The Genius of America (collection)/A Conversation on Ostriches
A Conversation on Ostriches
The Reputations of the nineteenth century will one day be quoted to prove its barbarism.
"If the world," said Thorpe in his usual ponderous manner of deepening a light chat by the fireside, "if the world possessed a livelier realistic imagination, it could dispense to advantage with a great part of its idealism." Thorpe is one of the intellectual amphibians developed by the unsettled environment of thought in our times. You know the sort. You can never tell where to have him, for he is always stoutly denying that he is what a moment before you thought he obviously was. "No, no, I'm not a pacifist. Don't class me with the Radicals. Why should you think I'm opposed to universal military service?" That sort of man.
We had been speaking of the nervous unrest and a kind of mild epidemic hypochondria which were more noticeable through the period of negotiations for peace than they were in the course of the war. "The trouble is," I had suggested, "that we are all suffering from exacerbated imaginations. It is impossible to be cheerful in a constant sense that each one of us is personally responsible for the misgovernment of every Southern European state. We cannot be expected to continue indefinitely responding with a lively pang to every toothache in the Balkans. Of course those who are appointed to the work must clean up the mess. But for the average man in America the motto should now be 'Business as usual.' In his recreative hours he should drop the war books and read Jane Austen's Emma. He should abjure the war pictures and visit an Arcadian musical comedy, Seriously, I see no remedy for despair but some form of profoundly attending to one's own business."
"Ostriches!" snorted Thorpe. "You tories are all ostriches. You started the war with your heads in the sand, you got them out towards the end of it, but you won't be happy till you have them snugly in again. Have you seen what Irving Babbitt calls the war?—'the crowning stupidity of the ages.' Babbitt is one of the people who occasionally look at the total human aspect of the thing. What he means is that the entire performance, if held off and scrutinized at arm's length—say, an arm the length of Socrates's—looks like the act of an angry and underbred child. Now the time to punish and admonish a child is when his mischief is fresh in his mind. You are for soothing him with syrups. I don't agree with you. Most of the people I know are already following exactly your prescription. Their nervous unrest is due to the fact that they are trying to have a good time when their consciences tell them that they deserve a thrashing."
"Come, now," I interrupted rather hotly, "don't you admit that the Germans were responsible for the war? When they struck at civilization, what were we to do?"
"Strike back of course," said Thorpe coolly; "but that, I trust, doesn't make it impossible for you to 'regret the entire incident.' The crowning stupidity of the ages might, I should think, without lifting the onus from the chief aggressors, be viewed by all the participants with a considerable measure of regret. I myself find the regretful mood morally so illuminating that I dislike to see it giving way so soon in this country to the post-war festivity. In the case of men who have been in the trenches and hospitals, perhaps a little riot of pleasure and relaxation is as useful as a hypodermic after surgical shock. If I were in Russia, France, or England, probably I should prescribe counterirritants, lenitives, sedatives. Imaginations there have been cut into deeply enough to hold the impression. But the average American of my acquaintance has been just enough touched by the war to regret that he was not in it. He prepared, indeed, to face the full meaning of battle, but nine out of ten of him faced little more than Jack Fairley did, and stand in as much need of a sweet oblivious antidote."
I could remember nothing of Fairley but his name in a list of men who received their degree in absentia—for military service.
"Jack was the best tennis-player in college, the best dresser, the best cheek-to-cheek dancer. Popular son of prosperous father. Not a bad fellow. Clean-cut, well-groomed American type. I met him in the Pullman smoker in war time, full of the big "scrap." He had won a second lieutenancy in the Coast Artillery, but was on leave, and was off with his mandolin, in an admirably fitting uniform, to enliven and decorate some house-party or other. Jack has a flow of spirits, and he told me of the hardships of his camp life by the sea. What I remember is his embarrassment at regulations which made it impossible for him to spend his evenings with certain privates of his company who were also classmates and brethren of his fraternity. For this deprivation, however, he solaced himself at a neighboring sea-side hotel, where every evening patriotic young women of excellent families and first-rate personal qualifications danced with the officers, for their country. He told me that he had two grand ambitions: the first was to fire his gun in France; the second was to come home, remove his puttees, and get into a pair of silk socks again. He has realized the second; and for the first, though he never got overseas, he is probably still receiving substantial credit this summer among the fair friends with whom he is yachting off the Maine coast."
"Well," I inquired, "why shouldn't he? What do you want to do to Jack—make him miserable?"
