Edith Wharton - Novel 14 (14 page)

 
          
A
gleam of shrewdness flashed through Benny Upsher’s inarticulate blue eyes. “A
word or two against, you mean? Why, it’s awfully kind, but not the least
earthly use. I guess I’ve heard all the arguments. But all I see is that
hulking bully trying to do
Belgium
in.
England
’s coming in, ain’t she? Well, then why
ain’t we?”

 
          
“
England
? Why—why, there’s no analogy”

 
          
The
young man groped for the right word. “I don’t know.
Maybe
not.
Only in tight places we always do seem to stand together.”

 
          
“You’re
mad—this is not our war. Do you really want to go out and butcher people?”

 
          
“Yes—this
kind of people,” said Benny Upsher cheerfully. ‘You see, I’ve had all this talk
from Uncle Harvey Mayhew a good many times on the way over. We came out on the
same boat: he wanted me to be his private secretary at the Hague Congress. But
I was pretty sure I’d have a job of my own to attend to.”

 
          
Campton
still contemplated him hopelessly. “Where is your uncle?” he wondered.

 
          
Benny
grinned. “On his way to
the Hague
, I suppose.”

 
          
“He
ought to be here to look after you—some one ought to!”

 
          
“Then
you don’t see your way to getting me into George’s regiment?” Benny simply
replied.

 
          
An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with
obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question.
It cost him
an effort to shake off the vision.

 
          
He
returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a
telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George’s
plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged
something…

 
          
He
tore open the message, and read: “
Utica
July thirty-first. No news from Benny
please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to
America
dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline
Upsher.”

 
          
“Good
Lord!” Campton groaned—”and I never even asked the boy’s address!”

 
          
  

 
          
The
war was three months old—three centuries. By virtue of some gift of adaptation
which seemed forever to discredit human sensibility, people were already
beginning to live into the monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its
language, regard it as a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by
day, and sleep on it—yes, and soundly—at night.

 
          
The
war went on; life went on;
Paris
went on. She had had her great hour of resistance, when, alone, exposed
and defenceless, she had held back the enemy and broken his strength. She had
had, afterward, her hour of triumph, the hour of the
Marne
; then her hour of passionate and prayerful
hope, when it seemed to the watching nations that the enemy was not only held
back but thrust back, and victory finally in reach. That hour had passed in its
turn, giving way to the grey reality of the trenches. A new speech was growing
up in this new world. There were trenches now, there was a “Front”—people were
beginning to talk of their sons at the front.

 
          
The
first time John Campton heard the phrase it sent a shudder through him. Winter
was coming on, and he was haunted by the vision of the youths out there, boys
of George’s age, thousands and thousands of them, exposed by day in reeking wet
ditches and sleeping at night under the rain and snow. People were talking
calmly of victory in the spring—the spring that was still six long months away!
And meanwhile, what cold and wet, what blood and agony, what shattered bodies
out on that hideous front, what shattered homes in all the lands it guarded!

 
          
Campton
could bear to think of these things now. His son was not at the front—was safe,
thank God, and likely to remain so!

 
          
During
the first awful weeks of silence and uncertainty, when every morning brought
news of a fresh disaster, when no letters came from the army and no private
mesages could reach it—during those weeks, while Campton, like other fathers,
was without news of his son, the war had been to him simply a huge featureless
mass crushing him earthward, blinding him, letting him neither think nor move
nor breathe.

 
          
But
at last he had got permission to go to Châlons, whither Fortin, who chanced to
have begun his career as a surgeon, had been hastily transferred. The
physician, called from his incessant labours in a roughly-improvised
operating-room, to which Campton was led between rows of stretchers laden with
livid blood-splashed men, had said kindly, but with a shade of impatience, that
he had not forgotten, had done what he could; that George’s health did not
warrant his being discharged from the army, but that he was temporarily on a
staff-job at the rear, and would probably be kept there if such and such
influences were brought to bear. Then, calling for hot water and fresh towels,
the surgeon vanished and Campton made his way back with lowered eyes between
the stretchers.

