Now, never mind! There is before you now but the marching for long hours with all these men. Here is something your mind has always been groping about trying to understand, the physical relation of man to man, of man to woman, of woman to woman. The mind is ugly when the flesh does not come in too. The flesh is ugly when the mind is put out of the house that is the body. Is the flesh ugly now? No, this is something special. This is something felt.
Suppose a man spend certain months, not thinking consciously, letting himself be swept along by other men, with other men, feeling the weariness of a thousand other men’s legs in his own legs, desiring with others, fearing with the others, being brave sometimes with the others. By such an experience can one gain knowledge of the others and of oneself too?
Comrades loved! Never mind now the thoughts of the hour of killing. One gets little enough. Take what is offered. And the killing may not come. Let the Roosevelts and others of that sort, the men of action, talk and think now of the hour of action, of the drawn sword, the pointed gun, victory, defeat, glory, bloody fields. You are not a general or a statesman. Take the thing before you, the physical marching fact of an army of which you are a part.
There is just the possibility that you are yourself a disease and that you may be cured here. This tremendous physical experience may cure you of the disease of yourself. Can one lose oneself utterly, become as nothing, become but a part of something, the state, the army? The army is something physical and actual while the state is nothing. The state exists but in men’s minds and imaginations and you have let your own imagination rule in your house too long. Let this young body of yours, so straight, so fair, so strong, let it have full possession of the house now. The imagination may play now over fields, over mountain tops if it please. “We are coming, Father Abraham, a hundred thousand strong!” You have forced your fancy to grovel in factory dust too long. Let it go now. You are nothing, so many little pounds of flesh and bone, a small unit in a vast thing that is marching, marching—the army. Blossoms on apple trees, sap in the branches of trees, a single head of wheat in a vast wheat field, eh?
All day long the march goes on and dust gathers in little circles about the eyes of weary men. A thin sharp voice is heard, an impersonal voice. It is speaking, not to you, not to one man only, but to a thousand men. “Fours right into line.”
“Fours right into line!” You have so wanted that, have so hungered for it. Has not your whole life been filled with a vague indefinite desire to wheel into some vast line with all the others you have known and seen? It is enough! The legs respond. Tears sometimes gather in the eyes at the thought of being able, without question, to do some one thing with thousands of others, with comrades.
NOTE XV
I HAD enlisted for a soldier shortly after my visit to Alonzo Berners and because I was broke and could see no other way to avoid going back into a factory. The voices crying out for war with Spain, for the freeing of Cuba, I had heard not at all but there had been a voice within myself that was plain and clear enough and I did not believe there was danger of many battles being fought. The glory of Spain, read about in the books, was dead. We had old Spain at a disadvantage, poor old woman. The situation was unique. America, the young and swaggering giant of the West had been fortunate. She had not been compelled to face, on the field of battle, the giant of the Old World in the days of her Old World strength. Now the young western giant was going to assert himself and it would be like taking pennies from a child, like robbing an old gypsy woman in a vacant lot at night after a fair. The newspapers might call into service Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, all the writers of battle tales trying to work up the illusion of a great war about to be fought, but no one believed, no one was afraid. In the camps the soldiers laughed. Songs were being sung. To the soldiers the Spaniards were something like performers in a circus to which the American boys had been invited. It was said they had bells on their hats, wore swords and played guitars under the windows of ladies’ bedrooms at night.
America wanted heroes and I thought I would enjoy being a hero and so I did not enlist for a soldier in Chicago, where I was unknown and my rushing to my country’s aid might have passed unnoticed, but sent off a wire to the captain of militia of my home town in Ohio and got on a train to go there. Alonzo Berners had pressed upon me a loan of a hundred dollars but I did not want to spend any of it for railroad fare so beat my way homeward on a freight train and even the hoboes with whom I sat in an empty freight car treated me with respect as though I were already the hero of a hundred hard-fought battles. At a station twenty miles from home I bought a new suit of clothes, a new hat, neckties and even a walking stick. My home town would want to think I had given up a lucrative position in the city to answer my country’s call, they would want a Cincinnatus dropping his plow handles, and why should I not give them the best imitation I could manage? What I achieved was something between a bank clerk and an actor out of work.
I was received with acclaim. Never before that time or since have I had a personal triumph and I liked it. When, with the others of my company, I marched away to the railroad station to entrain for war the entire town turned out and cheered. Girls ran out of houses to kiss us and old veterans of the Civil War—they had known that of battles we would never know—stood with tears in their eyes.