The Little Moment of Happiness

by Clarence Budington Kelland

“Fritz is gettin’ his good,” said the sergeant, with profound satisfaction.

This continued an hour, and then gradually subsided. The German fire had become desultory—and then ceased. They had drawn upon themselves more than they liked by their evening’s strafing.... The silence that ensued was startlingly loud. One could hear it....

“I’m for some grub if we can rustle it,” said a raw-boned lieutenant.

The lieutenant-colonel yawned and stretched his arms high over his head. “Oh-hum!... Darn these quiet nights,” he said, with sincerity. “I thought for a while there was going to be something stirring.”

“Oh, I’m willing to have a rest once in a while,” said Jimmy. “I’m going to sleep. Gimme all these quiet nights you want to....”

Kendall looked at his watch. It was half past two in the morning.... Quiet nights! He wondered if they were making game of him, but as he looked back on the conduct of these young men during that night he was persuaded of their sincerity.... And he—he had fancied himself present at the unloosing of Inferno....

Presently he was lying on a bundle of hay on a stone floor, wrapped in his blankets.... A sentence, a scrap from the talk of the night, repeated itself to him, “We’re in for casualties.” He pondered it. Casualties—that meant wounded and dead; men mangled and men in the horrible agonies that follow the breathing of mustard gas.... Some of those boys he had seen a few hours ago down in the woods—only a few hundred feet away—were dead ... dead! He had been near to death—had sat for hours where death might reach out and touch him upon the shoulder.... So this was war ... this was how the thing was done!

It seemed so futile. What had been accomplished by this night’s slaughter? Neither side had advanced a foot; nothing had been won or lost.... But hundreds of lives had been wasted, hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of munitions had been expended—and why? For nothing that he could see, for no purpose except the desire of each side to make the other side uncomfortable.... That night could have been erased from the history of the war, and its absence would never have been noticed. Its activities had no more effect upon the course of the war than the barking of a dog would have had—and yet hundreds of bodies were tenantless, and hundreds of mothers would mourn their sons.

“War is scientific waste,” he said to himself, and repeated the phrase. He hated war because it was waste.... He wondered how many men had given their lives on just such futile nights as this during the years since August, 1914. Thousands upon thousands, doubtless.... How many of those girls he had seen in Paris had been deprived of husbands—of the men who would some day have been their husbands—in just such affairs? It was wrong—wrong.... War was a horrid disease, or was it the German nation which was a horrid disease? He could not think clearly.... He had thought little of mankind in the mass, but now he considered it, and his sympathy attached to it. It was futile to pity an individual, any individual, but one’s heart might bleed for mankind.... And most of all it might bleed for that portion of mankind whose duty it is to be the mothers of forthcoming generations—who were deprived by war of the right to fulfil that duty.

Then he found himself repeating over and over a phrase: “Little moments of happiness.... Little moments of happiness....” If men were to be wasted as they had been wasted this night, and if God could sit quiescent in His heaven, tolerating such wastage, then could that God deny to women their little moments of happiness as a partial, an infinitesimal, balm for the agony He permitted? Could He frown upon those little moments, or decree them to be evil?... He wondered how God stood on this question of morals. In a moment came an answer, but Kendall could not assert it to be a true answer. It was this: “God demands another generation of mankind.”