Mary Russel - Dreamers of the Day

Photograph on page 156: Gertrude Bell Photographic Archive, Newcastle University

For Dad, Don, and Dan

Its remarkable how much a woman

can accomplish when the men in her life

are strong and good.

I SUPPOSE I OUGHT TO WARN YOU at the outset that my present circumstances are puzzling, even to me. Nevertheless, I am sure of this much: my little story has become your history. You wont really understand your times until you understand mine.

You must try to feel the hope and amazement of those years. Anything seemed possiblethe end of ignorance, the end of disease, the end of poverty. Physics and chemistry, medicine and engineering were breaking through old boundaries. In the cities, skyscrapers shredded clouds. Trucks and automobiles were crowding out horse-drawn cabs and drays in the boulevards below. The pavement was clean: no stinking piles of dung, no buzz of flies.

In 1913, America had a professor-president in the White Housea man of intelligence and principle, elected to clean up the corruption that had flourished in the muck of politics for so long. Public health and public schools were beating back the darkness in slums and settlements. The poor were lifted up and the proud brought down as Progressives reined in the power of Big Money.

In the homes of the middle class, our lives ticked along like clocks, well regulated and precise. We had electric lights, electric toasters, electric fans. On Sundays, there were newspaper advertisements for vacuum cleaners, wringer-washers, and automobiles. Our bathrooms were clean, modern, and indoors. We believed that good nutrition and good moral hygiene would make us healthy, wealthy, and wise. We had every reason to think that tomorrow would be better than today. And the day after that? Better yet!

The Great War and the Great Influenza fell on our placid world almost without warning.

Imagine: around the world, millions and millions and millions vital and alive one day, slack-jawed dead the next. Imagine people dying in such numbers that they had to be buried in mass graves dug with steam shovelsdying not of some ancient plague or in some faraway land, but dying here and now, right in front of you. Imagine knowing that nothing could ensure your survival. Imagine that you know this not in theory, not from reading about it in books, but from how it feels to lift your own foot high and step wide over a corpse.

What would you do?

Ill tell you what a lot of us did. We boozed and screwed like there was no tomorrow. We shed encumbrances and avoided entangle-ments.We were tough cookies, slim customers, swell guys, real dolls. We made our own fun and our own gin, drinking lakes of the stuff, drinking until we could Charleston on the graves. Life is for the living! Pooh, pooh, skiddoo! Drink upthe night is young!

I dont want children, said one celebrated writer after an abortion. Wed have nothing in common. Children dont drink.

Does such callousness shock you? I suppose it does, but you see, by that time the plain stale fact of mortality had become so commonplace, so tedious Well, mourning simply went out of style.

And just between you and me? Even if you find yourself among illustrious souls, you can get awfully tired of the dead.

Let me count my own. Lillian and Douglas, and their two young sons. Uncle John. And Mumma, of course. Six. No, wait! Seven. My brother, Ernest, was the first.

I last saw Ernest in September of 1918. Slim in khaki, a mustachioed captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, my brother waved from the window of a train packed three boys to every double seat. They were headed for Newport News, where the battalion would ship out for Europe.

By the time Ernest left for the coast, five million European soldiers had already disappeared into the sausage machine. Thats what their commanders called the Great War. To understand why, you must call to mind some modern war. Think of the casualties endured in a years time, or five years, or ten. Now imagine sixty thousand men killed in a single day of combat: meat fed to the guns. Imagine four years like that.

America stared, aghast and uncomprehending, while the Old World gorged on its young and smashed its civilization to pieces for reasons no one was able to explain. From the start, there was some war sentiment in America, but it was largely confined to those who knew there was money to be made selling weapons, uniforms, steel, and ships, should America join the fight.

Reelected, barely, on a peace platform, our professor-president remained steadfast even when he was called a coward for refusing to involve us in the madness of foreigners. Then, eight weeks after Wood-row Wilsons second inaugural, a document was captured and made public. In it, the German foreign minister urged the Mexican government to join Germany in a war against the United States and, in so doing, to reclaim the lost lands of New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Call me cynical. I always thought that document was a fraud. And if it were genuine, why send our boys to France if the threat was on our southern border?

Of course, I was just a schoolteachera woman without a vote of my own, or even a husband to persuade. The men all said that document changed everything. Certainly Mr. Wilson believed it did. When he turned the ship of state toward Europe, the nation cheered and felt gratified to have exciting newspaper stories to talk about at breakfast. Those of us who saw no need for war found the enthusiasm of our fellow citizens bewildering. I read all the papers, frantic to understand why this was happening to my country and the world. To me, Mr. Wilsons conversion was so shocking, it seemed Saint Paul had renounced Christ to become Saul once more. But there you are: the reason for going to war might be a shameless hoax, but the war itself was real and, by God, America was in it!

In fact, Mr. Wilson informed the nation, the Almighty Himself no longer wanted America to stand aloof from the slaughter in the Old World. America, the president declared, was born to exemplify devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.

By turning the other cheek? I wondered. Silly woman

No, exemplifying righteousness required America to fight a war to end all wars, a war so brutal and ruthless that war would never be waged again. Mr. Wilson assured us that this crusade was Gods will and Gods work.

If Abraham Lincoln had erred in allowing the press to criticize the government during our Civil War, Woodrow Wilson vowed, I wont repeat his mistakes. The president didnt repeal the First Amendment; he had, after all, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution. The press could print what it liked, of course, but the post office didnt have to deliver it. The Wilson administration ordered the confiscation of anything unpatriotic, which is to say anything critical of his administration. Total war demanded totalitarian power, Mr. Wilson told a compliant Congress. There are citizens of the United States, the president thundered, who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed.

Anyone who protested, or even voiced reluctance, was called a traitor. Mr. Eugene Debs was sentenced to decades in prison. His crime? He said that a war abroad did not excuse tyranny at home.

Mexico was all but forgotten in the excitement.

Thats why, by the summer of 1918, a million American men had been mobilized to fightfrom career officers like my brother, Ernest, to draftees straight off the farm. Ernests train left Cleveland carrying nearly 250 soldiers, including a boy from Wooster who seemed to have a dreadful cold. When the troops arrived on the Virginia coast two days later, more than 120 of the soldiers already had the flu. Sixty others were ill within a day or two.