But there wasn't any glory, any romance in this war. It was machine guns and bombs and dirt, and cold and mud; and base hospitals, and men screaming with awful wounds—and gas, and horrors, and nerve-shock and—frightfulness. She had read it all in the papers and in the magazines. And it had not meant anything to her, it had been just words and phrases, and now it was more than words and phrases—.
When the hordes of people had swept into Washington, changing it from its gracious calm into a seething and unsettling center of activities, she had been borne along on the wings of enthusiasm and of high endeavor. She had scolded women who would not work, she had scorned mothers and wives who had sighed and sobbed because their men must go. She had talked of patriotism!
Well, she wasn't patriotic. Derry would probably hate her when she told him. But she was going to tell him. She wouldn't have him blown to pieces or made blind or not come back at all. And in the morning, she would beg Daddy—she would beg and beg!
As she sat up in bed and looked wildly about her, it seemed as if all the corners of the little room were haunted by specters. A long time ago she had seen Maude Adams in "L'Aiglon." She remembered now those wailing voices of the dead at Wagram. And in this war millions of men had died. It seemed to her that their souls must be pressing against the wall which divided them from the living—that their voices must penetrate the stillness which had always shut them out. "How dare you go on with it? Are men made only for this?"
She remembered now the thing that her father had said on the night after "Cinderella."
"If I had my way, it should be an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. For every man that they have tortured, we must torture one of theirs. For every child mutilated, we must mutilate a child—for every woman—"
Her Daddy had said that. Her kind and tender Daddy. Was that what the war made of men? Would Daddy and Derry, when they went over, do that? Torture and mutilate? Would they, would they? And would they come back after that and expect her to love them and live with them?
Well, she wouldn't. She would not. She would be afraid of them—of both of them.
If they loved her, they would stay with her. They wouldn't go away and leave her to be afraid—alone and crying in the dark, with all of those dead voices.