The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

Joan of Arc, they are calling you, calling you.”

It was but the beginning. It had put the waiting boys in the mood for song, and the appealing refrain had scarcely died away when the tension was broken by a merry voice starting, “Where do we go from here, Boys? Where do we go from here?” From gay they swung to grave, and then back to gay. “The Star Spangled Banner” brought everybody to their feet. “I don’t want to get well, I don’t want to get well,” set everybody to laughing. Then came “Christmas Night” and then—“Home, Sweet Home.” It was almost too much for the singers themselves, for more than one lad on the stage dropped his head, unable to go on. As the song rose, so sweet, and familiar, so ladened with memories, the audience sat with quivering faces and eyes grown wet. If it had not been for the emotion which had seized it, it would have been sooner conscious that there was an unusual accompaniment to the words, a rhythmical beating, which grew louder and louder until it became a steady tramp. It had grown so near that it would have broken the spell which held the house, if suddenly a bugle had not sent every man on the stage to his feet.

They fell in line, and just as the outside tramp came too distinct to be mistaken, an order, “Forward, March,” came quick and sharp. They filed out and behind them came others, an interminable stream, across the stage, only to reappear, mounting upward along the road in the background. And as they started upward, at the right and top of the height, a great luminous American flag was suddenly flung out. It waved and waved as if in salute to the mounting men. They went up, up. Their young faces, turned to their banner, wore looks of such resolve, such exultation, that the hearts of the men and women watching, breathless below, swelled with pride and hope.

The host came on, wave after wave; the orchestra played on the wrought up audience as on a viol. They broke into cheers, dropped into silence, sobbed, then cheered and cheered and cheered; and when the light gradually faded, the curtain slowly dropped, the music little by little subsided; they sat unstrung, listening to the tramping grow dimmer and dimmer until it was lost in the sounds of the town.

It was a new Sabinsport that went home that night. Whatever might happen, never again would she doubt, or close her heart to the soldier. She was his. The General, waiting in his box for Dick, said as he grasped his hand, “That’s settled, Ingraham. We’ll have no more trouble with this town.”

But if Sabinsport had been chastened and her heart opened, she still had to grope her way into the organized service that alone could restore her hurt pride and give her some realizing sense of being a part of the great undertaking; and it was a hard moment for that.

In all the war there was not a month more difficult than January of 1918. The camp and the town were in the clutch of the most cruel weather that part of the world had ever seen. Again and again in these weeks, the miles of switches and sidings in the valley were blocked with long trains of cars filled with coal, with every conceivable kind of freight for the camp, as well as with materials needed for the shipyards and overseas. Although every effort was made to keep tracks clear for troop trains, every now and then, one filled with tired and shivering men would be held up. They sang—oh, yes, they always sang; but you could not go among them and not know that the singing often hid frightened and homesick hearts.

The town itself, surrounded as she was by mines underlaid with coal, was suffering. Sabinsport was startled to find some of her own families in actual danger of death by freezing. In a town which all its life had been accustomed to wait until the last minute and then call up and ask that a load of coal be delivered at once, and to get it as it would get its roast from the butcher’s, it was natural that many prosperous families were low in fuel supplies.

It was hard for the man of influence then not to throw aside all sense of responsibility for anybody but his family. Queer stories of the tricks that men played in order to get coal, headed for their neighbors, were told. And as for the poor, they waited in long lines, with pails and scuttles, to get their little lot, and many a time went home without it.

Unreasonably enough, storm and snow classed themselves in Sabinsport’s mind as part of the war, and her uneasiness grew. Was it all to be like this—failure, sorrow, shame, suffering? Was she never to see anything orderly, sufficient, successful? Was there nothing in war that was brave, glorious and stirring? Sabinsport was seeing only the fringe of the great undertaking, and it looked ragged enough in the early part of 1918.