 
          
The
“influences” in question were brought to bear—not without Anderson Brant’s
assistance—and now that George was fairly certain to be kept at clerical work a
good many miles from the danger-zone Campton felt less like an ant under a
landslide, and was able for the first time to think of the war as he might have
thought of any other war: objectively, intellectually, almost dispassionately,
as of history in the making.

 
          
It
was not that he had any doubt as to the rights and wrongs of the case. The
painfully preserved equilibrium of the neutrals made a pitiful show now that
the monstrous facts of the first weeks were known:
Germany
’s diplomatic perfidy, her savagery in the
field, her premeditated and systematized terrorizing of the civil populations.
Nothing could efface what had been done in
Belgium
and
Luxembourg
, the burning of
Louvain
, the bombardment of
Rheims
. These successive outrages had roused in
Campton the same incredulous wrath as in the rest of mankind; but being of a
speculative mind—and fairly sure now that George would never lie in the mud and
snow with the others—he had begun to consider the landslide in its universal
relations, as well as in its effects on his private ant-heap.

 
          
His
son’s situation, however, was still his central thought. That this lad, who was
meant to have been born three thousand miles away in his own safe warless
country, and who was regarded by the government of that country as having been
born there, as subject to her laws and entitled to her protection—that this
lad, by the most idiotic of blunders, a blunder perpetrated before he was born,
should have been dragged into a conflict in which he was totally unconcerned,
should become temporarily and arbitrarily the subject of a foreign state,
exposed to whatever catastrophes that state might draw upon itself, this fact
dawned on him that his boy’s very life might hang on some tortuous secret
negotiation between the cabinets of Europe.

 
          
He
still refused to admit that
France
had any claim on George, any right to his
time, to his suffering or to his life. He had argued it out a hundred times
with Adele Anthony. “You say Julia and I were to blame for not going home
before the boy was born—and God knows I agree with you! But suppose we’d meant
to go? Suppose we’d made every arrangement, taken every precaution, as my
parents did in my case, got to Havre or Cherbourg, say, and been told the
steamer had broken her screw—or been prevented ourselves, at the last moment,
by illness or accident, or any sudden grab of the Hand of God? You’ll admit we
shouldn’t have been to blame for that; yet the law would have recognized no
difference. George would still have found himself a French soldier on the second
of last August because, by the same kind of unlucky accident, he and I were
born on the wrong side of the
Atlantic
.
And I say that’s enough to prove it’s an iniquitous law, a travesty of justice.
Nobody’s going to convince me that, because a steamer may happen to break a
phlange of her screw at the wrong time, or a poor woman be frightened by a
thunderstorm,
France
has the right to force an American boy to go and rot in the trenches.”

 
          
“In
the trenches—is George in the trenches?” Adele Anthony asked, raising her pale
eyebrows.

 
          
“No,”
Campton thundered, his fist crashing down among her tea things; “and all your
word-juggling isn’t going to convince me that he ought to be there.” He paused
and stared furiously about the little lady-like drawing-room into which Miss
Anthony’s sharp angles were so incongruously squeezed. She made no answer, and
he went on: “George looks at the thing exactly as I do.”

 
          
“Has
he told you so?” Miss Anthony enquired, rescuing his teacup and putting sugar
into her own.

 
          
“He
has told me nothing to the contrary. You don’t seem to be aware that military
correspondence is censored, and that a solider can’t always blurt out
everything he thinks.”

 
          
Miss
Anthony followed his glance about the room, and her eyes paused with his on her
own portrait, now in the place of honour over the mantelpiece, where it hung
incongruously above a menagerie of china animals and a collection of trophies
for the Marne.

 
          
“I
dropped in at the
Luxembourg
yesterday,” she said. “Do you know whom I
saw there?
Anderson Brant.
He was looking at George’s
portrait, and turned as red as a beet. You ought to do him a sketch of George
some day—after this.”

