ANNA KEPT A TIGHT REIN on the balking horse as their black buggy trundled along the berm of the county road that led east from St. Louis. She and her father were forced to cover their mouths each time one of those new Ford Model Ts rushed past them trailing clouds of choking dust. The loud honks of the English trumpeting their superiority in speed always brought to her mind a verse from Job: His children are far from safety, and they are crushed in the gate, neither is there any to deliver them.
This world beyond Raglesville moved much too fast.
She studied her father, concerned why he was being so quiet. He looked haggard, and had eaten very little since leaving home. Despite her pleas that he not attempt the journey, he had insisted on attending his last Midwest Conference of Mennonite churches before retiring from the pulpit. It broke her heart to see him growing frailer and more despondent. She tried to lighten his mood with a bargain. “The rhubarb should be ripe by the time we get home. If you behave yourself and avoid that hard candy you always try to buy in Vincennes, I will make a pie.”
His bearded chin remained glued to his chest. “Perhaps we should forgo the pies this year.”
“But you love them.”
“To everything there is a season.”
Whenever something bothered him deeply, he always sought refuge in the verses of the Good Book. That particular passage from Ecclesiastes, however, was not one of her favorites, for it invariably caused her to feel dread and impending doom: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. She patted his fidgeting hand. “Father, what troubles you?”
“It does not seem proper that we enjoy sweets while other families send off their young men to go across the world and face death.”
He was worrying about that horrible European war again. She knew little about it, except that several countries from the old land had been fighting for three long years. In St. Louis, the English folk had been swept up with excitement over America’s joining the side of Great Britain and France. All that week, bands had been playing at the recruiting stations, where hundreds of boys had lined up to join the Army, and bankers had been walking the sidewalks clamoring for people to buy Liberty Bonds to finance the guns. She tried to offer him some reassurance. “It has nothing to do with us.”
“Wildfires do not honor fences.”
Unable to cheer him, she turned her thoughts to Micah, and prayed that he had reached Raglesville by now. She had waited seven long years—the four he had spent studying at Bethel College and the three he had devoted to missionary work—for him to return and take over her father’s ministry. Now, when at last they were about to join hands in marriage, this war—
A bloodcurdling scream echoed over the near hill.
Her father took the reins and snapped the horse into a hard canter toward the direction of the cry. Reaching the crest of the ridge, they saw a mob of a hundred or so men dragging a bound man toward a tree near a small courthouse. The victim, stripped to his underwear, had been wrapped in an American flag and was being forced to sing patriotic songs. Her father circled the horse into a retreat.
The abused man, seeing their buggy on the horizon, shouted in German at them for help. “Helfen Sie mir!”
Anna stuck her head out of the cab. Looking back, she saw the mob pummeling the poor man. “Father! I think he is calling to us.”
Her father snapped the reins, sending the horse off into a harder canter. “It is an English matter. None of our concern.”
She saw the mob throw a rope around the struggling man’s neck. “They are going to kill him!”
“Turn from it, Anna!”
“But they don’t understand what he’s saying!”
“Gehorche mir!” He slipped into German, as he always did when flustered.
“What if that was Christ being taken to the Cross?”
Stung by that example, her father reluctantly halted the buggy and dropped his head. Finally, after muttering a prayer, he reined the buggy around and hurried it back down the hill into the town.
The victim, about to be strung up from the highest limb, pleaded in German again for their assistance.
The mob aimed their torches to discover what he was shouting at. One of them came closer to the buggy. “What do you clops want?”
Hearing her father stumble for words, Anna spoke for him. “That man you have taken is trying to tell you something important.”
The ringleader examined her face. “How would you know?”
“I speak German.”
The vigilantes surrounded the buggy.
“You a Kaiser lover, too?” the leader of the mob demanded.
The torches were now so close that she could feel the scorch of the heat. She felt her father’s hand clutch at her wrist to demand her silence, so she demurred to him and lowered her gaze.
Jacob said, “My daughter learned a little of the old language in school.”
“Yeah? Well then maybe she can tell this Boche traitor that he’s about to learn which side of the war God is really on.”
Anna could no longer remain mute. Disobeying her father, she spoke up again. “What wrong has the poor man done you?”
“He’s a spy! And a Socialist rabble-rouser!”
Unable to comprehend why these people were so angry, she asked the prisoner in German if he spoke English. He shook his head and told her that he was a baker from Dresden. After immigrating to Philadelphia, he had come west and had tried to join the Navy, but was rejected because he was blind in one eye. Desperate for work, he had applied to join the United Mine Workers, but the union officials had refused to help him because he was unmarried. She tried to explain his innocence to the bloodthirsty crowd. “He says he came to this country before the war started. How could he be a spy?”
