During the first awful weeks of silence and uncertainty, when every morning brought news of a fresh disaster, when no letters came from the army and no private messages could reach it—during those weeks, while Campton, like other fathers, was without news of his son, the war had been to him simply a huge featureless mass crushing him earthward, blinding him, letting him neither think nor move nor breathe.
But at last he had got permission to go to Chalons, whither Fortin, who chanced to have begun his career as a surgeon, had been hastily transferred. The physician, called from his incessant labours in a roughly-improvised operating-room, to which Campton was led between rows of stretchers laden with livid blood-splashed men, had said kindly, but with a shade of impatience, that he had not forgotten, had done what he could; that George’s health did not warrant his being discharged from the army, but that he was temporarily on a staff-job at the rear, and would probably be kept there if such and such influences were brought to bear. Then, calling for hot water and fresh towels, the surgeon vanished and Campton made his way back with lowered eyes between the stretchers.
The “influences” in question were brought to bear—not without Anderson Brant’s assistance—and now that George was fairly certain to be kept at clerical work a good many miles from the danger-zone Campton felt less like an ant under a landslide, and was able for the first time to think of the war as he might have thought of any other war: objectively, intellectually, almost dispassionately, as of history in the making.
It was not that he had any doubt as to the rights and wrongs of the case. The painfully preserved equilibrium of the neutrals made a pitiful show now that the monstrous facts of the first weeks were known: Germany’s diplomatic perfidy, her savagery in the field, her premeditated and systematized terrorizing of the civil populations. Nothing could efface what had been done in Belgium and Luxembourg, the burning of Louvain, the bombardment of Rheims. These successive outrages had roused in Campton the same incredulous wrath as in the rest of mankind; but being of a speculative mind—and fairly sure now that George would never lie in the mud and snow with the others—he had begun to consider the landslide in its universal relations, as well as in its effects on his private ant-heap.
His son’s situation, however, was still his central thought. That this lad, who was meant to have been born three thousand miles away in his own safe warless country, and who was regarded by the government of that country as having been born there, as subject to her laws and entitled to her protection—that this lad, by the most idiotic of blunders, a blunder perpetrated before he was born, should have been dragged into a conflict in which he was totally unconcerned, should become temporarily and arbitrarily the subject of a foreign state, exposed to whatever catastrophes that state might draw upon itself, this fact still seemed to Campton as unjust as when it first dawned on him that his boy’s very life might hang on some tortuous secret negotiation between the cabinets of Europe.
He still refused to admit that France had any claim on George, any right to his time, to his suffering or to his life. He had argued it out a hundred times with Adele Anthony. “You say Julia and I were to blame for not going home before the boy was born—and God knows I agree with you! But suppose we’d meant to go? Suppose we’d made every arrangement, taken every precaution, as my parents did in my own case, got to Havre or Cherbourg, say, and been told the steamer had broken her screw—or been prevented ourselves, at the last moment, by illness or accident, or any sudden grab of the Hand of God? You’ll admit we shouldn’t have been to blame for that; yet the law would have recognized no difference. George would still have found himself a French soldier on the second of last August because, by the same kind of unlucky accident, he and I were born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And I say that’s enough to prove it’s an iniquitous law, a travesty of justice. Nobody’s going to convince me that, because a steamer may happen to break a phlange of her screw at the wrong time, or a poor woman be frightened by a thunderstorm, France has the right to force an American boy to go and rot in the trenches.”
“In the trenches—is George in the trenches?” Adele Anthony asked, raising her pale eyebrows.
“No.” Campton thundered, his fist crashing down among her tea things; “and all your word-juggling isn’t going to convince me that he ought to be there.” He paused and stared furiously about the little ladylike drawing-room into which Miss Anthony’s sharp angles were so incongruously squeezed. She made no answer, and he went on: “George looks at the thing exactly as I do.”
“Has he told you so?” Miss Anthony enquired, rescuing his teacup and putting sugar into her own.
“He has told me nothing to the contrary. You don’t seem to be aware that military correspondence is censored, and that a soldier can’t always blurt out everything he thinks.”