“I’ll look after it,” said Dick, promptly. “Go as soon as you please,” and John A. Papalogos, radiant with relief, had departed twenty-four hours later, leaving a fruit store on Dick’s hands—a fruit store with a primitive set of accounts in the drawer and written instructions to close it out and give the proceeds to the Boys’ Club in case of his known death.
“The war certainly is getting its hands on you, all right,” said Ralph when Dick told him of his new care. “You needn’t worry about your bit.” But Dick only gulped.
There were others from Sabinsport gone overseas—men hardly known to the town, and yet their going was swelling constantly the town’s interest, knowledge, sense of connection—these were men from mines, factories, mills, men who picked up and left without even a notice in the Argus—to join the Canadians—the English, the Foreign Legion. They were of many nations—and months later—long after their going had been forgotten save by a few, word sometimes came from them by more or less accident to their friends—“Lost a leg at Vimy”; “Decorated at Verdun”; “Killed at Messine Ridge.” Their number was so considerable that it finally led Ralph to investigate, and Sabinsport was deeply stirred to read one night the names of fifty men whom the European war had taken—twenty-five were foreigners, but twenty-five were Americans.
“It’s getting us,” Ralph said, again and again. “It’s getting us.” And it was getting them. Dick, who at times watched almost breathless with desire that Sabinsport should understand, and who again and again groaned, “God! how slow she is to see it,” began to take heart. So deeply was the town engaged in thought and feeling that not even the coming of a war of her own detached her interest. Indeed, it was a little difficult for her to take the trouble with Mexico very seriously, not being able to stretch her imagination to the point where Mexico could be anything more serious to the United States than a nuisance. Yet it did make a difference in things. When the call came in June a hundred men and boys suddenly appeared in khaki on the streets, making for the rendezvous. They came from the towns and surrounding country, and passed through the town so quietly and swiftly that Sabinsport gasped with amazement. She had not realized that she and the neighborhood had soldiers.
It disturbed things some. A thriving little grocery closed its doors because the young proprietor was among the called. His wife with her baby went home to her father and mother. It was hard; but all she said was, “It’s war.” Dick started when they repeated the incident to him. “That was what returning Americans never ceased to marvel at in French and Belgian women—their quiet answer to every hardship, every sorrow—‘C’est la guerre.’” That was what had amazed Patsy at Namur. And here was a commonplace little woman in this land, which the returning Americans always insisted was utterly lost in selfishness and cowardice, giving up her home and all her dawning hopes, with the same simple, “It’s war.”
Was war one of the universal facts accepted by simple people, to whom life is all reality and almost nothing of speculation and theory? Was it something they knew by instinct to be one of the inevitable tragedies of human existence, like sickness and death, storms and pests? Did all natural people take war this way, neither revolting nor lamenting? Could it be that Americans, trained to despise and hate war as a lower form of energy, an appeal only for those people who were ruled by tyrants and forbidden to express their will, to use their brains and self-control in finding peaceful conclusions for all misunderstandings—could it be that they, too, accepted it with this simple, “It is war”?
If the Great War came to the country, as Dick believed it must soon, would Sabinsport take it as she was taking the Border Trouble—send her men, readjust her affairs, go on with her daily duties? He wondered, but he was comforted; and as he watched the way Sabinsport took the successive steps of the Mexican difficulty, he gathered more and more hope. She watched every day’s events, discussed, criticized, condemned, approved. She knew as much of the essentials as the metropolis, though, as he realized, the metropolis was loudly proclaiming that Sabinsport did not even know there was a war either with Mexico or in Europe; that she was simply a sample of all of the United States outside of a portion of the Atlantic Coast, lost in money-making and comfort-seeking.
Dick said little, but more and more he became convinced that Sabinsport was taking the thing quite as seriously, if less noisily, than that portion of the Atlantic Coast that felt that all loyalty and understanding was centered in itself. She had her losses. The little grocer never came back—shot in a riot. Two farmers’ boys died of fever, and Sabinsport buried them in pride and sorrow. “She takes it so straight,” he thought. “I wonder if it will be like this when the great thing comes.”
The great thing was coming, he felt, and he felt that Sabinsport vaguely knew it—was only waiting to be sure. To him it all depended on Sabinsport whether we went into the war—not on the Administration, not on Congress, not on the angry, indignant voices that hurled cries of scorn at her. We would go in when Sabinsport was sure! Sure of what? When she was sure that we could no longer do business with Germany.