Evan Hunter: Sons

We were neutral.

We were sane.

To me, in Eau Fraiche, Wisconsin, the war was something that erupted only in newspaper headlines — I didn’t know where Servia was, and I couldn’t even pronounce Sarajevo. England was the only country with which I felt any real sympathy, but that was because both my parents were of English stock; my father, in fact, had been born and raised in Liverpool. But even then, I think my own attitude about the war in those early days was a reflection of what the rest of America was thinking and feeling, or at least the rest of America as represented by the state of Wisconsin. It wasn’t our battle. We were determined to stay out of it. We had headaches enough of our own — all that mess down there in Mexico which we still hadn’t resolved, and people out of work everywhere you looked, and southern Negroes causing even bigger job problems by moving in batches to the north and the midwest — we didn’t need any war. And anyway, even though Germany’s march into Belgium had caused us to sympathize momentarily with the underdog, it was really pretty hard to believe that people related to gentle Karl Moenke, who ran a dry-goods store in Eau Fraiche, could be even remotely capable of sacking Louvain, and shooting priests and helpless women there. The war for us was fascinating but remote. We didn’t want involvement. We said we’d remain neutral, and that was our honest intention.

And yet — there was something. There’s always something about war, a contagious excitement that leaps oceans.

I couldn’t look at the battle maps printed in the Eau Fraiche Record without visualizing gallant armies massed beneath those tiny flags:

By the nineteenth of August, the line stretched from Antwerp in the north to Mulhausen in the south, passing through towns with names like Charleroi and Bastogne and Bitsch (which gave me a laugh), but it was a fluid front that changed from day to day; you could follow it like a general yourself and discuss it with other generals — here’s where I’d break through, here’s where I’d try to outflank them. In addition, you could be a general for whichever side you chose, because in the months that followed each side certainly gave us reason to believe it was right and the other was wrong. If the Germans were cutting off the breasts of Belgian women and the hands of Belgian babies, then the French were firing on ambulances and killing doctors; if the English served coffee laced with strychnine to German prisoners, then the Huns were shipping corpses back home to be made into soap. We suspected both sides were lying, of course, but the Allies’ stories were more inventive and entertaining in a horrible way than the ones the Germans concocted, so I guess even then we were beginning to lean in their direction — though we had no real quarrel with Germany and, if anything, distrusted the French who, we’d been told, “fought with their feet and fucked with their face.” Wilson said in his address to Congress that year that this was “a war with which we have nothing to do,” and we believed him, I suppose, even though we were already singing “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” in the streets of Eau Fraiche, Red Reynolds’ orchestra having introduced the song in November — “the favorite of the first British Expeditionary Force,” he had proudly announced.

But if we identified (and I think we did) with the Tommies who were marching into France, we sure as hell did not appreciate what the British Navy was doing: seizing American ships and removing from their holds contraband items such as flour, wheat, copper, cotton, and oil; mining the North Sea; blacklisting dozens of American firms suspected of doing business with the Germans (none of England’s damn business, since we were, after all, neutrals); or even — and this really galled — raising the American flag on her own ships whenever German submarines were in hot pursuit. A lot of the German-American people in Eau Fraiche felt, and probably rightfully, that our diplomatic restraint in dealing with British violations of our neutrality merely indicated we weren’t neutral at all; we had, in effect, cast our lot with the Allies as early as the beginning of 1915. Well, maybe so. I myself was pretty confused, though I have to admit that by February, I began to lean toward the Allies again; that was when the Germans said they’d sink any enemy ship in the waters around the British Isles, and maybe a few neutral ships, too, if they couldn’t determine their national origin, which was sometimes difficult to do through the periscope of a submarine. Not only did they say they’d do it, but they actually did do it. and whereas searching ships and seizing merchandise was one thing, sinking them was quite another. I don’t think anybody in Eau Fraiche, not even those whose sympathies were with the Germans, condoned the actions of the U-boat commanders, who were already being pilloried in the press for their “wanton disregard of American life.”

I guess the sinking of the Lusitania could have been the last straw if President Wilson hadn’t kept his head. For me, it was the last straw; I was ready to go downtown with some of the other kids and smash Mr. Moenke’s store window (we had begun calling him “Monkey the Hun-kee” by then), but my father got wind of the scheme and told me if I left the house he’d beat me black and blue when I returned. I don’t know if it was my father’s warning or Mr. Wilson’s restraint that changed my mood of black rage to one of patience. In a speech on May 10, three days after the sinking, the President said, “The example of America must be a special example. The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”

I liked what he said.

It reminded me of something my father had once said when I’d been having a lot of trouble with a skinny kid who was a head shorter than me. I told my father I was going to knock the kid cold the next time he said anything nasty to me, and my father said, “What pleasure will you get from killing a cripple?” So I never did fight with that kid because after that I felt sorry for him whenever he picked on me. I knew I could beat him up, and I realized my father was right; there’d be no pleasure at all in taking him apart. I didn’t know whether or not the United States could beat Germany (the idea of going to war with people who were cutting off babies’ hands was frankly terrifying) but it seemed to me nonetheless that President Wilson was correct in saying there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. If we knew that war was wrong, then we were only compounding the crime by reacting to warlike acts in a warlike manner. If we really believed the world had gone insane, then behaving insanely ourselves was no way to effect a cure.

Later, when Wilson’s exchange of notes with the Germans got stronger and Bryan resigned as Secretary of State, I didn’t know what to think. I admired Wilson, but now he seemed to be saying that he was ready to risk war if respect for human life was at stake. This seemed to me contradictory. If you respected human life, if you were protesting so strongly against the drowning of the 114 Americans who had sailed on the Lusitania (even after the Germans had taken out a newspaper advertisement warning they would sink any vessel carrying the flag of Great Britain or her allies), then how could you risk sending more Americans to die in a war which was none of our business in the first place? Wilson said he was for peace. Okay. But when Bryan refused to sign the President’s second strongly worded note to the Germans, he said “I cannot go along with him in this note. I think it makes for war.” All right then, Bryan was for peace. But the Eau Fraiche Record reprinted an editorial from the New York World which said that Bryan’s resignation was “unspeakable treachery not only to the President but to the nation.” Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt, who was for preparedness but also for peace, mind you, said, “No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency,” and in almost the very next breath said, “I am sick at heart over the actions of Wilson and Bryan.”