Thomas Wolfe - Thomas Wolfe - Of Time and the River, You Can't Go Home Again & Look Homeward, Angel

“It’s not our fight,” said Mr. Bob Webster. “I don’t want to send my boys three thousand miles across the sea to get shot for those foreigners. If they come over here, I’ll shoulder a gun with the best of them, but until they do they can fight it out among themselves. Isn’t that right, Judge?” he said, turning toward the party of the third part, Judge Walter C. Jeter, of the Federal Circuit, who had fortunately been a close friend of Grover Cleveland. Ancestral voices prophesying war.

“Did you know the Wheeler boys?” Eugene asked George Graves. “Paul and Clifton?”

“Yes,” said George Graves. “They went away and joined the French army. They’re in the Foreign Legion.”

“They’re in the aviation part of it,” said Eugene. “The Lafayette Eskydrill. Clifton Wheeler has shot down more than six Germans.”

“The boys around here didn’t like him,” said George Graves. “They thought he was a sissy.”

Eugene winced slightly at the sound of the word.

“How old was he?” he asked.

“He was a grown man,” said George. “Twenty-two or three.”

Disappointed, Eugene considered his chance of glory. (Ich bin ja noch ein Kind.)

“— But fortunately,” continued Judge Walter C. Jeter deliberately, “we have a man in the White House on whose far-seeing statesmanship we can safely rely. Let us trust to the wisdom of his leadership, obeying, in word and spirit, the principles of strict neutrality, accepting only as a last resort a course that would lead this great nation again into the suffering and tragedy of war, which,” his voice sank to a whisper, “God forbid!”

Thinking of a more ancient war, in which he had borne himself gallantly, Colonel James Buchanan Pettigrew, head of the Pettigrew Military Academy (Est. 1789), rode by in his open victoria, behind an old negro driver and two well-nourished brown mares. There was a good brown smell of horse and sweat-cured leather. The old negro snaked his whip gently across the sleek trotting rumps, growling softly.

Colonel Pettigrew was wrapped to his waist in a heavy rug, his shoulders were covered with a gray Confederate cape. He bent forward, leaning his old weight upon a heavy polished stick, which his freckled hand gripped upon the silver knob. Muttering, his proud powerful old head turned shakily from side to side, darting fierce splintered glances at the drifting crowd. He was a very parfit gentil knight.

He muttered.

“Suh?” said the negro, pulling in on his reins, and turning around.

“Go on! Go on, you scoundrel!” said Colonel Pettigrew.

“Yes, suh,” said the negro. They drove on.

In the crowd of loafing youngsters that stood across the threshold of Wood’s pharmacy, Colonel Pettigrew’s darting eyes saw two of his own cadets. They were pimply youths, with slack jaws and a sloppy carriage.

He muttered his disgust. Not the same! Not the same! Nothing the same! In his proud youth, in the only war that mattered, Colonel Pettigrew had marched at the head of his own cadets. There were 117, sir, all under nineteen. They stepped forward to a man . . . until not a single commissioned officer was left . . . 36 came back . . . since 1789 . . . it must go on! . . . 19, sir — all under one hundred and seventeen . . . must . . . go . . . on!

His sagging cheek-flanks trembled gently. The horses trotted out of sight around the corner, with a smooth-spoked rumble of rubber tires.

George Graves and Eugene entered Wood’s pharmacy and stood up to the counter. The elder soda-jerker, scowling, drew a sopping rag across a puddle of slop upon the marble slab.

“What’s yours?” he said irritably.

“I want a chock-lut milk,” said Eugene.

“Make it two,” added George Graves.

O for a draught of vintage that hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delvèd earth!

Table of Contents

Yes. The enormous crime had been committed. And, for almost a year, Eugene had been maintaining a desperate neutrality. His heart, however, was not neutral. The fate of civilization, it appeared, hung in the balance.

The war had begun at the peak of the summer season. Dixieland was full. His closest friend at the time was a sharp old spinstress with frayed nerves, who had been for thirty years a teacher of English in a New York City public school. Day by day, after the murder of the Grand Duke, they watched the tides of blood and desolation mount through the world. Miss Crane’s thin red nostrils quivered with indignation. Her old gray eyes were sharp with anger. The idea! The idea!

For, of all the English, none can show a loftier or more inspired love for Albion’s Isle than American ladies who teach its noble tongue.

Eugene was also faithful. With Miss Crane he kept a face of mournful regret, but his heart drummed a martial tattoo against his ribs. The air was full of fifes and flutes; he heard the ghostly throbbing of great guns.

“We must be fair!” said Margaret Leonard. “We must be fair!” But her eyes darkened when she read the news of England’s entry, and her throat was trembling like a bird’s. When she looked up her eyes were wet.

“Ah, Lord!” she said. “You’ll see things now.”

“Little Bobs!” roared Sheba.

“God bless him! Did you see where he’s going to take the field?”

John Dorsey Leonard laid down the paper, and bent over with high drooling laughter.

“Lord a’mercy!” he gasped. “Let the rascals come now!”

Ah, well — they came.

All through that waning summer, Eugene shuttled frantically from the school to Dixieland, unable, in the delirium of promised glory, to curb his prancing limbs. He devoured every scrap of news, and rushed to share it with the Leonards or Miss Crane. He read every paper he could lay his hands on, exulting in the defeats that were forcing the Germans back at every point. For, he gathered from this wilderness of print, things were going badly with the Huns. At a thousand points they fled squealing before English steel at Mons, fell suppliantly before the French charge along the Marne; withdrew here, gave way there, ran away elsewhere. Then, one morning, when they should have been at Cologne, they were lined up at the walls of Paris. They had run in the wrong direction. The world grew dark. Desperately, he tried to understand. He could not. By the extraordinary strategy of always retreating, the German army had arrived before Paris. It was something new in warfare. It was several years, in fact, before Eugene could understand that some one in the German armies had done some fighting.

John Dorsey Leonard was untroubled.

“You wait!” he said confidently. “You just wait, my sonny. That old fellow Joffer knows what he’s about. This is just what he’s been waiting for. Now he’s got them where he wants them.”

Eugene wondered for what subtle reason a French general might want a German army in Paris.

Margaret lifted her troubled eyes from the paper.

“It looks mighty serious,” she said. “I tell you!” She was silent a moment, a torrent of passion rose up in her throat. Then she added in a low trembling voice: “If England goes, we all go.”

“God bless her!” Sheba yelled.

“God bless her, ‘Gene,” she continued, tapping him on the knee. “When I stepped ashore on her dear old soil that time, I just couldn’t help myself. I didn’t care what any one thought. I knelt right down there in the dirt, and pretended to tie my shoe, but say, boy”— her bleared eyes glistened through her tears —“God bless her, I couldn’t help it. Do you know what I did? I leaned over and kissed her earth.” Large gummy tears rolled down her red cheeks. She was weeping loudly, but she went on. “I said: This is the earth of Shakespeare, and Milton, and John Keats and, by God, what’s more, it’s mine as well! God bless her! God bless her!”