IT IS THE SUMMER of 1941, and I am helping a friend to pack. My friend is called Mac, and he lives in a room across the hall from me. In the late afternoon, when the weather was fine and the sky over the city a pale grey-blue, we have often met up on the roof.
Mac would sit leaning against a chimney, usually with a book, as after office hours he goes to night classes at N.Y.U. Nearly always Sugar would be on the roof with him, her head resting on one of his knees. Sugar is a very small, very smart terrier who has the most finicky of manners. Now as we are packing, Sugar sits in the corner of the room, and occasionally she whines and gives a little shiver, as she knows that something is happening that she does not understand. We are packing because Mac has volunteered for the Army and has been accepted; he is going off to fight.
The room is in mad disorder—with books, clothes, and phonograph records on the floor. Scattered about are old newspapers with their blunt, black head-lines of destruction, their captions of ruin. Mac sorts out his possessions quickly, not hesitating about the things he can take with him and the things he will leave behind. Much must be left.
Mac is twenty-three—with a short, wiry body and red hair. He has a freckled face, and his expression is now rather sombre and scowling, as he is cutting a wisdom tooth and keeps feeling out the sore spot with his tongue. As we crate the records with excelsior and nail the boxes of books, we are both of us intent on that inward reckoning that departure and great change bring about.
What few words we say aloud are only the flotsam of thoughts within us. Our meditations probably follow the same track. Our backgrounds are similar. We have known secure childhoods, in homes neither rich nor very poor. We have had our share of formal education and have been allowed to seek for and to affirm our own spiritual values. In short, we have grown up as Americans. And we have much to think over, much to remember, and not a little to regret.
"But why did it take me so long? Huh?" Mac is saying. "Glued to the radio, talking, talking. Doing nothing. Why? Answer me that one!"
Sugar looks up at the sound of his voice. Mac has had her for six years. She sits across the table from him when he has his meals at home, and eats exactly what he eats—eggs for breakfast, carrots, anything. Whenever he offers her some special dainty he holds it close to her nose, and before taking it she has a pretty way of raising her right paw in a gesture halfway between begging and benediction.
But Mac pays no attention to Sugar now.
"There is this," he says. "A virtue is a virtue only insofar as it leads to good. But when it can be used as a weakness, as an instrument to make way for evil...."
Mac balls up a sweater and throws it on a pile of clothes in the corner. "You know what I mean."
I do know what he means. We were all of us pacifists. In our adolescence and our youth, we had no notion that we would ever have to fight. War was evil. The last World War had no place in our memories, but we had heard and read all about it. Our heroes in childhood were not soldiers, but great adventurers.
There was Byrd. There was Lindbergh—I thought he was wonderful and wrote him a long letter to tell him so. But that was in 1927, ages ago.
Then later in High School. My High School was like any one of thousands of High Schools in America. On Thursdays, we studied a subject called current events. My teacher had a great spirit and a passion to instil in us the horrors of war. She need not have been so anxious; we were born to the pacifist point of view.
I remember the physical gestures and peculiarities of this teacher better than anything ever said in class—the way she rapped the top of her head with a pencil to emphasize a point, the way that, when she was exasperated, she took off her glasses, pressed her fingers to her eyeballs, and said, "Oh pshaw! Pshaw! Pshaw!" There was always a giggle when this happened, and she would put her glasses back on and peer all around resentfully.
A disarmament conference—the League of Nations—a new party in the German Reich led by a man called Hitler. None of these things meant very much. Everybody knew there could never be another war. What country could start such a thing again? And if in the future it happened—why that would be in Europe. And American faces would never rot in European mud again.
"They told the truth. They were right," Mac says, and I look up at him. He is still packing books. Among them are Company K, A Farewell to Arms, The Road to War, and The Enormous Room. It was in our adolescence that the culmination of all the agony and destruction of the past war was finally expressed. The influence of these books on us can not be exaggerated. Mac arranges the volumes in stacks according to their size.
"They were right, but only for their time. They could not have realized then that there are worse things even than war. You know?"
"Yes," I answer.
