The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

But all that Nancy could say at the start had no effect upon Sabinsport. Nothing in her experience could give her an inkling of what it would mean to have a camp of 50,000 men twenty-five miles away. The distance was prohibitive. What would they have to do with Sabinsport, with the City within five miles? It was the City’s business to take care of the camp, not hers.

It was November before Sabinsport began to feel any responsibility about the camp. By that time, the boys had discovered the town. Naturally, it was the City so near them that had drawn them first, and that continued to draw them in the largest numbers. And it was the City which from the start had accepted the responsibility of guarding the boys who came to her. The City had formed great committees of men and women. She had passed ordinances, she had opened canteens. Hundreds of her homes were open to the boys, her clubs and churches and halls regularly on the Wednesdays and Saturdays when they were off. The City did wonderfully well from the start, and the commanding officer had applauded the coöperation that she gave him.

In all this activity, Sabinsport, twenty-five miles away, had not been asked to help. It was natural enough. The City always had ignored Sabinsport. To be sure, she was a nice little country town and had a quaint hotel, with a wonderful cook; the best place in the country round to motor out for supper. Sabinsport had always resented this attitude. She was the older, she had never quite gotten over feeling that she should have been the City; she who was there so many years before, and who was responsible for the discovery and first development of this wealth which now the City handled and from which she so wonderfully profited. That is, Sabinsport was jealous of the City, her patronage, the fact that she was never taken in. It was partly this that made her unresponsive to all the pressure that Dick and Nancy brought upon her in the early days of the camp, to organize, to look after the soldiery that they felt inevitably would seek the town. Always the same answer came back: “Let the City look after them. She has not asked us to help. It’s her business.”

But, little by little, she discovered that, although she might make no overtures to the camp, the camp had found her out and was making good use of all she had to offer in the way of pleasure and freedom. The boys had discovered two things in Sabinsport, the two that Nancy had predicted: that she had factories full of attractive girls and that her saloons were wide open. The better sort had discovered the Paradise and High Town.

The consequence of Sabinsport’s blindness and her refusal to accept responsibility heaped up every day—the girl question, as they called it. There were sudden marriages which shocked and distressed her. There were no marriages, that horrified her even more. A new type of women began to appear in the streets. And again and again on Saturday afternoons soldiers were taken back to camp, but not to barracks—to the guard house. Irritation and disgust with the camp grew in the town, and then, late in November, sickness began. It ran rampant through the camp, still insufficiently equipped with hospitals and doctors and nurses to handle anything like an epidemic. Heartbreaking tales of deaths, from lack of care, it was charged, filled the town. Nancy who, from the opening of the camp, had given practically all of her time to whatever service she could put her hands to, and who by her common sense, her skill, her sweetness, had won completely officers, doctors, and nurses, now gave herself up to regular nursing, coming back only once a week for a half-day’s rest—on Monday afternoon always, though nobody at the time thought about that.

Dick practically spent his days and nights in service. He, too, had from the start been received by officers and doctors as one of those rare civilians who can be allowed the freedom of a camp and really help, not hinder, its work.

But Sabinsport was not rallying to the efforts of Nancy and Dick. The town was horrified at the things that she saw going on. She bitterly blamed the commanding officer, the War Department, the Government. She resented the intimations that she had had from both the authorities in the City and in the camp that her failure to deal resolutely with her saloons and with the strange women who were finding shelter within her limits, was a menace to the boys. Matters were not at all helped by the kind of agitation which had begun in the town, with the hope of controlling the situation. The center of this agitation was Mrs. Susan Katcham, president of an old-time temperance organization—a good, aggressive, tactless woman, whose main effect upon Sabinsport had always been to steel even the sober to the support of the saloon.

Mrs. Katcham now had no need to argue about the disastrous effects of the open saloon. Every day was demonstrating it, to the disgust and shame of the town. There was just one man everybody knew that could put a stop to this thing, and that was Jake Mulligan, for Jake controlled the police, and Jake owned half or two-thirds of the property in Sabinsport on which liquor was sold. Mrs. Katcham went for him openly and viciously, hammer and tongs; and all she did was to make him take a terrible oath that he would not budge an inch in the matter; that it was the business of the camp to keep its soldiers at home, and not his to run Sunday schools for the protection of grown men.

The tragic thing to Dick was that he saw growing in Sabinsport out of this clash, an increasing distaste for a soldier.

“Never, never,” he said, “would the heart of Sabinsport be reached until this was blotted out.” But what was to be done. He took it to the commanding officer himself, and between them they laid out a plan for capturing Sabinsport’s heart.