I keep forgetting that soldiers are so young: I keep thinking of them as my age, or Hitler’s age. (Hitler and I are about the same age.) Actually, soldiers are often quite young. They haven’t finished school, many of them, and their heads are full of the fragile theme of love, and underneath their bluster and swagger everything in life is coated with that strange beautiful importance that you almost forget about because it dates back so far. The other day some French soldiers on the western front sent a request to a German broadcasting studio asking the orchestra, to play “Parlez moi d’amour.” The station was glad to oblige, and all along the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line the young men were listening to the propaganda of their own desire instead of attending to the fight. So few people speak to the young men of love any more, except the song writers and scenarists. The leaders speak always of raw materials and Lebensraum. But the young men in uniforms do not care much for raw materials (except tobacco) and they are thinking of Liebestraum, and are resolving their dream as best they can. I am trying hard to remember what it is like to be as young as a soldier.
When war was getting under way in 1914, I was in high school. I was translating Caesar, studying ancient history, working with algebraic equations, and drawing pictures of the bean, which is a dicotyledonous seed, and of the frog, an amphibian. In those days I kept a journal. My life and activities and thoughts were dear to me, and I took the trouble to set them down. I still have this journal, and the outbreak of the present war has started me going through its pages to refresh my memory. The entries are disappointingly lacking in solid facts. Much of the stuff is sickening to read, but I have a strong stomach and a deep regard for the young man that was I. Everyone, I believe, has this tolerance and respect if he is worth anything, and much of life is unconsciously an attempt to preserve and perpetuate this youth, this strange laudable young man. Though my journal is a mass of horrid little essays, moral in tone and definitely on the pretty side, I cannot bring myself to throw it away. Just now I like to consult it to rediscover what the impact of a world war meant to one young fellow in the 1914–1918 period—how important each step seemed, what preposterous notions I held, how uncertain and groping and unscathed I was.
At first, before the United States entered the fray, the War seemed to mean mighty little. In those years, war was remote, implausible—a distant noise or threat, something that was ahead perhaps, like college or marriage or earning one’s living, but not near enough to be of any immediate concern. In the early pages of my journal I was thinking and writing about keeping pigeons, about going skating, about the comings and goings of people on the same block with us. After a couple of years of it the War begins to take shape and I begin swelling with large thoughts. On March 16, 1917, carefully described as a “rainy Saturday,” I pasted into my journal an editorial from the Globe on the emancipation of Russia, which spoke of the sunlight of freedom shining over the Russian steppes. “Father thinks it will be an important factor in the ultimate results of the war,” I wrote. “I have always wondered what the purpose—in the bigger sense—of the war was. Perhaps this is it.”
Russian freedom probably occupied my mind upward of ten minutes. The next entry in the journal was concerned with plans for a canoe trip down the Housatonic (which I never took) and with the rehearsals of a Pinero farce in which I acted the part of an English servant.
On Palm Sunday, 1917, with a bad cold in the head, I reported the advent of springtime, and the flags flying from houses all along the block. “War and springtime are being heralded with one breath and the thoughts of the people are in confusion.” My own thoughts, however, were not in any particular confusion. They came to an orderly, if not monumental, focus in the composition, on the same page, of a love poem of twenty-four lines, celebrating an attachment to a girl I had met on an ice pond.
On April 3rd, with America still three days away from war, I speculated on the possibility of another canoe trip, for August—a journey on which I proposed to carry “a modified form of miner’s tent.” Apparently I was spending more time reading sporting goods catalogues and dreaming of the woods than studying news accounts of hostilities in Europe. I was also considering the chances of getting a summer job. Next fall I was to enter college.
Springtime and wartime! Of the two, springtime clearly took precedence. I was in love. Not so much actively as retrospectively. The memory of winter twilights, when the air grew still and the pond cracked and creaked under our skates, was enough to sustain me; and the way the trails of ice led off into the woods, and the little fires burning along the shore. It was enough, that spring, to remember what a girl’s hand felt like, suddenly ungloved in winter. I never tried to pursue the acquaintanceship off the pond. Without ice and skates, there seemed no reason for her existence. Lying on my back on the settee in the hall, I listened to Liszt on the pianola.
I wrote half a dozen nature poems, got a haircut, read Raymond by Sir Oliver Lodge, and heard one of Billy Sunday’s workers in church on the text: “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men.” One of my friends enlisted in the Naval Reserve. Another became wireless operator on a mosquito boat. Dimly, dimly I became aware that something was going on.
