October, 1918
Morning
I was crossing the Place de la Concorde, and stopped for an instant, fascinated by the sinister expression of an immense cannon, painted in serpentine streaks and stripes, the muzzle of its tube distorted by an explosion so that a twisted flap of steel hung down like a broken jaw-bone. A hail made me turn around. The elegant old man who was an American correspondent for a New York newspaper, came up with an expression of approval. “Magnificent display, isn’t it?” he said, waving his hand towards the ranks of captured cannon and mitrailleuses, standing thick on the public square. “Why didn’t you bring your children?”
The gulf between his generation and mine yawned deep. I told myself the part of wisdom was to close my lips on what I felt. But the cannon leered at me too insolently, with its torn muzzle.
I answered, “I’m glad enough when the police seem to be getting the better of a band of ruffians who’ve been terrorizing the town. But I don’t take the children to see the bloody clubs with which....”
“Oh, come!” said my old friend, genially. “Feminine emotionality! These don’t look much like bloody clubs. They look more like part of a steel-foundry.”
“Every cannon here is wreathed in human viscera, spattered with human brains, and stands in a pool of human blood, if we only had eyes to see!” I said moderately.
“Why, you talk like a pacifist!” said the old gentleman, forgetting his usual politeness to women.
“I thought the unforgivable sin of the Germans was in forcing a war on a world that has outgrown war! If war is so hateful a thing, why complacently lay out to view its hideous instruments of torture?”
“Because,” said my old friend with deep emotion, “because they have been instruments of righteousness!” (For the moment he had forgotten the nationality of the cannon about us.)
“Have they?” I asked. “They’re German cannon, remember.” In spite of my feeling sick, I could not but laugh at the change in his expression. I went on, “Well, even if they had been sacred Allied cannon, they’d be instruments of torture all the same. I thought we were fighting to put such things on the scrap heap. Why don’t we have the decency to hide them from view? We don’t put the offal from our slaughter-houses on public view.”
“Vegetarianism, next?”
“Oh, no, I eat beefsteaks. But I don’t take the children to see the steers killed.”
“Of course, I know,” said my old friend tolerantly, “that women have a traditional right to be illogical, but really.... Did you, or did you not turn your personal life upside down to do your share in this war? It would give me brain fever to feel two different ways about the same thing.”
“See here,” I put it to him, “a man, crazy-drunk comes roaring down our street. Who wouldn’t feel two ways about him? I certainly do. First, I know that society has been wrongly organized to permit any boy to grow up crazed with whiskey; and second, I know that my children must be protected, now, at this very minute. Shooting that man dead isn’t going to help the general situation at all. If we are not to have a perpetual procession of crazy-drunk men coming down our street (and our own men among them) we must change the organization of society by long, patient, and constructive efforts. In the meantime with the drunken man pounding on my door, if the police don’t do what is necessary, why, of course, I will throw a dishpan of scalding water down on him. But I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life making speeches about the dishpan.”
My sophisticated old friend had for me the smiling amusement one feels for a bright child talking about what he does not understand. Taking up the sharp ax of Ecclesiastes, he struck a great blow at the root of the matter, “No, my dear girl, no, you don’t. A well-meaning, high-principled woman like you, can do a great deal, but she cannot amputate a vital part of human nature. You can’t make manly, brave men ashamed of war and it’s a lucky thing for you you can’t, for if you did, there would be nobody to stand between you and the bullies. Take it from a man nearly twice your age, that without the soldier in every man (and that means love of force and submission to force—you must swallow that!) there would be no order in the world. You needn’t try to reduce that element of force to mere businesslike police-work. It can’t be done. There would be anarchy in the twinkling of an eye. You won’t believe this, because it doesn’t fit into your womanish, preconceived notions. But it doesn’t make any difference whether you believe it or not. Such are the facts. And all your noble phrases can’t change them.”
I turned and left him. I did not believe a word he said, of course... but.... There is a horrible side to human nature.... Suppose that to hold it in check it might be necessary...
Afternoon
“Oh, mother, this is Thursday and the merry-go-round in the Parc of the Château is running. Couldn’t you take us?”
We set off, the three of us, hand in hand, crossed the arid, bare Place d’Armes where the great Louis had mustered his troops, hobbled up over the villainous paving-stones of the gray entrance court and came by beautiful leafy avenues to where the primitive circle of wooden horses whirled slowly about, as a one-armed soldier turned the crank. I was left on a bench, with the other waiting mothers, watching our children’s pleasure.
My two were at once in another world—Jimmy’s a mere wide world of enchantment, as befitted his five-year-old ignorance. He swam through the air, a vague smile of beatitude on his lips. Sally sat very straight, one hand on her hip, the other stretched out in a gesture of command. She was perhaps Charlemagne before the defeated Saxons, or possibly Joan of Arc at Orléans. Sally’s class at school begins to have some notions of history.
When the crippled soldier was tired, and we had paid our copper sous, we wandered on, to a bench in front of a statue of mellow marble. Here I sat down while the children ran about, shouting and kicking up the chestnut leaves which laid a carpet of cloth-of-gold under their feet. Their laughter sounded distant in my ears. I was hearing again the cock-sure old voice of the morning.... “Anarchy in a moment if respect for force were eliminated... you cannot amputate a part of human nature....”
What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.”
Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked.
“No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!”
“I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy.
Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.”
Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it for, if nobody was allowed in?”
“It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.”
“I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously.
“Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody else.”
Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’t love that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea.
(... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!)
“Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.”
Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.”
Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”
Jimmy was a little intimidated. He took his big sister’s hand and said in rather a small voice, “What would you say back?”
Sally made a dramatic gesture of scorn. “I’d say, ‘Get away from here, you old King. Don’t you know you’re dead?’ And then, Jimmy, you know ghosts aren’t solid. I’d just draw off and run right through him, gold clothes and diamonds and all, like this.”
She executed a headlong assault on space and came back laughing.
Jimmy, reassured, caught the note, “Yes,” he said swaggering, “I would too, I’d say, ‘You old King, you’re dead!’ and I’d run right through him too.”
It was the most delightful of all the games Sally had invented. They went at it with gusto, their faces rosy and laughing as they took turns in dashing through the non-existent might, majesty, and glory of a dead idea.
It was a game which amused their mother quite as much as the children. I sat watching them at it, till it was time to start home back through the rich magnificence of the old park which had been planted for a king’s pleasure and which throughout the silent, purposeful centuries had grown to beauty for the people.