The mob’s leader felt the questioning gazes around him. Incensed at being shown up, by a German girl no less, he pointed a threatening finger at her. “Maybe you were sent by the Kaiser to save him.”
The knuckles on her hand gripped the reins so hard that they turned white. Had these English all gone mad? How could anyone possibly think that she and her father, descendants of Mennonite refugees from the kings and churches of the old country, would care anything for the current German leader? She looked beyond their torches and saw several policemen standing aside on a far street, unwilling to stop the lynching.
“You Krauts better get out of the way! Or you’ll get the same treatment!”
She repulsed her father’s attempt to take the reins. Refusing to move the buggy, she asked the ringleader, “Why have you wrapped him in a flag?”
The wild-eyed man laughed and swiped his torch at her horse to spook it. “He said he wants to be buried in it.”
“I beg of you!” she cried, repulsing her father’s grasp. “Don’t kill him!”
“Get out of our way, you fräulein cow!”
The jeering throng pushed the buggy back, slapping at the flanks of the horse. When the grass under the tree had been cleared again, a hundred of hands began pulling on the rope and lifting the man off his feet.
Strangling, the German man rasped, “Lassen Sie mich zu beten!”
The mob’s leader turned to Anna. “What did he say?”
She was frantic, struggling not to cry. “He asks to pray before he dies.”
The instigator signaled for the German to be dropped. On his knees and clutching at his throat, the poor man mumbled prayers in his native tongue. When he was finished, he whispered another request to her.
“Does he want a last dance before his last dance?” the mob’s leader asked.
She couldn’t bring herself to look at the murderers. “He asks permission to write a letter to his parents. To tell them what happened to him.”
The crowd roared its insistence that the request was an admission of guilt, and its leader nodded his permission for the letter. “Good idea! It’ll let those Sauerkrauts know what’s in store for them once we get to the Rhine.”
One of the attackers thrust a handbill and a pencil into the kneeling German’s shaking hands. Struggling to control the pencil, he managed to scribble a couple of lines, then handed the letter to Anna, thanking her in German, and nodded his readiness to die. The rope lifted him off his knees again and thrust him dangling to the sky. His feet thrashed for several minutes, and then, blessedly, it was finally over.
As the crowd dispersed with their bloodlust sated, Anna looked down through tears to see what the poor man had written. He had addressed the letter to Mr. and Mrs. Carl Henry Prager of Preston, Germany. She glanced around and saw a couple of the townspeople still lingering near their buggy, shaken by what they had allowed to happen. To shame them for their sin, she read the letter aloud to them in English:
Dear Parents, I must this day die. Please pray for me, my dear parents. This is my last letter. Your dear son, Robert Paul Prager.
THE NEXT MORNING, AFTER TRAVELING all night in a state of shock and fright, Anna and her father reached Raglesville and found dozens of buggies parked at the meetinghouse. Anna couldn’t understand why so many people were there on a Friday. And why was an American flag flying on a pole over the roof? The weather was clear, so everyone should have been in the fields. She searched the foddering horses, and her heart leapt.
There was Micah’s roan, tied to the post.
She fussed at her bonnet, hoping for time to make herself presentable, but her father was insistent on learning without delay the reason for the gathering. She helped him from the buggy, and together they opened the door. Micah stood at the front of the room addressing the congregation. She broke a wide grin, but resisted the urge to run into his arms. He had filled out, and his beard was now thick and wiry. She saw him catch her eyes, and she waited for the old mischievous smirk. But his glance, dark and foreboding, deflected from her and fell to the floor.
After all these years, did he not recognize her?
Her father shuffled down the aisle. “Could you not wait, Micah Yoder, for me to offer you the pulpit on Sunday?”
The congregation turned, their faces strafed with fear, and Micah reached for Anna’s hands. “Praise the Lord you are back. The Almighty has commenced our days of trial.”
She was hurt that he showed no joy in seeing her. “What do you mean?”
Ada Hostetler arose from her pew. “The English burned two of our barns near Jasper last night. All week there have been men from the government here asking about the ages of our boys and demanding to know what we think of the Kaiser.”
Anna’s father pulled anxiously at his beard. “Men from the government? You mean the English sheriff?”
