The Highflyers

by Clarence Budington Kelland

He went alone to see the spectacle. He did not want companions, but wanted to see, to study, to comprehend. He was going to the laboratory to endeavor to assay the American people.

From a boy he bought a wooden box and stood upon it at the corner of Woodward and Adams avenues. North and south the streets were massed with such a crowd as Detroit had never before turned out. Potter watched the section of it that lay under his eye, and listened for such messages by word of mouth from the public thought as might filter to his ears.

In the park at his left the very trees bore a human fruit. Roofs were densely fringed; every window was filled beyond its capacity—and upon all the pitiless heat beat down. They waited patiently, for the parade, like all parades in Detroit, was delayed in starting. A couple of women fainted—not from emotion, not because loved ones were marching away, but because of weariness and the breathless heat.

Potter studied, but was at a loss for conclusions. The same holiday air was present; the same lack of somber forebodings. Once he saw a woman pass with handkerchief to her eyes, her husband’s arm about her shoulders. She was giving a son. The crowd looked after her and whispered, and grew silent for a moment.... Maybe they did understand, Potter thought. Maybe this holiday air was a pose to conceal a dark care. He could not force himself to believe it.

The crowd surged closer, straining eager eyes up the street, for the parade approached. It came and passed—fraternal orders, Grand Army men, Spanish War veterans, home guard, cadet corps—and the men of the draft.... It was upon the men of the draft that interest centered, and they came rollicking, in straggling, unmilitary lines. They, too, apparently, were bent on holiday, for they jostled, sang, bandied retorts with the crowd, called joyously to acquaintances, and filled the air with straw hats. A humorist had snatched a straw hat from a companion and sent it sailing into the air. In a moment the air was full of straw hats and laughter.... And these men were marching away to be trained in the business of killing their fellow-men!

It was characteristic of America that the draft men had staged their parade with humorous effects. They carried signs and banners upon which were mottoes, and for one legend which was serious, thought-compelling, twenty were flamboyantly farcical. There was a fondness for announcing in rhyme that the Kaiser would be given hell. One man led a goat which was announced to be the Kaiser’s goat.... Potter searched for a downcast face, a tearful eye. It might have been that some were present in that marching line, but he saw none. America was marching to war with a jest on its lips.

“They’ll laugh out of the other side of their mouths,” Potter heard a man remark, and that was the nearest he approached to gloomy prophecies that day.

He went back to his work. He had seen, and he was puzzled. He could not read the meaning of that day’s spectacle, and it hurt and bewildered him. “They don’t take it seriously,” he said to himself. “What does it mean?”

Perhaps if he could have stepped into the homes of those thousands of young men he might have read a different message; perhaps if he could have seen the farewells, heard the words of father or mother to son who was going away from them to fight for the great issue of the right of individual nations to live, he might have perceived matters which were hidden from him. The American does not parade his grief; does not flaunt before the world his serious emotions. Those are for his secret heart; not even, save in great moments, for his immediate family. With a rude joke and a laugh he puts himself on record, and perhaps that record lies. There is but one record that offers verity, but that is a secret record, not open to the investigator. It is printed in the recesses of the heart.

Hildegarde saw the parade, too, saw it from the vantage-point of Cantor’s office window, and watched his face with greater interest than she watched the passing men below. His expression was ironical, almost sneering. He was studying, appraising. Hildegarde said to herself that he was formulating in his mind a report of the thing to be forwarded through devious channels to Berlin. In due time the High Command in Germany would have spread before it Cantor’s well-considered estimate of America’s draft army, and, if his expression were indicative, that report would be pleasing to those in charge of Germany’s military destinies.