The books are now packed in their boxes, and Mac stops off for a rest. He goes over to the medicine cabinet, opens his mouth very wide, and paints his sore gum with iodine. Then he sits down on a packing-case, his forehead propped on his fists, his face pink and sweating.
"Listen!" Mac says suddenly. "Do you remember May the first, 1935? Can you think back that far?"
Sugar looks up at him, and, as he gives her no notice, she sighs so deeply that her ribs stand out, and she drops her head down on her paws.
"That May day was my first year at University, and I was a member of a students' club. We marched in the parade. I was carrying a big banner against war and fascism. Everything was either black or white. War was evil, Fascism was evil—they were the same. We never knew then that we would ever have to choose between them."
"They were marching that year in Germany, too," I said quickly. "But they weren't choosing the banners they marched to."
"Yeah," Mac says. "They were marching all right."
Mac starts folding his good suit to put into the bag. "It was Spain," he says. "It was Spain that waked most of us up....
"That was the first round, and we lost it. Then afterward we were forced to pull our punches for so long that most of us just gave up. We didn't make this war, so why should we have to fight in it. Why I ask you? Let's just sit around punch drunk and see what happens. Maybe that gorilla on the other side won't even notice that we're in the ring."
There is truth in what he has just said. The last year has a weird, drunken quality. The Blitzkreig—the collapse of Europe—funereal radio voices affirming each new loss—the debris that was once Democracy. We in America have not been able to grasp it all at once. We were prepared to fight for the betterment of Democracy, and to fight with Democratic means—that in itself is no paltry battle.
We never knew that the full force of our barrage would have to be turned outward in order to escape complete annihilation. We have been demoralized. It has taken us long, too long, to come to terms with our inward selves, to adjust our traditions to necessity, to reach the state of conviction that impels action. We have had to re-examine our ideals, and to leave much behind. We have had to face a moral crisis for which we were scantily equipped. But at last we have reached our conclusions and are ready to act. We have come through.
Democracy—intellectual and moral freedom, the liberty to work and live in the way most productive for us, the right to establish our individual spiritual values—that is the breath of the American ideal. And we Americans will fight to preserve it. We have clenched our giant fist; it will not open until we are victorious.
"Thank the Lord it's over," Mac says.
He may be speaking of the past indecisions, or of the packing. We have finished. The room has a sad, naked look with the boxes and suitcases piled up on the dusty floor. Mac goes down-stairs for beer, and when he comes back we close the door and go up to the roof. It is a quiet, warm late afternoon. Wet clothes are hanging on a line, and pigeons strut along the parapet. We sit resting with our backs against a chimney.
Mac opens the beer. Because of the warmth, the foam geysers up over the neck of the bottle and spills on his hand and arm. He holds out his arm to Sugar, and she licks it daintily. Evidently the taste pleases her, for very slowly she raises her right paw and begs for more; he draws her in between his knees and scratches her behind the ears. To-morrow Sugar will be sent on the train to Mac's brother in Delaware.
For a long time we are silent. When Mac speaks his voice is controlled and quiet:
"They say we know what we are fighting against, but that we don't make ourselves plain about what we are fighting for. They want us to stop off to form slogans. It is like asking a man who is being choked and in danger of suffocation why he puts up a struggle. He does not say to himself that he fights because with his wind-pipe clutched he can not get air. He does not remind himself that air contains oxygen, and it is by the process of oxidation that the body derives the energy by which it functions. He does not lie still and tell himself that he has three minutes of grace in which to find out his reasons for wanting to fight off his oppressor and to breathe. A man in such peril simply fights. He fights for release, for air, for life, and he struggles with every ounce of power in his body. He does not stop fighting until all trace of consciousness has left him, or until breath has been granted him once more."
Dark comes on. An airplane cruises in the deepening sky. Mac does not say anything further, there is no more need to talk. To-morrow he will be in the Army.
And Mac, the thousands of others like him, does not face the struggle ahead of us with hopped-up, specious feelings of glory. He knows what it will cost his generation in personal self-denial and in suffering. But he is done with questioning, finished with doubt.
[Vogue, July 15, 1941]