Micah shook his head. “No, they were with the military. The English politicians in Washington have passed a law making it a crime to say anything against this war. They confiscated all of our German Bibles and demanded that we fly their flag from the meetinghouse. I tried to explain that this was against our beliefs, but they threatened to padlock the doors if we refused.”
Anna’s father collapsed into a pew. “This is not possible. We were promised the freedom of speech and to practice our religion in peace.”
Jared Wagler, a farmer, glared recrimination at him. “We should never have allowed the English police to come onto our lands and arrest those beard-cutting devils.”
Ada waved off that complaint. “We tried Micah’s way, and it didn’t work. We had no choice.”
Wagler shunted Ada aside, drawing protests at the act of discourtesy to his elder. But he would not be silenced. “I warned you, Jacob Raber. We were not harsh enough in dispensing punishment on our own. Now we will all pay dearly for bringing these English into our business. Our elders came here from the old country to escape this intrusion. We have gained nothing.”
The congregation argued hotly, until Anna’s father raised his hands in a plea for calm. Regaining their silence, he arose with difficulty and insisted, “We will weather this storm, as we have all others. We need only avoid saying anything about this war. We must stay out of it.”
“I don’t intend to remain silent,” Jared Wagler said. “I have relatives in Germany. I’d rather see them win this war than those English out there who burn our barns and paint our houses yellow to vent their venom!”
“Enough of such talk!” Ada shouted. “You will put us all in danger!”
Another farmer in the congregation turned a look of hatred on Ada. “Maybe you’re the one spying on us for the English. I’ve heard rumors that the government is paying people for information about what German-Americans say in private.” He appealed to the rest of the congregation. “Does not anybody else notice how she has been leaving the services early this year?”
Ada clutched her hymnal to her bosom as if using it for a shield. “Where did you get the money to build that second new house of yours, Brother Wagler? If anyone is taking money on the side from the English, it is you.”
Anna’s father raised his hands weakly in a plea to stop the accusations. “Satan enters our hearts through the windows of suspicion and fear! We must remain steadfast in the faith that Our Lord will protect us.”
“I am to blame for this,” Micah said softly.
They all turned toward him, stunned by his confession.
Anna took a step closer. “Why do you say such a thing, Micah?”
He would not look at her directly. “The government has been investigating graduates of Bethel for violations of the Sedition Act. Many of us there swore a pact of nonresistance in this war. These government agents are here because I came home. They are looking for German sympathizers. Some of my fellow pastors in Ohio and Pennsylvania have already been arrested.”
“Arrested for what?” Anna asked.
“Conspiracy and unpatriotic behavior.”
Horrified, she turned to her father for an explanation of this injustice.
Her father tried to assure them that such prosecutions could never be enforced. “I promise you, if we tend to our own business and do not get drawn into these English arguments, this war will not ensnare us.”
“The war has already ensnared us,” Micah warned. “The government has created a draft to compel civilians to become soldiers. All men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty must report to the local boards to register.”
Anna felt certain that Micah must have misunderstood the law. “But that is surely only for the English and—
“I have been called to report to their draft board,” Micah said. “Six other men from Raglesville have also received orders.”
Anna turned toward her father again, unable to accept that such a violation of their faith could stand. She had waited seven years for Micah to come back, and now this? Had her father let him go to Bethel knowing this might happen? Could this have been prevented if he had allowed her to marry Micah years ago? When he would not meet her demanding eyes, she turned back to Micah. “The English must give you an exemption.”
Micah set his eyes askance, silently denying that possibility. “The government has ruled that all men, including Mennonites, must serve.”
Jacob stumbled from faintness, and Anna braced his arm to prevent him from falling. Nearly blind with despair, she felt as if everything she loved was crumbling to the ground around her. She turned back to Micah and begged him, “Don’t go.”
“I have no choice. None of us do. You needn’t worry. We will register with the conscription authorities. If the English require us to travel to the military camps, we will declare ourselves conscientious objectors and refuse to drill. The worse that can happen is that we will be required to delay our happiness in life together for a few more weeks.”
Anna looked around the room. They were all nodding, taking refuge in a dream, but she could not banish from her memory the horrid lynching in Collinsville. That poor German man had come to America taking refuge in a dream, too. And what had his dreaming gotten him? She had seen how war fever turned people into animals. She no longer shared her father’s belief that the divine spark in people would always burn to chase the Devil’s darkness. She grasped Micah’s hands and pleaded with him. “Listen to me. If you leave our protection here, the government can do what it will with you. If you stay as pastor of this settlement, you will have the strength of numbers and prayers.”
