“Yes, not only the suffering that comes from needless sacrifice, but the unending suffering that comes from those who must go on living. You know one thing. I know the great mass; the suffering of those who starve and suffocate.”
“You speak of the individual. I speak of the bigger thing,—the race.” A little color came into her face as she grew animated with her theme. “If a million men die to-day or to-morrow, what difference does that make to the nation, any more than the death of a single sparrow?”
“I can hardly believe it is you that says such a thing!” he said, astounded.
“Perhaps you don’t understand me. It is not how a million men die but how they live that is important.”
“You are arguing with an individualist,” said Brinsmade.
“The right to live your life as you wish is to me a far more important thing than whether half the world shall speak English or German,” said Magnus warmly. “I am looking from the bottom up. I know what they think who are striving,—not how best to enjoy life, but how to live. I know what the workers feel about such things.”
“If that is true in America,” she said, seeking to moderate the antagonism which his views aroused in her, “it is because the peasants and the workers who have emigrated are—how do you say?—déracinés; they have been uprooted; they have not yet fastened to your land; they do not love it more than they do themselves. What you say is not true of our French people. If you had seen our mobilization, you would have understood what it is,—the love of country.”
“I saw it in the city,” I said, breaking in, “and it is a memory I shall never forget.”
“But you should have seen it in the country! The quietness and the stillness of it all—only the tocsin ringing in the church towers, ringing all the afternoon. I saw it. I saw the women running to join the men in the fields; to be together, the first thought. And I can see the men leaving their reaping, sending back the women to make ready their uniforms while they went, silently—always silently—to register at the mairies. And when they went off, that night, each woman brought down something from the store of the stockings,—a hundred, two hundred francs. Not a woman rebelled. They put out flower pots on the window sills and garlands of flowers on the great locomotives; and I myself saw a little child writing in chalk on the cars, ‘J’aime la France!’ There have been other moments—moments of doubt and weakness—but it is good to have seen that!” She stopped, a little embarrassed at having been carried away by her own enthusiasm. Then, she said more quietly: “That is how the people of France, the people you speak of, felt.”