Jordan and Asher in his ports, but no atrocious detail had been spared them. They knew, therefore, just what they were doing, exactly what was before them. I can hardly say that they made their choice; they grew toward it. They grew toward it calmly, deliberately, clear-sightedly; and for this very reason with an incomparable bravery. If I were an American citizen instead of the American citizen’s blood-brother, I might not say this; I might not have been aware of it. In any family the outsider can see that which escapes the observation of the daughter or the son. I heard no born American comment on this splendid, tranquil, leisurely readjustment of the spirit to a new, herculean task; perhaps no born American noticed it; but to me as an onlooker, interested and yet detached, it was one of the most grandiose movements of an epoch in which the repetition of the grandiose bewilders the sense of proportion, as on the first days in the Selkirks or the Alps.

It was at this time I heard that Regina was addressing meetings. They were women’s club meetings, and I learned from Annette that she was speaking with success.

“She seems to have come out of a sort of trance,” Annette observed of her, using the word I had used myself. “Ever since she came home she’s been like a girl walking in her sleep. Now she’s waked and is like her old self.”