“The English can force us to report,” he said. “But they cannot force us to fight. We will resist and remain silent with humility, just as Christ remained silent and resisted Pilate.”
Unable to sway him from this course, she turned in desperation to her father. “You can order him not to do this.”
But Jacob sat dazed, as if he could no longer hear her.
ANNA HAD WAITED FOR TWO hours outside the infirmary at Camp Zachary Taylor in Kentucky, but there was still no word if she would be allowed admittance. Earlier that week, the corpse of one of the Mennonite men reporting to the Army had been brought back in a coffin, a victim of the Spanish flu that was ravaging the military encampments. During the funeral, the deceased man had twitched, revealing to the horror and then relief of all that he was still alive.
It was then that she had decided to come here and bring Micah home.
She had not heard from him in three months. With her father now too ill to travel, she had made the long, terrifying journey alone. She was feeling faint, having not eaten since leaving Raglesville, and it had taken all of her waning strength just to persuade the gate guard to grant her a pass. After entering the camp that morning, she had learned to her distress that Micah was not housed with the other Mennonite men in the CO detention barracks, but was being kept under medical care.
Finally, the barracks door opened, and a soldier motioned her inside. “Ten minutes.”
Her heart raced as she passed through a door and walked down the aisle of sickbeds. She searched for Micah’s face among the sleeping and unconscious patients, but she couldn’t find him. Convinced that a mistake had been made, she was about to leave when one of the prostrate boys, his eyes closed in an agitated sleep, captured her wrist.
“Mama! Mama!” he cried. “Don’t leave me!”
She tried to escape, but the boy, caught in a nightmare, wouldn’t let go.
In the next bed over, an older man with burred gray hair and a toneless, pocked face shouted across the gape. “Amos! Wake up!”
The fever-addled boy looked up at Anna with rounded eyes, as if unable to understand why he was staring at a woman.
“He has these spells,” the older patient explained. “He hasn’t been in his right mind for weeks.”
The boy finally eased back into a fitful sleep, and she escaped his clawing grasp. She asked the coherent man next to him, “Do you know Micah Yoder?”
“Are you his sister?”
“No, we are to be married.”
After regarding the door, the older man sat up, wincing. He levered to his feet and, limping down the aisle, led her to another patient who lay unconscious, his legs chained to the bars of the footer.
Anna stared into the twisted face of the emaciated soldier. He was apparently out of his mind, his lips constantly moving but making no sound. Relieved, she shook her head. “No, my Micah has a beard. This is not him.”
“The officers sheared him. They sheared us all like this.”
She stared down at the shackled patient again—and stifled a gasp. She had not recognized him. His beardless face, sunken and wan from malnourishment, was bruised and marred with cuts. He looked ten years older than when she had last seen him.
“He’s been out for two days.”
She brought her fist to her mouth and turned away, trying not to let the other patients in the ward see her fall apart. Recovering enough to speak, she turned to the man who had helped her. She looked deeply into his deadened eyes and asked, “Are you one of us?”
The man shook his head. “I am a Hutterite pacifist. They dragged ten of us here from North Dakota. They despise me and my people, all right, but Micah has gotten the worst of it.”
She stroked Micah’s arm, at a loss how to help him. “But why him? He never hurt a living thing.”
“They found out he was a man of the cloth. I guess they figured if they could break him, the rest of us would follow. They tried to make us drill, but we refused. Then they drove us out to load ammunition onto wagons. Micah told them that transporting armaments was no different than firing them. He held up pretty good for a while, better than most of us. Beatings. Kickings. Cuttin’ us with bayonets. He kept us going. But then … “
She couldn’t bear to hear more, but she knew she must. “What happened?”
“They forced him to dig a grave. And they buried him alive.”
She braced against the wall to avoid collapsing.
The Hutterite man helped her sit on Micah’s bed. “They dug him up before he stopped breathing. Then they threw him into the latrine cesspool and pushed his head under. They were mocking Christ’s baptism. After that … well, he goes in and out now.”
She stared down at Micah, hoping that her touch would heal his fractured mind, but his eyes remained closed. “I have to get him out of here.”
“The Army ain’t let one CO go from this camp. They’re making an example of us for the rest of the country.”
She wrung out a cloth with warm water in a basin that sat on a table next to the bed. As she washed the grime and dried blood from Micah’s face, she prayed to God for guidance. None of these men around her were being cared for properly. She handed the basin to the Hutterite and gestured for him to follow her. She went from bed to bed, washing the abused faces of the objectors and asking their names so that she could contact their families back home.
