“At the very end of the letter he wrote, and they were doubtless the last words he ever penned, that he felt as if science herself in this mad world had also become cruel and malignant.
“I learned later that it was at this time that he had been consulted in the manufacture of asphyxiating gases, because the same gases are used in industry and he had made experiments to determine their poisonousness in different degrees of dilution. The original investigation with which he had been identified had been carried on that the fumes released in a certain industrial process might be prevented from injuring the men who worked in the factory. I know how hard it must have been for him to put knowledge acquired in his long efforts to protect normal living to the brutal use of killing men. It was literally a forced act of prostitution.”
As if to free her son’s memory from any charge of lack of patriotism, after a few moments she continued: “These modern men of science are red-blooded, devoted patriots, facing dangers of every sort in mines and factories and leading strenuous lives in spite of the popular conception of the pale anæmic scholar, but because they are equally interested in scientific experiments wherever they may be carried on, they inevitably cease to think of national boundaries in connection with their work. The international mind, which really does exist in spite of the fact that it is not yet equipped with adequate organs for international government, has become firmly established, at least among scientists. They have known the daily stimulus of a wide and free range of contacts. They have become interpenetrated with the human consciousness of fellow scientists all over the world.
“I hope that I am no whining coward—my son gave his life to his country as many another brave man has done, but I do envy the mothers whose grief is at least free from this fearful struggle of opposing ideals and traditions. My old father, who is filled with a solemn pride over his grandson’s gallant record and death, is most impatient with me. I heard him telling a friend the other day that my present state of mind was a pure demonstration of the folly of higher education for women; that it was preposterous and more than human flesh could bear to combine an intellectual question on the function of government with a mother’s sharp agony over the death of her child. He said he had always contended that women, at least those who bear children, had no business to consider questions of this sort, and that the good sense of his position was demonstrated now that such women were losing their children in war. It was enough for women to know that government waged war to protect their firesides and to preserve the nation from annihilation; at any rate, they should keep their minds free from silly attempts to reason it out. It’s all Bertha von Suttner’s book and other nonsense that the women are writing, he exploded at the end.”
Then as if she were following another line of reminiscence she began again. “My son left behind him a war bride, for he obeyed the admonition of the statesmen, as well as the commands of the military officers in those hurried heroic days. But the hasty wooing betrayed all his ideals of marriage quite as fighting men of other nations did violence to his notions of patriotism, and the recklessness of a destructive air raid outraged his long devotion to science. Of course his child will be a comfort to us and his poor little bride is filled with a solemn patriotism which never questions any aspect of the situation. When she comes to see us and I listen to the interminable talk she has with my father, I am grateful for the comfort they give each other, but when I hear them repeating those hideous stories of the conduct of the enemy which accumulate every month and upon which the war spirit continually feeds itself, I with difficulty refrain from crying out upon them that he whose courage and devotion they praise so loudly would never have permitted such talk of hatred and revenge in his presence; that he who lived in the regions of science and whose intrepid mind was bent upon the conquest of truth, must feel that he had died in vain did he know to what exaggerations and errors the so-called patriotism of his beloved country had stooped.
“I listen to them thinking that if I were either older or younger it would not be so hard for me, and I have an unreal impression that it would have been easier for my son if the war had occurred in the first flush of his adventurous youth. Eager as he had been to serve his country, he would not then have asked whether it could best be accomplished by losing his life in a scouting aëroplane or by dedicating a trained mind to industrial amelioration. He might then easily have preferred the first and he certainly would never have been tormented by doubts. But when he was thirty-one years old and had long known that he was steadily serving his country through careful researches, the results of which would both increase the nation’s productivity and protect its humblest citizens, he could not do otherwise than to judge and balance social values. I am, of course, proud of his gallant spirit, that did not for a moment regret his decision to die for his country, but I can make the sacrifice seem in character only when I place him back in his early youth.
“At times I feel immeasurably old, and in spite of my father’s contention that I am too intellectual, I am consciously dominated by one of those overwhelming impulses belonging to women as such, irrespective of their mental training, in their revolt against war. After all, why should one disregard such imperative instincts? We know perfectly well that the trend of a given period in history has been influenced by ‘habits of preference’ and by instinctive actions founded upon repeated and unrecorded experiences of an analogous kind; that desires to seek and desires to avoid are in themselves the very incalculable material by which the tendencies of an age are modified. The women in all the belligerent countries who feel so alike in regard to the horror and human waste of this war and yet refrain from speaking out, may be putting into jeopardy that power inherent in human affairs to right themselves through mankind’s instinctive shifting towards what the satisfactions recommend and the antagonisms repulse. The expression of such basic impulses in regard to human relationships may be most important in this moment of warfare which is itself a reversion to primitive methods of determining relations between man and man or nation and nation.
“Certainly the women in every country who are under a profound imperative to preserve human life, have a right to regard this maternal impulse as important now as was the compelling instinct evinced by primitive women long ago, when they made the first crude beginnings of society by refusing to share the vagrant life of man because they insisted upon a fixed abode in which they might cherish their children. Undoubtedly women were then told that the interests of the tribe, the diminishing food supply, the honor of the chieftain, demanded that they leave their particular caves and go out in the wind and weather without regard to the survival of their children. But at the present moment the very names of the tribes and of the honors and glories which they sought are forgotten, while the basic fact that the mothers held the lives of their children above all else, insisted upon staying where the children had a chance to live, and cultivated the earth for their food, laid the foundations of an ordered society.
“My son used to say that my scientific knowledge was most irregular, but profound experiences such as we are having in this war throw to the surface of one’s mind all sorts of opinions and half-formed conclusions. The care for conventions, for agreement with one’s friends, is burned away. One is concerned to express only ultimate conviction even though it may differ from all the rest of the world. This is true in spite of the knowledge that every word will be caught up in an atmosphere of excitement and of that nervous irritability which is always close to grief and to moments of high emotion.
“In the face of many distressing misunderstandings I am certain that if a minority of women in every country would clearly express their convictions they would find that they spoke not for themselves alone but for those men for whom the war has been a laceration,—‘an abdication of the spirit.’ Such women would doubtless formulate the scruples of certain soldiers whose ‘mouths are stopped by courage,’ men who months ago with closed eyes rushed to the defence of their countries.