And it was the town’s introduction to the Balkan question. Up to now, Serbia had scarcely been included in the field of war. There was a Western front and an Eastern for them, but that was all. Serbia’s tragic fate, brought home to them as it was by Nancy Cowder’s escape, set them to asking what it meant. Why should Austria set out to annihilate a people? Why, even Belgium’s fate, hard as it had been, did not compare in cruelty with this. She meant to exterminate—nothing else. How could such things be? Should such things be? And if not, what should Sabinsport do about it?
The War Board was terribly stirred over the matter, and Captain Billy did not hesitate to condemn the Allies bitterly for not having sent aid in time to prevent the disaster. “If we’d gone into this war when we ought to,” he declared loudly, “this thing never would have happened. Our boys would have gotten around there in time.” And there was a constantly increasing number of people who agreed with him.
Mr. John Commons, with his usual Shavian perversity, sneered at the indignation of the body, and he spent an entire evening reviewing the history of the Balkans, pointing out with real enjoyment the inconsistencies, violated agreements, murders and cruelties with which the states charge one another. He claimed he could match every Bulgar atrocity with a Serbian, and quoted a well-known modern commission to prove his point. They were a group of lawless states, born and brought up to cut one another’s throats—and that a peaceful group of American citizens should lash themselves into fighting mood because one of the cut-throats was getting the worst of it, was only another of the unspeakable absurdities of this war. And why were they so stirred up? They hadn’t even remembered Serbia was in the war until this story about Nancy Cowder came out. Fool thing for any woman to do—just another example of the mania for notoriety that had seized women in these times. He supposed Sabinsport would insist on making a lion of her when she came back. He hoped she’d have sense enough to have nothing to do with the people that had ignored her so long; that she’d see their interest in Serbia was nothing in the world but vanity—their desire to flatter themselves they knew somebody who had been in the thick of things. Absurd, he called it—enough to make the gods laugh.
The members of the War Board went home much perturbed after this long harangue, for they were considerably muddled in their minds. Was their sudden interest and sympathy ridiculous? Dick was much interested to find how the thoughtful ones figured it out. Of course Captain Billy didn’t need to figure it out. Captain Billy instinctively and promptly took his position on any question which arrested his attention. He never had to think—he knew. To him all this “back history” had nothing to do with the case. Germany and Austria were the enemy. Serbia was on the side of the Allies. That was all that was necessary for him to know. Neither the War Board nor the town was so sure. In many a quarter of the town Dick ran on efforts to understand what Europe herself has so long and so fatally failed to understand. The boys in his club began to ask for books on the Balkans. It was no uncommon thing to find the butcher or the grocer catechizing Czech or Serb or Greek, getting their point of view. And the stories they heard were repeated. Nikola Petrovitch became one of the most popular men in town. The radical Rev. Mr. Pepper gave a series of Sunday night talks on the submerged Balkan States, boldly declaring for a United States of Europe, which, if not a new idea to statesmen and journalists, certainly was new, and not very intelligible to his congregation, most of whom thought he was going rather far afield for something to talk about. And yet they listened, tried to understand, and many of them discussed the idea—studied their maps—looked up forgotten histories.
It was leaven—working leaven; and slowly there rose out of it the conviction in Sabinsport that something was very wrong indeed in Southwestern Europe, and that the powerful states of those parts, instead of trying to right the wrongs by just agreements, faithfully observed, were, and long had been, intent on keeping the hot-headed little states in turmoil and in suspicion, watching their chance for a plausible excuse to pounce on them one by one and absorb them. Certainly this was as near the truth as you could get in regard to Serbia and Austria; and it ought to be stopped. There were few, if any, in Sabinsport yet, however, that felt that our responsibility reached that part of the world. To rescue France and avenge Belgium might come to be our business—was our business, certain ones felt more and more strongly. But the Balkans? No, that was not for us.
CHAPTER VI
Sabinsport took the fate of Serbia more to heart because just before Nikola came home in March of 1916, with his thrilling personal tales, Verdun had knocked her growing hardness and indifference toward the war to splinters. That sudden fierce flood, breaking at a point in the long line of which she had never heard, threatening as it did to engulf the defenders and sweep over Paris, marked an epoch in Sabinsport’s war history. Not since the invasion of Belgium had feeling run as high as now. There was a keen personal anxiety lest her chosen side should be beaten, for the attack revealed to Sabinsport that she had a chosen side, that she cared—cared for the Allies; and, above all, cared for France.
Verdun broke a crust that had formed over the town; a curious crust which had grown thicker and thicker through the winter of 1915-16, justifying much of Ralph’s bitterness and filling Dick with increasing dread. Half of this was reluctance to going into war—not fear, mind you, not at all. There was no fear in Sabinsport’s heart of anything that she made up her mind she must do, but there was a strong feeling that she ought not to have to go into this war, that it was not her business, that there ought to be a way out. It was clinging to this reluctance through a growing consciousness that the things which she stood for were being attacked, that hardened her. She did not see clearly yet, it is true, that it was her ideas of life that were at stake on the earth; but she every day more strongly suspected that was the case, and she was reluctant to admit it.
An element in the crust, and a hard one, was her desire not to be disturbed in her prosperity. She was making money. The whole face of Sabinsport had been changed in the year and a half since the war began. The great wire mill had trebled its plant and was running in three shifts, day and night. The old linoleum factory around the Point had never stopped growing. There were 2,000 girls there now, the pick of Sabinsport and all the country round. When you can make twenty to forty dollars a week, for eight hours’ work, as these girls were doing, you can get pretty nearly any wage-earning woman that you want, so Sabinsport had discovered. Teachers had left the schools throughout the county, stenographers had left their desks, clerks had left the counters, and the farmers’ daughters for miles around had flocked into the factory. This meant business for Sabinsport. Months before her housing capacity had outrun the demand. The onrush of strange men and women had raised a score of difficult and delicate problems; but it all meant money. Never had the shops of Sabinsport made so much, never had they charged so much. And this prosperity had made a new class in Sabinsport, a new kind of rich—the munition rich they called them. They succeeded the class whose fortunes had been made in the factories, as that class had succeeded one whose fortunes came from franchises; immediately back of which lay those made rich by coal, the successors of the original land rich. And, like each successive new rich class, they brought into the town an element of vulgarity which their predecessors had been gradually living down, the kind of hard and reckless vulgarity which the sudden possession of money almost invariably causes. There were not a few in Sabinsport whose families had outlived all this unpleasant phase of wealth, who felt and talked very hardly of this class. There was no question that they helped in the forming of the crust over Sabinsport’s soul.
There was still another element, which had much to do, I am convinced, with a certain tenaciousness in the crust, and that was the conviction that Germany was bound to win; and all they wanted, since this was so, was to see it over—stopped—get the sound of it out of their ears, the stench of it out of their nostrils.