 
          
Campton’s
face darkened. He knew it was partly through Brant’s influence that George had
been detached from his regiment and given a staff job in the Argonne; but Miss
Anthony’s reminder annoyed him. The Brants had acted through sheer selfish
cowardice, the desire to safeguard something which belonged to them, something
they valued as they valued their pictures and tapestries, though of course in a
greater degree; whereas he, Campton, was sustained by a principle which he
could openly avow, and was ready to discuss with any one who had the leisure to
listen.

 
          
He
had explained all this so often to Miss Anthony that the words rose again to
his lips without an effort. “If it had been a national issue I should have
wanted him to be among the first: such as our having to fight Mexico, for
instance”

 
          
“Yes;
or the moon. For my part, I understand Julia and Anderson better. They don’t
care a fig for national issues; they’re just animals defending their cub.”

 
          
“Their—thank you!”
Campton exclaimed.

 
          
“Well,
poor Anderson really was a dry-nurse to the boy. Who else was there to look
after him? You were painting Spanish beauties at the time.” She frowned.
“Life’s a puzzle. I see perfectly that if you’d let everything else go to keep
George you’d never have become the great John Campton: the real John Campton
you were meant to be. And it wouldn’t have been half as satisfactory for you—or
for George either. Only, in the meanwhile, somebody had to blow the child’s
nose, and pay his dentist and doctor; and you ought to be grateful to Anderson
for doing it. Aren’t there bees or ants, or
something, that
are kept for such purposes?”

 
          
Campton’s
lips were opened to reply when her face changed, and he saw that he had ceased
to exist for her. He knew the reason. That look came over everybody’s face
nowadays at the hour when the evening paper came. The old maid-servant brought
it in, and lingered to hear the communique. At that hour, everywhere over the
globe, business and labour and pleasure (if it still existed) were suspended
for a moment while the hearts of all men gathered themselves up in a question
and prayer.

 
          
Miss
Anthony sought for her lorgnon and failed to find it. With a shaking hand she
passed the newspaper over to Campton.

 
          
“Violent
enemy attacks in the region of Dixmude, Ypres, Armentières, Arras, in the
Argonne, and on the advanced slopes of the Grand Couronne de Nancy, have been
successfully repulsed. We have taken back the village of Soupir, near Vailly
(Aisne); we have taken Maucourt and Mogeville, to the northeast of Verdun.
Progress has been made in the region of Vermelles (Pas-de-Calais), south of Aix
Noulette. Enemy attacks in the Hauts-de-Meuse and southeast of Saint-Mihiel
have also been repulsed.

 
          
“In
Poland the Austrian retreat is becoming general. The Russians are still
advancing in the direction of Kielce-Sandomir and have progressed beyond the
San in Galicia. Mlawa has been reoccupied, and the whole railway system of
Poland is now controlled by the Russian forces.”

 
          
A good day—oh, decidedly a good day.
At this rate, what
became of the gloomy forecasts of the people who talked of a winter in the
trenches, to be followed by a spring campaign? True, the Serbian army was still
retreating before superior Austrian forces—but there too the scales would soon
be turned if the Russians continued to progress. That day there was hope
everywhere: the old maid-servant went away smiling, and Miss Anthony poured out
another cup of tea.

 
          
Campton
had not lifted his eyes from the paper. Suddenly they lit on a short paragraph:
“Fallen on the Field of Honour.” One had got used to that with the rest; used
even to the pang of reading names one knew, evoking familiar features, young
faces blotted out in blood, young limbs convulsed in the fires of that hell
called “the Front.” But this time Campton turned pale and the paper fell to his
knee.

 
          
“Fortin-Lescluze;
Jean-Jacques-Marie, lieutenant of Chasseurs a Pied, gloriously fallen for
France…” There followed a ringing citation.

 
          
Fortin’s
son, his only son, was dead.