“I saw her get two or three staggering blows, utterly unconscious, of course, on the boy’s part. One night I was there, and he was talking about American girls, the nurses and canteen workers. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘I didn’t know women could be so wonderful. You haven’t any idea of it until you see them working over there. They are not afraid of anything. You cannot tire them out. Maybe they will drop, but they won’t give in. Afraid? Why, the Germans bombed the front line hospital I was in, just after I got mine, and those girls never turned a hair, never looked up, never hustled, just went about laughing and cheering us up. They killed two of them—the murderers! And there wasn’t a woman there that did not stick. It’s great. It’s great to know that women can be like that.’
“You should have seen Mary’s face. It was tragic, and Tom was so unconscious. Then, her second blow came when she knew that he was going back. You see, she hadn’t an idea but what this would mean that that was the end of it. I think she had some notion that he would not want to go back; that getting hurt would kill this strange, unfamiliar thing that possessed him. Mary is like so many of us American women. Certainly I used to be so—afraid somebody will get hurt—afraid of suffering. Why, I cannot see that you can know much about life unless you suffer, and see suffering. Mary could not understand it. When Young Tom really was all right, which was very soon, he went out and enlisted—enlisted in the Marines.
“Mary went all to pieces. Of course Tom stood by the boy. A week after he was gone, she came out here one afternoon. ‘Nancy Cowder,’ she said, ‘do you think I could be used at the camp?’
“‘Oh, Mary,’ I told her, ‘if you only would go to the camp, we need you so.’ She looked at me in such a curious way.—‘Need me? What for?’ ‘The boys need you,’ I said. ‘We cannot do for them the hundredth part of what we ought. Boys like Young Tom need you. You should be doing here, Mary,’ I said, ‘just what other American women will be doing for Young Tom.’
“‘I think I must try,’ she said. ‘I have discovered I have lost my husband and I have lost my son. I don’t understand what they are talking about. I don’t understand what they feel. They have no interest in me and no interest in what I do. I don’t know that I can ever get them back. But I must have something to do.’
“Well, I sent her into the city for a course as a nurse’s orderly. She made a great discovery there. And, oh, the things she has learned since she has been working in camp. You can see from her face that it’s a new Mary. And Tom—Tom is the happiest man in the world, though Mary, I think, doesn’t know it, yet. The clouds have not all cleared off her mountain top, but she is there. War is a dreadful thing, a hideous, wicked thing, but there are some of us that have discovered the greatness of life through it.”
A new attitude toward the conduct of the War had come in Sabinsport, too, Dick remarked. When he had left, the town had been alive with disheartening rumors of failure, graft, inefficiency. The meetings of the War Board were given over to them. Captain Billy, than whom nobody in all of Sabinsport was more desirous that the country should make a record for itself in the war, was doing his utmost to prevent that end by decrying loudly everything that was attempted. Mr. John Commons was having the time of his life. Never had he been able to reduce so many people for so long a time to despairing doubt of all human institutions as at present. He could scoff, and not be contradicted, at the absurdity of an untrained, democratic body raising a great army. He could sneer, without answer, at the notion of the United States—soiled as its hands were with stealing from the Red Man, from lynching the negro, from gobbling up innocent Panama—setting out on a crusade “to make the world safe for democracy.” Mr. John Commons was certainly having a wonderful time, when Dick went away.
But all this had changed. To his amazement, he found that criticism of the Government, any doubt of a war enterprise, any reluctance to accept at full face value any request of the Government, was met in Sabinsport with a fierce declaration that it was all German propaganda.
“What has happened?” he asked Reuben Cowder. “What turned the town in this direction? When I went away, the easiest thing in the world was to get a hearing for a criticism, sympathy for a sneer. What has done it?”
“Well,” said Cowder, “Sabinsport discovered that it was being ‘worked.’ You know I have always suspected that that was true. You remember how we talked, back in 1915 at the time of Labor’s National Peace Council, how I told you that no such organization could thrive in Sabinsport when there was plenty of work without outside feeding. And you know how for a year or so after that went to pieces, pro-German talk was not very popular. After we went into the War it revived. The town was alive with distrust, and I was sure, just as I was about Labor’s Peace Party, that there was somebody feeding it. You take the negroes; why, they almost came to the point of revolt here against the war. Nancy had a cook out at the farm that came home from one Sunday afternoon meeting to tell her that she ’wan’t goin’ to save food any more; that all the United States wanted it for was to make slaves of the negroes again, that if Germany came over here, she would keep them free.’ There was a regular campaign here against the Liberty Loan and thrift stamps. And when the women took their registration for service, the idea was spread around among all the more ignorant people that the women were being registered in order to be taken to France to cook and work for the soldiers.