Born in 1879 in Lawrence, Kansas, the daughter of a humanities professor, Dorothy Canfield received a BA from Ohio State, studied at the Sorbonne, and earned a PhD in French literature from Columbia University before becoming a novelist, translator, and writer on education. In 1916 she went to France, where her husband, John Fisher, was serving in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. She became active in war relief work, establishing a Braille press for blinded veterans and a convalescent home for refugees. Her friend Sarah Cleghorn, a poet and political radical, lived in Vermont.
September 5
Dearest Sally:
Soldiers, hundreds of them are marching past my window as I write . . . a strange accompaniment to a letter to you! The regiment which has been quartered here at rest, is getting ready to be sent back to the trenches, and are going through preliminary exercises of marching etc. to get them into shape for active service again. They look . . . curiously just like anybody, just like the civilians-in-uniforms that they are. I am all the time struck by the contrast between our regular army of professional soldiers and these grocer’s clerks and farm-hands and college-professors, with their worn blue-gray clothes. The strangest of all, though, to me, are the soldier-priests. A good many of them wear their black soutanes just as usual, only a good deal shorter, just about to the knee. With their chain and cross hanging over their hearts and their big spurred cavalry boots, and revolvers . . . don’t they symbolize the world as it is! Almost without exception they are strong broadly built men, with serious, good faces and sad, earnest eyes. What do they make of it, I wonder. I wonder so much that I want to go up to them in the street and ask them! I can’t tell you how eagerly I read your Journal letters nor how deeply grateful I am to you for all the time you are taking to keep me close to what you are feeling and doing. I know that I’m not doing it for you . . . it’s just from lack of time and strength! If I began I would never finish . . . and anyhow there is a wild incoherence about what I feel that I never could get on paper. It is mostly just pure suffering and horror. Here I come in contact with refugees, in close personal contact, and feel what the war means to them, as only personal contact can make you feel anything.
Don’t children stump you! Jimmy said the other night as he was being dressed, “Me, I think that le bon Dieu is bad.” “Oh why? Jimmy,” “Because he made mosquitoes. If He isn’t bad why did he make mosquitoes?”
And Sally, last evening, looking over some American newspapers, saw the cartoon in the Post, of the lynching of Little and the ironic heading “Montana’s short-cut to law and order.” Of course she wanted an explanation. I explained as best I could which was pretty badly, and ended, “I think of course that the men who hanged him were as bad as could be. He had a right to express his opinion about anything. That’s what America should be like.” Sally pondered and asked, “If he thought people ought to steal, would he have a right to try to get them to do it?” So I had to fall back on the fact, which even a child’s abrupt reasoning can’t disconcert, that no matter what anybody did, he should be treated according to the law. And a minute later, she was screaming with laughter over the antics of the new puppy, and had forgotten apparently the whole dark and terrible question . . . which is quite as disconcerting as anything else children do.
This is started as an answer to your letter of August 12, with its dreadful news of the suppression of the socialist-press and the general running-riot of Censorship and “Public Opinion.” I’ve just thrown into the waste-paper basket, and now think I’ll fish out to send you, a letter from Horace, Henry, my father’s old friend on the Pacific Coast. I suppose that is quite genuinely and sincerely how the matter looks to him and others of his generation. My Godfather writes in the same strain, and says I ought to go home to “influence public opinion” to more active participation in the war and against the pro-Germans etc., etc. If I went, it would be to make the biggest kind of protest against gagging anybody with a tongue in his head. If that is to be the system employed, there’s no use bothering ourselves to fight Germany. She’s won the war already, and infected us with her methods . . . because it was just such hideous and unnatural unanimity which made possible the German invasion of Belgium. But I’m sure of my country, and I feel certain that this is only the usual fervent American reaction to any stimulant . . . this is the way they “took up” the blue glass craze, and ping-pong and the Montessori system . . . to put together the most dissimilar examples I can think of. I mean not at all the serious earnest people on both sides, but this particular craze for unanimity I know it will give way to a more American way of thought. If I didn’t think that . . . it would certainly be about the last blow necessary to convince me that the sooner this planet gets blown into star-dust, the better for everybody concerned.
The soldiers are coming back now, from where they have been drilling and look in on me wondering where I sit tapping on the typewriter . . . the only one Crouy has ever seen. They look a little tired, just agreeably so, and flushed and healthy with clear eyes and unconcerned expressions. As they pass one of the younger ones, while not losing step at all, manages to kick another one slyly in the leg. This makes the others laugh, and the young lieutenant look back at them sharply . . . and then that set passes out of sight and another files into view walking alertly, swinging their hands from one side to the other as French soldiers march, so vigorous, so alive. I send you this picture, taken as a snap-shot, to put in your war-Journal. They are so entirely human beings, like all others. Yesterday I saw a boche prisoner running a wheat-reaper, and noted with inexpressible interest, that he too looked just like anybody very calm and well-fed, much interested in running his machine right so the wheat would fall properly. I was on my way to send a package to a French prisoner in Germany to whom I have been sending food since the beginning of the war, and who is now working in the fields in Germany! I thought that very likely he is doing the work that his German-prisoner would be doing if he were at home . . . and found myself on the verge of that wild laughter which I imagine to fill madhouses. Thank heavens I have Jimmy and Sally.
Do write often, my dear, dear sister. And don’t mind if I don’t, nor regularly. Really I cannot!
Your loving
Dorothy
1917