A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

Of late years we have had in the United States such a deluge of talk about “internationalism” that our young men had almost reached the point of being ashamed to feel patriotism. An insidious propaganda of pacifism, beginning in elementary schools all over the country, had undermined the old American pride in the flag. The children went through the motions of saluting the flag, true, but in too many schoolrooms the poisonous suggestion was given them that it was much nobler to love all flags and all countries equally with their own.

A young Jewish soldier from the east side of New York told me that, when he learned that he had been drafted, he actually contemplated suicide. It seemed to him a crime for him to become a soldier. His parents had fled from Russia to escape death at the hands of soldiers, but that was not why he was opposed to all war. It was because in his school, and afterward in the city college, he had imbibed what is miscalled internationalism.

“I went to training camp because I was afraid to resist,” said this young man. “I stayed and I worked hard because I liked it, liked my officers, and because, being assigned to the aviation service as a ground man, I knew I would not be obliged to kill Germans. I still believed that it was my duty to be international at heart.”

And then he told me how the conviction came to him that men can not love all countries unless they love their own first and best. “You see that work gang over there,” he said. “Those fellows are Russians. They are part of the Russian division that was sent to fight in France two or three years ago. You remember what a fine impression they made then. Well, after the revolution in Russia, or rather after the Bolshevist soldiers began running away from the fight, murdering their officers and clamoring for a separate peace, there was the question what to do with the Russian regiments in France.

“Some of the Russians it was impossible to trust. Some, at least, I don’t know how many, were bitten with the German propaganda. They did what they could to demoralize the French soldiers. Nobody knew but that they might betray the allies in the middle of a battle. The upshot of the whole thing was that they sent the Russian troops back from the front, and now they work in labor gangs. They don’t want to go back to their own country. Things are too bad there.

“Among our flyers was a young lieutenant who was born a Russian. Not a Jew, a Russian. He was finishing his training in this camp. It was partly the monotony and the lack of work that made him melancholy. You know we haven’t enough practise planes and the flying men are idle half the time. But mainly it was the sight of those Russian laborers that got on his nerves. He used sometimes to talk to them, and they were pathetically glad to have him, because nobody else spoke their language and they were lonesome.

“He said to me once: ‘When those poor devils landed in France the houses were decked with flags to greet them. The streets were full of cheering crowds and children threw flowers in their path. Now nobody trusts them to fight. They are outcasts. They have no country, and no country wants to adopt them.’ I tried to tell him that he was wrong, that the allies wanted to help Russia to get back, but it was no good.

“By and by this man took it into his head that he was distrusted because he had been born a Russian. It wasn’t true. But he thought it was. He said so. One day he went up in an altitude test with an observer. He was acting as pilot, but the machine had a double control and the man with him was a cool and capable flyer. Otherwise the thing might have been even worse than it was. For when they were six thousand feet up and still climbing, the Russian suddenly unbuckled the belt that secured him in his seat, and before the observer could even guess what he was about to do, he stepped over the side of the machine into space.

“That settled me. I said to myself that I would rather be dead than be a man without a country. That’s what that poor fellow figured that he was, and all other Russians. But I’m not a Russian, nor an internationalist, nor anything else but a one hundred per cent. American, and if they want me to kill boches, I’m ready to begin any minute.”

A man without a country. Is there any sentence in the language, any combination of words more dreadful? Yet what the German propagandists, which is the real name of many of the pacifists and “internationalists,” have been trying to do to American youth is to take their country away from them. They nearly succeeded, and the proof of that was the three years of indifference we loitered through before we woke up to the fact that this war was ours, as well as England’s, France’s and Belgium’s.