"Not wholly," Thorpe retorted, "but I should like to send to him—and to his father—for summer reading in the hammock, a copy of Georges Duhamel's Civilization, 1914-1917. It would stir up an organ in him that the war hasn't touched yet—his imagination. Have you seen the book? Goncourt Prize last year. Disquieting, but really worth reading. One of the notable impressions from the front. It hasn't the picturesque energy or sullen intensity of Barbusse. It isn't a merely excruciating picture of mental and physical horror, like Latzko's Men in War. And it quite lacks the splendor of baffled fighting heroism that distinguishes Masefield's Gallipoli. But it takes you overseas and puts you where you can see what went on here and there. Not the whole story but a part of it that you are inclined to blink at. Furthermore, it's literature; it has a personality of its own with a peculiar humor, blending irony, tenderness, grimness, resignation—faithfully expressing the mixture of astonishment, curiosity, and dismay with which the average man in the years of our Lord 1914-1917 dumbly assisted the lords of the earth in consigning civilization temporarily—I said 'temporarily'—to the devil."
"I have read the book," I said, "but with rather less enthusiasm. I must say it affected me very much as certain chapters in the modern novels do, chapters that I should like to tear out, chapters considering with a morbid and unholy curiosity and publicity the physiological processes attendant on an event which in the older fiction was smilingly reported by physician or nurse to a man 'pacing restlessly back and forth in the room below.' I object to these chapters because they tend to produce extravagant and unnecessary terror before an event which really must be faced if the agreeable race to which we belong is to increase and multiply and spread the blessings of civilization among the Prussians and other backward peoples. For precisely the same reason I object to Duhamel's book."
"I see," Thorpe broke in, with a rather crudely ironical tone, "for precisely the same reason. Your analogy is flawless. Maternity and war are both necessary, both inevitable, if the race is to continue. You object to deterrents from either. In what German work did you learn of the sacred inevitability of war, the holy duty of handing the torch of battle on from generation to generation? Between deterring people from what is necessary to the perpetuation of life and deterring people from the unnecessary destruction of it, there is, I should think, a not inconsiderable difference."
"You do not, you said, take the radical pacifist position? You aren't ready with Russell to lie down and let the invader swarm over you?"
"No."
"Then admit that the book is dispiriting, demoralizing. It steadily envisages the seamy side of military life without a glimpse of the incontrovertible glamor and glory of battle. That sort of writing is ruinous to morale. It is just what shouldn't be read by a young soldier. It sets the imagination to work. You recall why boys between eighteen and twenty make better soldiers than men of forty: they haven't any imagination. They don't consider what they are getting into, but put their heads down and go in. A man of forty stays awake nights seeing a picture of himself lying in No Man's Land under fire with his leg blown off. Duhamel sets your mind running that way."
"'Civilization,'" Thorpe admitted, "is not the thing to present to a soldier on the way to the front line trenches. It gives too vividly a sense of the sights and smells of the receiving hospital, the operating room, the morgue. But we are not on the way to the trenches now. Jack Fairley is probably reading The Cosmopolitan in his hammock at Bar Harbor. Other people, of whom life makes more serious exactions, are soberly reckoning up the profit and loss of the international readjustments we have just been making. There has been even a little fundamental reconsideration of the wisdom of making such adjustments in the manner hitherto fashionable among enlightened people. I should really like to see the matter quite thoroughly overhauled with all available evidence and testimony. The report of a French ambulance surgeon through whose hands the débris of battle drifted to the rear is a legitimate and useful portion of the evidence. I remember hearing a grizzled old Tartar of the Regular Army working up what you call morale in a bunch of young college boys. 'If you're killed,' he told them, 'you're all right. If you're wounded, you're a damn nuisance!' Those college boys all laughed heartily. Now Duhamel makes you understand why, if you're wounded, you're a nuisance."
"And what is the value of that?"
"As a modern realist in an age that prides itself on the remorseless facing of facts, I am in favor of removing the gilded lid of war and looking inside. Somehow I don't fancy this notion of horrors that can only be met by boys who don't know what they are up against. Sending them in savors to me of what I call modern German idealism."
"Please explain," I said, for Thorpe knows no philosophy and uses the terms in odd senses of his own.
"Modern German idealism," said Thorpe, "means retreating from facts into the quieter region of ideas. It means, shut your eyes and everything is lovely. For example, in the days of the Belgian atrocities, the German idealist, we were told, laid this unction to his soul: that the horror of military executions and other harsh punitive measures was mitigated by the fact that those who ordered the sanguinary acts were never the ones who carried them out. It is not clear that this division of responsibility diminishes the horror for the victim. But one readily understands that a cultivated judge who, in the purity of his military idealism, had ordered the shooting of Edith Cavell would sleep the better on the following night if he were not obliged to see the English nurse actually crumple up under the fire of his own rifle. Or, to remove the matter from the hot air of controversy, take the case of Pontius Pilate. As he appears to have been a man of some fineness of sensibility and at the same time tainted with Teutonic idealism, it is more than likely that he refrained from visiting Golgotha to investigate the mere physical consequences of his having washed his hands of responsibility. He withdrew, I suspect, into his own cultivated though somewhat unimaginative mind, and left the eye-witnessing of the thing to a squad of soldiers under orders and to calloused workmen handy with hammer and nails."
