A soldier's mother in France

There is one thing our soldier sons are learning in France that is more valuable than the French language or history or any mere knowledge acquisition. Our men are learning the true meaning of nationalism, love of country and the flag.

Of late years we have had in the United States such a deluge of talk about “internationalism” that our young men had almost reached the point of being ashamed to feel patriotism. An insidious propaganda of pacifism, beginning in elementary schools all over the country, had undermined the old American pride in the flag. The children went through the motions of saluting the flag, true, but in too many schoolrooms the poisonous suggestion was given them that it was much nobler to love all flags and all countries equally with their own.

A young Jewish soldier from the east side of New York told me that, when he learned that he had been drafted, he actually contemplated suicide. It seemed to him a crime for him to become a soldier. His parents had fled from Russia to escape death at the hands of soldiers, but that was not why he was opposed to all war. It was because in his school, and afterward in the city college, he had imbibed what is miscalled internationalism.

“I went to training camp because I was afraid to resist,” said this young man. “I stayed and I worked hard because I liked it, liked my officers, and because, being assigned to the aviation service as a ground man, I knew I would not be obliged to kill Germans. I still believed that it was my duty to be international at heart.”

And then he told me how the conviction came to him that men can not love all countries unless they love their own first and best. “You see that work gang over there,” he said. “Those fellows are Russians. They are part of the Russian division that was sent to fight in France two or three years ago. You remember what a fine impression they made then. Well, after the revolution in Russia, or rather after the Bolshevist soldiers began running away from the fight, murdering their officers and clamoring for a separate peace, there was the question what to do with the Russian regiments in France.

“Some of the Russians it was impossible to trust. Some, at least, I don’t know how many, were bitten with the German propaganda. They did what they could to demoralize the French soldiers. Nobody knew but that they might betray the allies in the middle of a battle. The upshot of the whole thing was that they sent the Russian troops back from the front, and now they work in labor gangs. They don’t want to go back to their own country. Things are too bad there.

“Among our flyers was a young lieutenant who was born a Russian. Not a Jew, a Russian. He was finishing his training in this camp. It was partly the monotony and the lack of work that made him melancholy. You know we haven’t enough practise planes and the flying men are idle half the time. But mainly it was the sight of those Russian laborers that got on his nerves. He used sometimes to talk to them, and they were pathetically glad to have him, because nobody else spoke their language and they were lonesome.

“He said to me once: ‘When those poor devils landed in France the houses were decked with flags to greet them. The streets were full of cheering crowds and children threw flowers in their path. Now nobody trusts them to fight. They are outcasts. They have no country, and no country wants to adopt them.’ I tried to tell him that he was wrong, that the allies wanted to help Russia to get back, but it was no good.

“By and by this man took it into his head that he was distrusted because he had been born a Russian. It wasn’t true. But he thought it was. He said so. One day he went up in an altitude test with an observer. He was acting as pilot, but the machine had a double control and the man with him was a cool and capable flyer. Otherwise the thing might have been even worse than it was. For when they were six thousand feet up and still climbing, the Russian suddenly unbuckled the belt that secured him in his seat, and before the observer could even guess what he was about to do, he stepped over the side of the machine into space.

“That settled me. I said to myself that I would rather be dead than be a man without a country. That’s what that poor fellow figured that he was, and all other Russians. But I’m not a Russian, nor an internationalist, nor anything else but a one hundred per cent. American, and if they want me to kill boches, I’m ready to begin any minute.”

A man without a country. Is there any sentence in the language, any combination of words more dreadful? Yet what the German propagandists, which is the real name of many of the pacifists and “internationalists,” have been trying to do to American youth is to take their country away from them. They nearly succeeded, and the proof of that was the three years of indifference we loitered through before we woke up to the fact that this war was ours, as well as England’s, France’s and Belgium’s.

We failed to realize that our country was in immediate peril, because we had almost forgotten that we had a country. Are we all awake to the fact yet? No, because, if we were, there would not be left anywhere from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific one single disloyal citizen, one single copperhead or so-called internationalist. No community would tolerate them. There would be no corner where they could hide.

Some of the Socialist party leaders are beginning to see a great light on the subject of loyalty to the government, and are advocating a new policy toward the war. Their last party platform read like one of Trotzky’s messages to the Petrograd Soviet, but now even the late Socialist candidate for mayor of New York, who appealed for the pacifist vote, and got it, is beginning to talk about revising the platform.