April 26, 1917. I suppose this little Journal ought to be filled with war talk, because that is what people are all thinking about now. It is believed that there will be a shortage of food soon, and so the State is supervising a “Farm Cadet” movement.
I joined the cadets that July, and served in Hempstead, L. I. It never seemed to me that the farmers were particularly pleased with the arrangement.
May 14, 1917. Yesterday I heard Billy Sunday deliver his booze sermon.
May 27, 1917. I don’t know what to do this summer. The country is at war and I think I ought to serve. Strange that the greatest war in the history of the world is now going on, and it is hard to get men to enlist.
June 3, 1917. I’m feeling extraordinarily patriotic tonight, after having read the papers. I think tomorrow I shall buy a Liberty Bond and get a job on a farm. The struggle in Europe isn’t over by any means, and so much history is being made every minute that it’s up to every last one of us to see that it’s the right kind of history. It is my firm conviction that only the unstinted giving of time, money, and resources of the Anierican people can save this world from its most terrible doom.
June 7, 1917. I guess there is no place in the world for me. I’ve been trying to get a job since Monday, and have failed. Yesterday afternoon I applied at G—’s School of Popular Music for a job playing piano at a summer hotel in the Catskills. This was in answer to an ad that I had seen in the paper. When I got there, I couldn’t play the kind of music he gave me, so I started for the door, but not before he had handed me a circular showing how, by his method, ragtime piano playing might be taught in 20 lessons. However, when I arrived home, I discovered that the little town in the Catskills was not on the map. I don’t weigh enough to join the Army, and a job on a farm would probably be hard on my hay fever. I want to join the American Ambulance Corps, but I’m not eighteen and I’ve never had any experience driving a car, and Mother doesn’t think I ought to go to France. So here I am, quite hopeless, and undeniably jobless. I think either I must be very stupid or else I lack faith in myself and in everything else.
My morale at this point had sunk so low that I pasted into the journal a clipping called “Foolishness of Worry,” a reprint from The White Road to Verdun, by Kathleen Burke.
June 10, 1917. Tomorrow I am going to the city to find out facts concerning the American Ambulance Corps. Somewhere in Europe there must be a place for me, and I would rather save men than destroy them. Father and Lillian have just come back from the city where they went in a fruitless attempt to hear Billy Sunday.
July 5, 1917. I can think of nothing else to do but to run away. My utter dependence galls me, and I am living the life of a slacker, gorging my belly with food which others need. I wish I were old enough to be drafted.
July 11, 1917. My birthday! Eighteen, and still no future! I’d be more contented in prison, for there at least I would know precisely what I had to look forward to.
September 4, 1917. Tonight I have been reading about aviation tests—I think I would like to fly, but as with everything else I have thought of, I lack the necessary qualifications.
Leaving the war behind, I packed my suitcase and went off to college, itself no small adventure. I took along the strip of bicycle tape which she and I used to hang onto in our interminable circuit of the pond the winter before. I was homesick. After the football games on Saturday afternoons I would walk down the long streets into the town, shuffling through the dry leaves in the gutters, past children making bonfires of the piles of leaves, and the spirals of sweet, strong smoke. It was a golden fall that year, and I pursued October to the uttermost hill.
October 13, 1917. My English prof said the other day that bashfulness was a form of vanity, the only difference being that vanity is the tendency to overestimate your worth, and bashfulness to underestimate it; both arising from the overindulgence of self-consciousness. The days are getting colder.
November 10, 1917. The war still continues in this its third autumn. [I couldn’t even count—it was the fourth autumn.] Our troops are in the trenches on a relatively quiet sector of the west front. Just the other day I read that the first American Sammy had been killed. More are being trained by experienced officers in back of the line, and still more are in this country training in the several cantonments for the National Draft Army. It is a wonderful thing. The Russians have again overthrown their new-born republic and are showing themselves incapable of meeting the crises that are being put in their way. The Italian Army has been outguessed by the combined Austro-German forces and has retreated to the Piave River. The French and English lines show little change. Now, after more than three years of intensive warfare, Germany stands, solidly defying three-fourths of the countries of the world. They all look to us as the only hope of salvation, and I firmly believe that, slow as we are to foresee danger and loath as we seem to be to give up our pleasures and amusements, once in the struggle for fair we will live up to the examples set by our sturdy forefathers and will shed the last drop of blood for the great cause for which the whole world is now shedding blood.
November 21, 1917. I’ve been feeling sick for the past week and I think I must have consumption. If I have, I will leave college and travel for my health.
