The two or three pacifists in the Woman’s Club seized on the Reverend Pepper’s idea with avidity. It was so simple, so sure—stop making munitions everywhere, and war would have to stop. But the Woman’s Club, although in the main sympathetic, handled the matter gingerly. In the first place, the Rev. Mr. Pepper had always been “visionary,” so the men said. Then, too, they had the relief work of the town to consider. Stop munition making, close the wire mill, and what were the workmen to do? It wasn’t right. Somebody would make munitions, why not Sabinsport? Of course, if the League did succeed and other towns went in, they would be for it; but they thought they better wait. In this policy of caution, it is useless to deny that there was an element of self-interest. The husbands of not a few of the ladies had stock in the wire mill and in the works “around the Point.”
The hottest opposition that Ralph met in his anti-munition campaign was from the War Board, as he and Dick had come to call it. This War Board had evolved from a group which for years had met regularly after supper in the men’s lounging room of the Paradise Hotel. Both Ralph and Dick considered it far and away the most entertaining center of public opinion in the town, for it offered a mixture of shrewdness and misinformation, of sense and cynicism, which were as illuminating as they were diverting—a mixture which spread, diluted and disintegrated, of course, into every nook and cranny of the town.
The War Board was made up of socially inclined guests and a group of citizens whose number varied with the character, the importance and the heat of public questions. Dick, who, since he first arrived in the town, had taken his dinners at the Paradise, found that the war was having the same drawing power as the choice of a mayor, a governor, or a president. Almost every night more or less men dropped in to discuss the progress of the campaigns and wrangle over the problems raised for this country.
A member of the War Board that never missed an evening was Captain William Blackman, as he appeared on the roster of Civil War veterans; “Cap” or “Captain Billy” as he was known at the Paradise—“Captain If” as he came to be known a long time before we went into the war.
Captain Billy was seventy-two years old. He walked with a limp, the result of a wound received two days before the evacuation of Petersburg on April 2, 1865. His comfortable income was derived not from a pension which he had always spurned—he had given his services—but from a wholesale grocery business established in Sabinsport after a long and plucky struggle and on which he still kept a vigilant eye. Neither limp nor grocery had ever taken from Captain Billy’s military air or dimmed his interest in the battles of the Potomac, in many of which he had taken part.
Captain Billy frequented the Paradise pretty regularly at election time, for he was a Republican of the adamantine sort and felt it his duty to use every chance to impress on people the unfathomable folly of allowing a Democrat to hold any sort of office. But it was when there was a war anywhere on the earth that Captain Billy never missed a night. He never had any doubt about which side he was on, about the character and ability of generals or what they ought to do. He never for an instant hesitated over Belgium’s case, or doubted the guilt of Germany. Much as he hated England—Civil War experience on top of a revolutionary inheritance—he defended loudly her going in, thought it the decentest thing in her history. It took Captain Billy at least three months to grasp the idea that we should have taken a hand at the start, but in this he was in no way behind the most eminent advocates of that theory. Like all of them at the start he accepted with sound instinct the doctrine of neutrality. Before Christmas, however, Captain Billy was hard at the Administration. “If we had done our duty in the beginning,” was his regular introduction to all arguments—hence the name which was soon fixed on him of “Captain If.”
Mr. Jo Commons was as steady an attendant of the War Board as Uncle Billy, and in every way his antithesis. He had for years been the leading cynic and scoffer of Sabinsport. You could depend upon him to find the weak spot in anybody’s argument, the hypocrisy in any generous action. According to Mr. Jo Commons there was no such thing as sound or noble sentiment. All human thought and feeling he held to be worm-eaten by self-interest, and he spent his leisure, of which he had much, for he was a bachelor with a law practice which he had studiously kept on a leisure basis, in unearthing reasons for mistrusting the undertakings of his fellowmen. The war gave him a wonderful chance. His was the first voice raised in Sabinsport in defense of the invasion of Belgium. His defense of Germany and his contempt for England were Shavian in their skill.
If Captain Billy contributed certainty, idealism and emotion to the Board, and Mr. Jo Commons doubt, realism and cynicism, a traveling salesman, Brutus Knox by name, kept it in suspicion and gossip. Brutus was a stout, jolly, clean-shaven, immaculate seller of “notions and machinery,” and under this elastic head he handled a motley lot of stuff in a district where the Paradise was the most comfortable hotel; and it was his habit to “make it” for Sundays if possible.
Brutus was a master-hand at gossip. He liked it all, and told it all—gay and sad, true and false, sacred and obscene. He was always welcome at the Paradise, but never more so than since the war began, for he brought back weekly from Pullman smoking rooms, hotel lobbies and business lunches a bag of “inside information” which kept the War Board sitting until midnight and sent it home swollen with importance.
The War Board prided itself on being neutral—this in spite of the fact that nearly every one that attended had the most definite opinions about all parties in the conflict and that no one hesitated to express them with picturesque, often profane, violence. Almost to a man the War Board looked on the invasion of Belgium as rotten business. King Albert became its first hero. His picture—a clear and beautiful print from an illustrated Sunday supplement—was pinned up the third week of August. It came down only once—to be framed, and it was to be noted that on all holidays “Albert,” as they called him, always had a wreath. The general verdict was that he was “American”—“looks like one”—“acts like one”—“been over here”—“no effete king about him.” After the Marne, Joffre joined Albert on the lobby wall, and the two of them hung there alone—for nearly two years.