After doing what she could for all of them, she retreated to a window to find fresh air. Through the pane, she saw a sign across the base pointing the way toward the office of the commandant. She whispered to the Hutterite objector who had helped her, “What is the name of the man who governs this place?”
“Colonel Riggins.”
She handed him the washcloth and marched out of the infirmary.
A ROUND-BELLIED OFFICER WITH CROPPED red hair that looked like wheat stubble sat lounging behind his desk with his feet kicked up. He slapped at a fan, trying to speed its blades in the stifling heat. When that didn’t work, he rolled up the short sleeves of his drab uniform, revealing biceps tattooed with images of profligate women and satanic-looking insignias. “So, you plan to marry that German slacker, huh? Maybe you can talk some sense into him.”
Anna’s skin crawled with revulsion at the officer’s crudeness. “Our people don’t believe in war.”
“Nah, you let the others do the fighting while you sit safe on your farms and enjoy prosperity. You think evil just slinks away because of prayer? Your Boche kinfolk across the pond are starving babies and raping Belgian women.”
“How could there be more evil over there than what is being done here?”
The officer reddened. “You go blabbing to the papers, lady, and I’ll make it even worse on that copperhead coward of yours.”
“Micah Yoder is a good man. He will die if he is forced to stay here.”
“That’s his choice.”
She felt utterly helpless. Her father had always promised her that the Light of the Almighty resided in every human soul, and that sometimes one just needed to search deeper for its source. Micah had sacrificed everything here for his faith. How could she stand by and do nothing while letting him suffer? She had prayed and prayed during this last hour, but God had given her no answer on a way to stop this madness. Seeing that she could say nothing more to convince this Godless man to show mercy, she stood to leave.
“Wait.”
At the door, she turned, expecting the officer to hurl more threats at her.
“That Bible thumper will go to his grave before he agrees to drill. I’ve seen enough of his blind stubbornness to know it. But I can’t let him off without paying a price. Every coward in the country would yelp his name in protest.”
“He has given everything for his faith.”
“Not everything.”
“What more can you take from him than his life?”
The officer lit up a cigarette and savored a couple of puffs. “During the Civil War, rich folk were allowed to pay for some fool immigrant off the boat to take their place in the draft. That doesn’t seem fair to me, but I don’t make the rules. Does that seem fair to you?”
She shook her head, unable to understand his point.
He lifted his boots off his desk and, pulling a document from under a stack of papers, waved it at her. “Congress just passed a law giving base commanders the discretion to furlough a few conscientious objectors to perform farm work for the duration of the war. Not the way I would have handled the problem, but I just take orders and pass them along. The furlough would require the CO to work at least fifty miles from his home.”
She allowed herself a prayer of hope. “Why are you telling me this?”
“That sonofabitch thinks he’s beaten me. But I won’t be humiliated in my own camp.”
She took a cautious step closer. “I can promise you, sir, that he meant no—”
“I’ll give your fiancé one of these precious furloughs. On one condition.”
She waited, expecting a demand that Micah make a public apology. She would convince him to do it, anything to get him out of this hell on—
“The guards at the infirmary told me you were a regular angel of mercy.”
“Sir?”
“Cleaning those slackers up. Washing their faces. Almost like you had a gift for healing.”
“I was just tending to their cuts. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, I think you’ve got what it takes to be a military nurse. There’s nothing in your faith that says you can’t tend to wounded, is there?”
“I don’t have any training.”
His smile widened into an evil grin. “You’ll learn quick enough. Instinct takes over the first time you see a man’s jugular gushing blood.”
“I haven’t seen any other women here. Where would I live?”
“Here?” The colonel guffawed. “No, you’ll be going to France.”
She stared at him in disbelief. “This is the farthest I’ve ever been from home. I have an elderly father who needs me.”
The colonel bounced to his feet and came shambling around the desk to loom over her. “That’s the deal. That bastard Yoder is about to find out that the Army has other ways to break a yellow sloper. I don’t give a damn if you take his place or not. Go back to your farm and tend your chickens, then come pick up his coffin when it’s Judgment Day.”
“Please—”
“Or we can do it my way. When we get confirmation from the Brits that you’ve arrived at the Front, I’ll release your preacher boy on furlough. And you won’t be allowed to see him until the war is over. You people are big on sacrificing for penance. I’d pay to see Yoder’s face when I tell him what his pigheadedness cost him.”
She closed her eyes to dam the tears. If this was the Lord’s wish, why had He delivered it to her through the Devil?