IV.
In the evening there were picture-shows, concerts, lectures-nearly all dealing with the war, of course. They were held in big halls built by the Y.M.C.A., an organization for which Jimmie had a hearty contempt. He regarded it as a device of the exploiting classes to teach submission to their white-collar slaves. But nobody could live in a training-camp without being aware of the “Y”. Jimmie was invited to a lecture, and out of boredom he went.
It was Sergeant Ebenezer Collins, imported from Flanders to tell the “doughboys” about the wiles of the Hun. Sergeant Collins spoke a weird language which Jimmie had never heard before, and not all of which he could understand; it served, however, to convince him that the sergeant was genuine—for nobody could possibly have faked such a form of utterance! “When yer gow inter Wipers naow,” said the orator, “yer see owld, grye-headed lydies an' bybies like little wite gowsts, an' yer sye ter them, 'Gow-a-wye, the 'Un may be 'ere ter-dye,' but they wown't gow, they got now 'omes ter gow ter!”
But in spite of the difficulties of a foreign language, you realized that this Cockney sergeant was a man. For one thing he had a sense of humour; he had kept it in the midst of terror and death—kept it standing all night in trenches full of icy-cold water, with icy-cold water pouring down his collar. Also the sergeant had a sense of honour—there were things he could not do to a 'Un, even though the 'Un might do them to him. Jimmie had listened to excited debates in Local Leesville, as to whether the Allies were really any better than the Germans; whether, for example, the Allies would have sunk passenger-liners with women and babies on board, if it had been necessary in order to win the war. Sergeant Collins did not debate this question, he just revealed himself as a fighting man. “It's because we plye gymes, an' they down't,” he remarked. “If yer plye gymes, yer now 'ow to plye fair.”
For three years and eight months Jimmie had been hearing stories about atrocities, and for three years and eight months he had been refusing to believe them. But now the Cockney sergeant told about a pal who had been wounded in a night attack by the 'Uns, and the sergeant had tried to carry him back and had had to leave him; towards dawn they made a counter-attack, and retook the village, and there they found the sergeant's pal, still alive, in spite of the fact that he was spiked to a barn-door with bayonets through his hands and feet. When that story was told, you heard a low murmur run through the room and saw a couple of thousand young men clenching their hands and setting their jaws, getting ready for their big job in France.
“Just now,” said the sergeant, “the Germans were making the most desperate attack of the war. The British were at bay, with their backs against the wall. It was upon the men in the training-camps of America that the decision rested; there was no one but them to save the day, to save the rest of the world from falling under the hoofs of the Hun monster. Would they do their part?” Jimmie Higgins heard the answer from those two thousand young throats, and the pacifist in him shrunk deeper out of sight.
But the pacifist was never entirely silent. War was wrong! War was wrong! It was a wicked and brutal way for human beings to settle their disagreements. If human beings were not yet intelligent enough to listen to reason—well, even so, that didn't make war right! A man had to have principles, and to stand by them—how else could he make the world come his way? Yes, war was wrong! But, meantime, war was here; and calling it wrong did not put a stop to it! What the devil was a fellow to do?
V.
As soon as Jimmie was able to work, they took him to the part of the camp where a motor-cycle division was training. Here was a big repair-shop, with plenty of damaged machines upon which he might display his skill. He did not know the particular engine they used here, but he soon learned the secrets of it, and satisfied the officers in charge that he knew how to take one apart and put it together again, to replace and mend tyres, to clean ball-bearings and true crooked rims. “You're all right,” they said. “And you're needed like the devil over there. You won't have to wait long.”
There was a platform where the trains came into the camp, and every few hours now there came a long train to be loaded with men. Jimmie got his notice, and packed his kit and answered roll call and took his place; at sundown of the next day he was detrained at a “mobilization-camp”—another huge city, described in the cautious military fashion as “Somewhere in New Jersey”, though everybody within a hundred miles knew its exact location. Here was a port, created for the purposes of war, with docks and wharves where the fleets of transports were loaded with supplies and troops. The vessels sailed in fleets, carrying thirty or forty thousand men at once. From the port of New York alone there was going out a fleet like this every week—the answer of America to the new drive of the Hun.