December 25, 1917. I have just finished Over the Top by Arthur Guy Empey. On the last page of his narrative he confirms what I have always sensed as truth, that strength comes surely at the critical hour, that anticipation far exceeds the realization of the utmost trial; and that man, despite his recent gentle breeding and flabby ways, when called, is not found wanting, nor untrue when facing death.
December 31, 1917. I find myself thinking the same thoughts and wishing the same wishes that I thought and wished this night a year ago. I’m wondering if I’m any nearer my ultimate goal—certainly still a long way off inasmuch as the goal itself is an unknown quantity.
February 18, 1918. The talk is of Universal Peace after the war—everlasting peace through the medium of an international council. Nations will be ruled by brotherly love and divine principle, arms will be laid down forever and man will return to the ploughshare. Bosh!
March 26, 1918. Sunday was the beginning of the immense German offensive along a 50-mile front which is threatening the civilized world and which is paralyzing the stoutest of hearts in the enormity of its plan and the apparent success of its execution. The grimness of impending danger is settling slowly over the American people. I had begun to think that perhaps I would not be called to war, but now I am not so sure. In fact, it seems almost inevitable that I will go. Things are happening on a tremendous scale.
April 13, 1918. I heard ex-President Taft speak in Bailey Hall this morning. He spoke on the war—nothing else is spoken of in these days. Now the question is, shall I set out, at the close of this academic year, to fit myself for some branch of the service so that at the age of 21 I will be trained in military or war work, or shall I wait still longer in the hope that peace will come?
On April 25th I inscribed a short nature poem, celebrating spring. On May nth, while other freshmen were burning their caps, I recorded the belief that the greatest period of my life was past and gone. The school year was drawing to a close and again I was left stranded for the summer. “I don’t even know that I’ll return in the fall. I ought to want to, but I’m not sure that I do. I am never sure of anything.”
I settled this feeling of uncertainty by buying a second-hand Oldsmobile and taking a job in my father’s store, in the credit department. But I could feel the War in my bowels now.
July 14, 1918. I have been thinking of a sentence I read somewhere: “Destiny makes no mistakes.”
Armed with a copy of Marcus Aurelius, I accompanied my family to Bellport, Long Island, for the month of August. There was a noticeable dearth of young men at the summer resort. The sea washed over me, the sun struck down, the wind blew at me, in an attempt to dispel the fearful mists of indecision. On the first of September we returned to the cicadaladen streets of our suburb; the month in Bellport had become a memory of sea and sky and doubt. On August 31st I wrote a poem strongly advising myself to get killed in action. On September 12th, with thirteen million other Americans, I registered for the draft.
September 21, 1918. My serial number is 3751 and I don’t understand what it means, except that I can remember the days when I didn’t used to have a number. The harvest moon is full tonight … and looking through the window 3751 enjoys the splendor.
The War, and my own travail, were both drawing to a close. I returned to Ithaca and enlisted in the Army. The enemy turned out to be an epidemic of flu—which I met stoically with a bag of licorice drops. I can’t remember who told me that licorice fended off flu germs, but he was right.
November 12, 1918. Yesterday was one of the greatest days in the history of the world. The war came to an end at 2:15 o’clock in the morning. At half-past five a hand pushed against me in the darkness and a voice whispered “The whole town of Ithaca must be on fire—listen to the bells!” I sat up in bed. Just at that moment the chimes in the library tower rang out “The Star Spangled Banner” and someone down below yelled “The war is over!” … The terms are little less than unconditional surrender. Germany is brought to her knees, and is no longer in a position to menace the safety of other European nations. Peace with victory has been established, to the everlasting glory of all the allied countries who stood side by side in the greatest conflict of history.
For another month we had to go on drilling as though nothing had happened. As a parting blessing, the War Department vaccinated all of us for smallpox, shot us with a triple dose of typhus serum, and confined us to barracks. It was dark when I walked out of the Army, and the lights were beginning to twinkle in the valley. I strode away from the mess hall in a mantle of serenity.
December 25, 1918. Christmas Day. I argued with father for about an hour and a half after breakfast, and just as is always the case we came to no agreement. He believes that the plans now being formulated for a League of Nations will be the means of preventing war in the future for all time. I cannot believe that that is so. He believes that a new era has dawned, that our President and his associate representatives of other nations have a great vision, that all the countries of the world will be united by a bond so strong that there can be no war. Father did most of the talking.
December 28, 1918.
The pines hang dark by a little pond
Where the ice has formed in the night
And the light in the west fades slowly out
Like a bird in silent flight.
The memory of the sun that’s gone
Is just the glow in the sky,
And in the dusk beyond the trees
A figure is skating by.
I was still in love. The great world war had come and gone. Parlez moi d’amour.