"You mean to suggest that if Pilate had possessed a lively imagination, he might not have washed his hands?"
"Just that," said Thorpe. "I attribute the cruelty of his refined nature to his shrinking and cowardly imagination. It is the case of the whole modern world. You shut your eyes and wrap the mantles of your abstract ideas around you and lie down in the midst of horrible realities to pleasant dreams. You can't stand the gaff. Consider how you and other nice men and women shudder away from the deformed and malodorous results of the conflict of your own ideas in these times. I concede that your self-protective idealism has its uses in a crisis. It was the stimulant which made you enter and endure the conflict. It is the opiate which dulls your sense of its pains. It is as busy to-day as the robins that covered the babes in the woods, weaving a pleasant shroud for dreadful things, hiding them away from the eyes of men for fear of what they might do to the heart if they reached it rawly through the senses."
"Be a little more specific."
"Very well. The only son has given his life for his country. Do not ask for the details. They are distressing. What is left of the only son is brought home for burial. The good clergyman tactfully fixes the attention of father and mother upon the spiritual values preserved by his sacrifice. Over the shattered face the coffin lid is closed. Over the coffin the great flag is draped. Over the grave, smelling too pungently of freshly turned earth, a smother of flowers is strewn. The poet sings of victory. The politicians go forth to address their constituents. And Congress, in the warm afterglow of battle, cheerfully appropriates a million dollars to distribute up and down the land the trophies of the Great War."
"I see nothing objectionable," I said, "in any part of your programme. Everyone seems to be making the best of it. What more can one do? Surely you wouldn't propose harrowing the feelings of the parents who had lost their son by an exhibition or a Zolaesque description of the boy's face."
"No," Thorpe retorted tenaciously, "but I should like to harrow a little the feelings of parents who have not lost their son. I should like to harrow the feelings of Jack Fairley's parents. Already they and ninety per cent. of the American people are beginning to think of those four infernal years as a fairy-tale, with some breathless places in the middle, but coming out all right and happy in the end. In a little while the mere physical reek and wreck will be cleared away, and ten years hence our schoolboys will speak of the year 1914 without a thought of hunger, disease, gas-gangrene, trench fever, lice, or carrion—the spectres which rise in my mind to-day when I think of those German trophies in the park. The realistic imagination, which for a few bitter months brought these things home to comfortable people in America, will be slumbering again; and the young generation will fancy, as we did once on a time, that war is mainly an affair of flags and heroes and martial music."
"If you are not a pacifist," I said, "you sound remarkably like one. I don't see what you are driving at."
"You're mistaken," Thorpe replied, "I'm not arguing against war. That would be silly. Senator Lodge and General Wood and other idealists insist that we shall have war every little while always; and what such men insist upon is pretty likely to take place. I think, as they do, therefore, that we had better be prepared. Perhaps I believe ir an even more comprehensive plan of preparation than theirs. Since they are always talking of the ships and guns, I'm willing to trust them to provide that element. What interests me is that the country should be kept in a state of imaginative preparedness; that is, I want to be sure that it is ready to go in with a clear realistic preliminary vision of costs and consequences, such as never entered the heads, for example, of the military idealists in Germany and Austria. Civilization is now in a horrid predicament from an overdrawn bank account, the result of a shifty, evasive feminine habit of buying and 'charging' all sorts of expensive things without any adequate anticipative facing of the bills. War is a firstclass luxury, the cost of which should be contemplated coolly, like the purchase of a yacht or the commission of a crime, to determine whether one can afford it. Too many of my neighbors fancy they are paying for the war when they are only detaching the coupons from their Liberty bonds."
"That is doubtless true," I assented, "but do you know any practical remedy?"
"Whatever," said Thorpe, "stimulates the imagination, that faculty which sees absent things as they really are, will be useful. The German war trophies will help. Duhamel's book will help. I have still another suggestion. In searching the Old Testament along with Mr. Wells and Mr. William Hohenzollern, I have lately been struck with the ingenuity of the ancient Hebrew kings and prophets in driving important matters in on the sluggish imaginations of their countrymen. I refer to the device of cutting a malefactor into twelve pieces and sending a section to each one of the tribes through all the coasts of Israel. Perhaps we ought not to follow this example literally. We might, I think, adapt its leading idea to aur modern circumstances. We have at hand a fair number, not of malefactors, but of returned soldiers, already cut up by the enemy in various fashions, some with the loss of a leg, some an arm, some an eye or a nose or a larger segment of the face. What if to each town or village that received a German trophy, Congress should also send, to sit in the park at public expense, one of these more or less fragmentary men? Wouldn't it help unimaginative idealists to make rational estimates for the next war?"
"Thorpe," I said, "I'm glad you're absurd. If you weren't absurd, I shouldn't be at all sure you aren't seditious."