A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

We failed to realize that our country was in immediate peril, because we had almost forgotten that we had a country. Are we all awake to the fact yet? No, because, if we were, there would not be left anywhere from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific one single disloyal citizen, one single copperhead or so-called internationalist. No community would tolerate them. There would be no corner where they could hide.

Some of the Socialist party leaders are beginning to see a great light on the subject of loyalty to the government, and are advocating a new policy toward the war. Their last party platform read like one of Trotzky’s messages to the Petrograd Soviet, but now even the late Socialist candidate for mayor of New York, who appealed for the pacifist vote, and got it, is beginning to talk about revising the platform.

Unless it is revised, the Socialists are going to lose their adherents at present serving in France. The Jewish boys who, a little over a year ago, were orating from soap boxes against the draft and against what they called “this profiteers’ war,” are among the hottest young patriots and keenest fighters in the American army.

I saw some of those boys at Camp Upton last autumn. I saw one who was sitting in a corner blubbering like a small child because he was being sent to Spartanburg. He was being transferred because he was continually begging to be allowed to go home. His captain told me that the only thing to do with him was to send him so far away from New York that week-end visits home would be impossible.

I saw other Jewish boys who were unwilling soldiers then, but every one I saw in France was enthusiastic about his work, and as little of an internationalist as the young man in the aviation camp. The Jewish soldier has made good. I was told so by many officers, and I saw it for myself.

Our soldiers have not been taught to hate the Germans, and I don’t think they do hate them. It is certain that the French people with whom our men associate do not. But they scorn and loathe the Hindenburg method of making war, and this attitude our men share. They regard the Germans with horror rather than hatred, and so must all Americans who even faintly realize what is going on every day and hour in the invaded districts of Belgium and France.

Our soldiers, many of them, have seen this terrible thing, and it has made their blood run hot in their arteries, it has set their jaws hard, and caused their eyes to blaze. What theories they have ever had about internationalism have been dissipated by the facts with which they are faced.

The submarine war has come home to our men, sometimes as a bitter personal experience.

In a Y. M. C. A. canteen I came upon a young corporal who had found a seat behind the piano, and he was sitting there weeping his heart out over a letter from home, a letter telling him how his brother had died when the Germans torpedoed the Tuscania. I sat down beside this soldier. He seemed to need somebody, and I was the only woman near. In a few minutes he was himself again, outwardly at least, and he read me the letter.

It was from his sister, because, she said, mother was taking it very hard and could not write yet. When the ship went down brother managed to get on a raft which was very much overcrowded. There were so many men on the raft that the brother’s chum, who was in bad shape with a broken leg, was pushed off into the water.