Unless it is revised, the Socialists are going to lose their adherents at present serving in France. The Jewish boys who, a little over a year ago, were orating from soap boxes against the draft and against what they called “this profiteers’ war,” are among the hottest young patriots and keenest fighters in the American army.

I saw some of those boys at Camp Upton last autumn. I saw one who was sitting in a corner blubbering like a small child because he was being sent to Spartanburg. He was being transferred because he was continually begging to be allowed to go home. His captain told me that the only thing to do with him was to send him so far away from New York that week-end visits home would be impossible.

I saw other Jewish boys who were unwilling soldiers then, but every one I saw in France was enthusiastic about his work, and as little of an internationalist as the young man in the aviation camp. The Jewish soldier has made good. I was told so by many officers, and I saw it for myself.

Our soldiers have not been taught to hate the Germans, and I don’t think they do hate them. It is certain that the French people with whom our men associate do not. But they scorn and loathe the Hindenburg method of making war, and this attitude our men share. They regard the Germans with horror rather than hatred, and so must all Americans who even faintly realize what is going on every day and hour in the invaded districts of Belgium and France.

Our soldiers, many of them, have seen this terrible thing, and it has made their blood run hot in their arteries, it has set their jaws hard, and caused their eyes to blaze. What theories they have ever had about internationalism have been dissipated by the facts with which they are faced.

The submarine war has come home to our men, sometimes as a bitter personal experience.

In a Y. M. C. A. canteen I came upon a young corporal who had found a seat behind the piano, and he was sitting there weeping his heart out over a letter from home, a letter telling him how his brother had died when the Germans torpedoed the Tuscania. I sat down beside this soldier. He seemed to need somebody, and I was the only woman near. In a few minutes he was himself again, outwardly at least, and he read me the letter.

It was from his sister, because, she said, mother was taking it very hard and could not write yet. When the ship went down brother managed to get on a raft which was very much overcrowded. There were so many men on the raft that the brother’s chum, who was in bad shape with a broken leg, was pushed off into the water.

Brother was a good swimmer and he managed to rescue his chum and to get him back on the raft. But while he was in the water two more men, half drowned and desperate, had climbed aboard, and the raft was now several inches under seas. So this heroic young American soldier, unwilling to jeopardize his comrades’ life, gave up his own.

“Tell my mother and the family that I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to fight for America,” he said, and sank into the black and icy ocean.

“Well, I can fight,” said the soldier who read me that letter. “And every time I am allowed to go over the top I shall remember how they killed my kid brother in the dark.”

American men are accustomed from their childhood to see women treated with respect and children with tenderness. They see with horror-stricken eyes the women and children refugees from the war invaded districts flying before a foe that knows no pity, that treats combatant and non-combatant with equal cruelty and wrath.

I have told of a Sunday I spent in a railroad station in the first days of the great spring offensive, and of the southward bound trains bearing the wounded and the homeless. With me on that platform were several American soldiers, two or three members of the military police. They were there primarily to look after our soldiers passing up and down the line, but they worked hard to help the stricken refugees, hundreds of whom were fed and ministered to that day by the French Red Cross.

They were mostly women and children and old men, and their plight was pitiful. This was the second time that they had fled before the German hordes. Last November, after the “victorious retreat,” they had crept back to their ruined and desolated villages and farms, and with the aid of their government and the American societies for French reconstruction had begun life again.

In their shells of houses and in their shattered little farms they gladly took up the work of gaining a little bread. Then, without any warning, the awful flood of war swept over them again.

They fled, half clad, never pausing to collect their poor belongings. Without the blessed help of the Red Cross they would have died of starvation on the road. Everything they ever had was gone. They stumbled off the trains, dazed, with white blank faces and staring empty eyes.

I saw those American soldiers carrying old women and little children into the Red Cross canteen, feeding them, ministering to them, all the time muttering curses on the fiends who had brought them to this bitter pass.

“Oh, we have work to do over here,” one of these men said to me. “God help the kaiser when we get fairly into this war.” And then he exclaimed: “Are there really any pacifists left in America? If there are I wish they could see what we have seen to-day.”

I wish so, too. I wish I could show the theorists, the “internationalists,” what I saw of those French refugees, the poor, despoiled working people and farmers who fled, as the hordes of old fled before Attila, another scourge of God, but one not less tigerish or void of soul.