Perhaps one of the strongest factors in making Jewish parents fear the proscription of their sons was the fact that in many cases military service meant a complete breaking away from Jewish customs. The lads themselves had no pleasure in store for them in their association with Gentile comrades and officers who were never too considerate of their feelings. No small wonder then, that everything which could be done legitimately or illegitimately was done to free a son from military service. The rich and unscrupulous bribed the examining military physician and the poor sometimes tried a prolonged debauch to make the desired impression of physical unfitness.
There were two great virtues which my mother constantly preached and practiced; charity and contentment. The first kept her from speaking ill of her neighbours and the second saved her from unnecessary worry. Yet I knew that after my brother’s name was posted on the courthouse doors among the list of those to present themselves for physical examination, she lay awake many a night and I often saw traces of tears on her face. “As God wills,” was her characteristic expression, and it seemed to be the will of God that her son should be found fit to serve the Hungarian king in the seventy-third infantry regiment. It was a dreary day in our house, as if some one had died. We walked about on tiptoe and never raised our voices. Only the brother most concerned seemed cheerful or at least pretended to be. He was sworn in at the dirty jail, where the peasant lads were locked up, for fear they might get drunk before they came to that solemn ceremony. Then he returned home, awaiting the command to join his regiment.
When the summons finally came, it was a call to arms—to war. Austria had been apportioned the unruly Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina and, in her self-confident fashion, hoped to pacify its half-savage inhabitants by invading their territory with a brass band, regiments of soldiers and a superabundance of useless officers. The untamed Slavs, who spurned Moslem rule and had fought for freedom in their mountains, were not eager to exchange masters, so from behind the rocks they fired their crude blunderbusses and from safe ambush fell upon the trim Hapsburg soldiers. Regiment after regiment was sent, thousands and tens of thousands of soldiers were slain, the national debt leaped into hundreds of millions and the poor women all over that beautiful and unhappy country began making bandages and picking lint for the wounded. The regiment to which my brother belonged was ordered to the front, but before it left he obtained a two days’ furlough to visit his mother. It was the Jewish New Year’s day; one of the most solemn of all holy days. When early in the evening he came, I remember with what awe I handled his uniform, the dread I felt of his bayonet, fearing to touch it, and the general atmosphere of gloom which pervaded the house. Mother cried all day, we children wept with her and my brother walked up and down in his bright uniform, manfully trying to keep back his own tears. In the evening he had to leave us and it was as sad a leave-taking as I ever have witnessed.
A few days later, the postmaster himself came to our house with a message, which contained the sad news that my brother had been fatally wounded in the first engagement in which his regiment took part. That night my mother started for the far-away city. I begged to go with her. When she refused to let me, I threw myself in front of the horses, and when I was lifted from the ground I determined not to allow mother to face the misfortune alone. Unseen by any one, I ran through an orchard, across the creek to the highway, and when the carriage came, I jumped onto the protruding rear springs and made myself as comfortable as possible. Early in the morning, when the driver was changing horses, I was discovered, chilled to the bone and hungry; but happy because I was too far away from home to be sent back and could be with my mother in the great sorrow which awaited her.
She dragged herself from hospital to hospital, until our clothes were saturated by the odour of ether, our ears ringing from the groans of dying men, and our hearts heavy to the breaking point. Upon a bit of level soil, scarce in that stony country, soldiers were digging trenches, into which carts full of human bodies were literally dumped, and at each trench mother’s eyes searched for her first-born son. As they threw the last cartful of these torn and soiled temples of the spirit into a trench, her heroic strength gave way, for she saw my brother’s black hair matted from blood, and his handsome young face distorted by the pain he had suffered. It was hard to recognize him but she knew it was her son, because he wore the ring she herself had taken from the finger of her dead husband, and put there.
The experience of that day aged my mother and aged me, but it put a new sort of courage into me. I felt enraged by what I saw. I knew that a great wrong was being practiced against the children of men, a wrong which must be righted;—above all, I had seen Slav, Magyar, Jew and Gentile, one in death, so much alike that a Jewish mother scarcely knew her own child; my wise mother talked it all over with me. “Yes, my boy, we are made of the same clay and I believe we have the same spirit in us, no matter what our race or faith.” “Then, mother,” I said, “if we are all alike, why do we hate each other and kill each other?” But she was not wise enough to answer that question.
XII
THE PENALTY OF SCEPTICISM
OF the comforts and luxuries by which the American child seems to be surfeited, I knew few or none. Sweets I tasted only in the form of Sabbath cake, an occasional piece of loaf sugar, purloined from the pantry, or a sheet of sugar paper, a delicacy whose delights still linger in my memory. This confection was a by-product of the candy shop, and was the sticky substance left in a cornucopia, out of which the Bohemian candy-maker squeezed artistic decorations onto the cakes he made. These “Skarnitzel,” as they were called, were highly prized by the children; they were of many flavours, but all, whether vanilla, lemon or rose, smelled strongly of snuff tobacco, evidence of the artist’s bad habits.
Books and especially newspapers were also scarce, but the candy-maker was a great reader and a sceptic towards religion. After he had read his papers he used them in the manufacture of the afore-mentioned confection, so that “Skarnitzel” became a by-product, not only of fancy cakes, but also savoured of Bohemian literature. I was one of the best customers the candy-maker had, and, while frankly confessing that I licked the sweets from the paper with great gusto and skill, I soon learned to appreciate the literature which remained. Both from the sanitary and the mental standpoint this confection was unwholesome. One winter, after disposing of the covering sweets, I read fragments from the works of Thomas Paine, and another season I reached the bitterest parts of one of Ingersoll’s savage attacks upon the Bible. I suppose I did not understand what I read, but it fitted into my rebellious mood and I soon began to make propaganda for my unbelief. When the candy-maker discovered that he had a disciple, he took pains to fill the gaps which remained in my mind, after reading the philosophy of scepticism in so fragmentary a way.
For hours I would sit in his bake shop and while he was decorating cakes or making gorgeously coloured stick candy, he led me into the outskirts of the scientific view of creation, in a crude but, to me, satisfactory manner. The world was self-created, there was no God, no Adam, no Eve, no flood, no patriarchs and no revelation on Sinai. Moses was a shrewd leader who used Egyptian magic to impress the barbaric Israelites. The candy-maker was particularly severe with the heroes of the New Testament, and no less so with Jesus Himself. I recall just one sentence of his argument against the divinity of the Master. “If He was a God, why did He let them crucify Him? Why did He not come down from the cross and kill His enemies?” Of course, I did not know how old this argument was until I read the New Testament for myself. At school during the recess I gathered my classmates, who were all my seniors (for I made two and three grades each year), and repeated to them what I had heard, amplifying it not a little.