The old soldier looked around the room and his glance rested appealingly on the face of the sad-eyed man who had borne the sufferings and agonies of many men.
“Give that picture to the boy who brought me to you—let him have the book also. The flag you must wrap me in; let it be my shroud. My discharge I want buried with me and let them fire a salute over my grave; for it will be a soldier’s grave.”
Coming home the next day at noon, I heard the pious men of our community repeating verses spoken at the bedside of the dying. It was a weird lamentation that went up from those hoarse-throated men, and in the tumult of voices affirming faith in the God of Israel, “Uncle Joe’s” soul took its flight.
To induce the pious men, whose consent was necessary, to wrap his body in the Stars and Stripes, was difficult, but was finally accomplished through my mother’s importunity. The firing of the salute was out of the question, for no Jew owned a gun, and it would be sacrilege to hire a Gentile to use one.
The solemn procession came to the cemetery with its burden and they buried him after the manner of the Jews. But hardly had the last man left the grave when three shots were fired, startling young and old alike.
Istvan, the Hungarian shepherd, once a soldier himself, had yielded to my entreaties and paid this last tribute to a warrior.
Istvan was fined and imprisoned for shooting within the limits of the cemetery; I too was punished, and the common suffering created fellowship between us. Over and over again, while he was watching his sheep, I told him the story of the life and death of Abraham Lincoln.
“Too bad,” he would say, “that he had a Jewish name. Too bad that his name was Abraham.”
VII
THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER
NO man of another race than my own spoke kindly to me after I had developed some sense of race consciousness. “Little Jew” was the mildest term in which I was addressed, and it ranged to the cruel “Christ-Killer”—a rather questionable term to apply to a seven-year-old lad, who could not have looked very ferocious, with his blue eyes and his shock of curly blond hair. I knew I was guiltless of the last appellation, even if I understood its meaning, which I doubt; but I was quite sure I was a little Jew and every time I was called that, it hurt, as if I were smitten by a lash. I cannot help wincing yet when the word Jew is applied to me; I suppose it hurt because it was meant to. It is the mental attitude of the other man which makes me sensitive, rather than the name itself, which was one to conjure with through many a Golden Age.