"We're going to do something," I says to him, "that you'll remember, Bennie, when you're an old man." And I gave his shoulders a little shake. "You tell them about it when you're old. Because they'll understand it better then than we do now. You tell them!"
"Yes, ma'am," says Bennie, obedient—and I kind of think he'll do it.
We were to meet in the Court House yard, that's central, and march to the Market Square, that's big. I was to march in the last detachment, and so it came that I could watch them start. And I could see down Daphne Street, with all the closed business houses with the flags hung out at half mast, some of them with a bow of black cloth tied on. And it was a strange gathering, for everybody was thinking, and everybody knew everybody else was thinking.
We've got a nice band in Friendship Village, that they often send for to play to the City. And when it started off ahead, beating soft with the Beethoven funeral march, I held my breath and shut my eyes. They were playing for Europe, four thousand miles away.
Then came the women. That seemed the way to do, we thought—because war means what war means to women. They were wearing white—or at least everybody was that had a white dress, but blue or green or brown marched just the same as if it was white; and they all wore black streamers—just cloth, because we none of us had very much to do with. Every woman in town marched—not one stayed home. And one of the women had thought of something.
"We'd ought not to carry just our flag," she said. "That don't seem real right. Let's us get out our dictionaries and copy off the other nations' flags over there; and make 'em up out of cheese-cloth, and carry 'em."
And that was what we done. And all the women carried the different ones, just as they happened to pick them up, and at half mast.
I don't know as I know who came next, or what order we arranged them. We didn't have many ex-foreigners living in Friendship Village, but them we had marched, in their own groups. They all came, dressed in their best, and we had cheese-cloth flags of their own nation, made for each group; and they marched carrying them, all together.
There was everybody that worked in the town, marching for Labor. Then come the churches, not divided off into denominations, but just walking, hit or miss, as they came; and though this was due to a superintendent or two getting rattled at the last minute and not falling in line right, it seemed good to see it, for the sorrow of one church for Europe isn't any whit different from the sorrow of every one of the rest. When your heart aches, it aches without a creed.
Last came the children, that I was going to march with; and someway they were kind of the heart of the whole. And just in front of them was the Mothers' Club—twenty or so of them, hard-worked, hopeful women, all wanting life to be nice for their children, and trying, the best they knew, to read up about it at their meetings. And they were marching that day for the motherhood of the nations, and there wasn't one of them that didn't feel it so. And the children ... when we turned the corner where I could look back on them, I had all I could do—I had all I could do. Three-four hundred of them, bobbing along, carrying any nation's flag that came handy. And they meant so much more than they knew they meant, like children always do.