It did. In all my experience of men coming back into life from the state which is so expressively known as dead drunk it was the first time I ever saw them listen with avidity to any voice but that of the inner man.
What is there about war which speaks with this authority? Where did it get its power to go to the hidden man of the heart, that subliminal self with which modern speculation has been so busy, and shift him from off his age-long base? It is commonly said that, whatever our personal vicissitudes, human nature remains the same; but though that may be true of the past, I doubt if it will be true of the future. War on the scale on which we are waging it has already changed human nature. It has changed it as the years change a baby to a boy and a boy to a man. It has lifted human nature up, drawn out of it what we never supposed to be there, freed it from its slavery to time. It has to a large degree reversed the processes of time as it has reversed the usages of sex. We have seen youth doing the work of maturity, maturity that of youth, women that of men, men that of women. We have seen cowards transformed into heroes, rotters into saints, stupid, idiotic ne’er-do-wells into saviors of mankind.
We shall never go back again to the helpless conviction that youth must grow slowly into age, only to have age decay into ugliness and senility. This kind of foolish, useless progress may still go on for an indefinite time to come, but we shall work against it as against something contrary to the highest possibilities of nature. Since we have thrown off our mental shackles in great moments, we shall see that we can do the same in small, and, having emerged on a higher plane, we shall stay there. Staying there, we shall doubtless go on in time to a higher plane still—a plane on which the mighty works that are now wrought in war will become feasible in peace. We are not on that plane yet; but if the advance of the human race means anything we shall get there. It may take a thousand years; it may take more; it may take less; but in the mean time we must seize our blessings as we may.
So these fellows listened to my tale as raptly as if a trumpet were sounding in their ears. It was like a summons to them to come out of stupefaction. They asked questions not only as to my own experiences, but as to the causes and purposes of the war in general. I do not affirm that they were the most intelligent questions that could be asked; but for men in their condition they were astonishing.
That they were not of necessity to be easy converts I could see when the old chap sitting apart asked again, in his bitter voice, “Did you ever kill a fellow-creetur that had the same right to live as yourself?”
As we discussed that aspect of the subject, too, I found it difficult to restrain my audience from the free fight for which at the Down and Out there was always an inclination.
I accomplished this, however, and as I rose to go the brawny Hercules sidled shyly up to me with the words: “Say! I’m a Canuck. Peterfield, Ontario, is where I hail from. Why ain’t I in this here war?”
He was my first recruit. A few weeks later he was in uniform in Montreal. My object in telling you about him is to point out the fact that I made a beginning, and that from the beginning the sympathy of the City of Comrades upheld me. Little by little that movement by which the whole of America was being shaken out of its materialism, its provincialism, and its mental isolation reached us in Vandiver Street, and we began to see that there were subjects of conversation more commanding than that of drink. What I may call a war party rose among us, and the sentiment that we ought to be in it was expressed.
“We shall be in it when the time comes,” Andrew Christian said to me when we were alone for a few minutes after I had been talking with the men one day. “One of the great mistakes human impatience makes is in trying to hurry the methods by which the divine mind counteracts human errors. We forget that it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father hath put into His own power. Things that take place in their own way generally take place in His. And the overruling force of His way, when we let it alone, working simply, naturally, and as a matter of course, is one of the extraordinary features of history.”
I was the more impressed by these quiet words for the reason that I saw that he, too, was one of the Americans chafing under the long holding back of his country. No one I had seen since my return was more changed in this respect than he. I had left a man who had but one object in his life, the salvation of other men from drink. I found a man marvelously broadened, heightened, illumined, almost transfigured by a larger set of purposes.