After a brief jostling match with Patty, Frances gave up the struggle and with a last fierce hug and a hammering of kisses, fell away into the mass of crumpled crinolines at the curb and was lost to Keith’s backward gaze.
His heart ran to her but he could not rebuke the triumphant laugh of his mother, who scuttered alongside, with hardly equal steps clinging to him so tight that her hoop skirts must bulge out sidewise and brush the throngs. She was no longer the radiant beauty, but only a frightened little old lady whose child was striding off to all that a mother’s heart could imagine for her anguish. And at last the hard cobbles broke her little feet and made them bleed as her heart bled. Her breath came in such quick gasps that she could not speak. Her breath became a drumming of sobs and her eyes spilled so many tears that she could not mind her way. Finally, realizing that her stumbling threw her soldier out of step and out of the alignment of which the Seventh was so proud; realizing blindly that her grief was beginning to break his pride and would send him to war blubbering, she panted:
“Kiss me good-by, oh, my little boy, for I must let you go.”
He bent his head and drenched her cheeks with his tears, as their lips met in salt. The soldier behind him jostled his heel and forced him along. And that was the last he saw of his mother for four years.
Patty was flung back from the edges of the companies, going by like the blades of a steamer’s wheel. She got home somehow, and it was no consolation to her that thousands of other mothers joined her in despair as regiment after regiment filled Broadway with the halloo of trumpets and the thud of warward feet.
The Irish Sixty-ninth had not drilled since it refused to honor the Prince of Wales, but now Colonel Corcoran begged that the colors should be restored, and promised to march a thousand men in twenty-four hours. He got his prayer and kept his word. And the Sixth and Twelfth and the Seventy-first, and the Eighth and the Twenty-eighth and the others went forth into the dark, so that numerals took on a sacred significance once more.
Day after day, night after night, the streets throbbed like the arteries of men who have been running. The glory and the pride of war made hearts ache with a grandeur of neighborliness. The religion of nationhood became something awesome like the arrival of a new all-conquering deity upon the mountain tops. Suddenly the words “My Country” conjured a creed. People vied with one another to die in proof of their fealty to this vague thing that but yesterday had been a politician’s joke, a schoolboy’s lesson in geography. This flag that had been a color scheme for decorating band stands on Fourths of July became an angel’s wing streaked with blood, a thing that filled the eyes with tears, the soul with hosannas.
Then the hilarious victory of the Bull Run picnic was turned into a panic of disaster, of shame, of dismay. Lists of dead men became news, and the poor citizens gnashed their teeth upon their grief, understanding how grim and long a game they had begun. Whichever side won the game, both must lose infinitely precious treasures only now valued truly.
All the songs were war songs; all the love-stories had either warriors or skulkers involved; the rejoicings were over the disasters of other Americans, other mothers and fathers; the highest of arts was the art of destruction; the zest of life was in slaughtering and enduring. Life had more beauty and glory than ever but no more prettiness, no grace.
One day RoBards brought home the paper, and after assuring Patty that Keith’s name was not in any of the gory catalogues, he said: