"Oh, my God!" gasped Bill. "I'm done for!"

"What is it?"

"Haemorrhage."

The terrified Jimmie did not even know what that was. There was
nothing he could do but sit there, holding his friend's trembling
hand and listening to his moans. When the train stopped, Jimmie
sprang out and rushed to one of the brakemen, who came with his
lantern, and saw "Wild Bill" lying in a pool of blood, already so
far gone that he could not lift his head. "Jesus!" exclaimed the
brakeman. "He's a goner, all right."

The "goner" was trying to say something, and Jimmie leaned his ear
down to him. "Good-bye, old pal," whispered Bill. That was all, but
it caused Jimmie to burst out sobbing.

The engine whistled. "What the hell you stiffs doin' on this train?"
demanded the brakeman--but not so harshly as the words would
indicate. He lifted the dying man--no very serious burden--and laid
him on the platform of the station. "Sorry," he said, "but we're
behind schedule." He waved his lantern, and the creaking cars began
to move, and the train drew away, leaving Jimmie sitting by the
corpse of his pal. The world seemed a lonely place that long night.

In the morning the station-agent came, and notified the nearest
authorities, and in the course of the day came a wagon to fetch the
body. What was the use of Jimmie's waiting? One "Potter's field" was
the same as another, and there would be nothing inspiring about the
funeral. The man who drove the wagon looked at Jimmie suspiciously
and asked his age; they were scarce of labour in that country, he
said-the rule was "Work or fight". Jimmie foresaw another session
with a draft-board, so he leaped on to another freight train, taking
with him as a legacy "Wild Bill's" diary of the unemployed army.




IV



It was harvest-time, and Jimmie went West to the wheat country. It
was hard work, but the pay made your eyes bulge. Jimmie realized
that war was not such a bad thing--for the ones that stayed at
home! If you didn't like one farmer's way of speaking to you, or the
kind of biscuits his wife offered you, you could move on to the
next, and he would take you in at four bits more per day. It was the
nearest approach to a working-man's paradise that Jimmie had ever
encountered. There was really only one drawback--the pestiferous
draft-boards that never stopped snooping round. They were for ever
hauling you up and threatening and questioning you--putting you
through the same scene over and over. Why couldn't the fools give
you a card, showing that you had been through the mill, and let that
settle it? But no, they wouldn't give you a card--they preferred to
go on jacking you up because you had no card. It was all a trick,
thought Jimmie, to wear him out and force him into their army by
hook or by crook. But here was one time when they would not get away
with it!

However, Jimmie Higgins was not nearly so dangerous a character, now
that "Wild Bill" was gone out of his life. It was really not his
nature to cherish hate, or to set out deliberately to revenge
himself. Jimmie was a Socialist in the true sense of the word--he
felt himself a part of society, and that peace and plenty and
kindness which he desired for himself he desired for all mankind. He
was not dreaming of a time when he could turn the capitalists out of
power and treat them as they were now treating him; he meant the
world to be just as good a place for the capitalists as for the
workers--all would share alike, and Jimmie was ready to wipe out the
old scores and start fair any day. His propaganda regained its
former idealistic hue, and it was only when somebody tried to drag
him into the slaughter-pen that he developed teeth and claws.

So he became fairly happy again--happier than he had thought he
could ever be. It was in vain he told himself that he had nothing to
live for; he had the greatest thing in the world to live for, the
vision of a just and sane and happy world. So long as anybody could
be found to listen while he talked about it and explained how it
might be achieved, life was worth while, life was real. It was only
now and then that his bitter heartache returned to plague him--when
he awakened in the night with his arms clasped about the memory of
the soft, warm, kindly body of Eleesa Betooser; or when he came to a
farmhouse where there were children, whose prattle reminded him of
the little fellow who had been his prime reason for wanting a just
and sane and happy world. Jimmie found that he could not bear to
work in one farmhouse where there were children; and when he told
the farmer's wife the reason, he and the woman declared a temporary
truce to the class-war, and celebrated it with half a large apple-
pie.




V



The Socialists held a National Convention at St. Louis, and drew up
their declaration concerning the war. They called it the most
unjustifiable war in history, "a crime against the people of the
United States"; they called on the workers of the country to oppose
it, and pledged themselves "to the support of all mass movements in
opposition to conscription". This was, of course, a serious step to
take at such a time; the comrades realized it, and there were solemn
gatherings to discuss the referendum, and not a little disagreement
as to the wisdom of the declaration. In the town of Hopeland, near
which Jimmie was working, there was a local, and he had got himself
transferred from Leesville, and paid up his back dues, and had his
precious red card stamped up-to-date. And now he would go in and
listen to debates, just as exciting and just as bewildering as those
he had heard at the outbreak of the war.

There were some who pointed out the precise meaning of those words,
"all mass-movements in opposition to conscription." The leading
dry-goods merchant of the town, he was a Socialist, declared that
the words meant insurrection and mob violence, and the resolution
would be adjudged a call to treason. At which there leaped to his
feet a Russian Jewish tailor, Rabin by name; his first name was
Scholem, which means Peace, and he cried in great excitement: "Vot
business have ve Socialists vit such vords? Ve might leaf dem to de
enemy, vot?"

You might have thought you were in Leesville, listening to Comrade
Stankewitz. The only difference was that there were not many Germans
in this town, and those few confined their discussions to Ireland
and India.

Jimmie would hear the arguments, back and forth and back again, and
his mind would be in greater confusion than ever. He hated war as
much as ever; but, on the other hand, he was learning to hate the
Germans, too. The American government, going to war, had been forced
to assert itself, and the stores and billboards were covered with
proclamations and picture-posters, and the newspapers were full of
recitals of the crimes which Germany had committed against humanity.
Jimmie might refuse to read this "Wall Street dope", as he called
it, but the working-men with whom he was associating read it, and
would fire it at him whenever they got into a controversy. Also the
daily events in the news dispatches--the sinking of hospital-ships
filled with wounded, the shelling of life-boats, the dragging away
into slavery in coal-mines of Belgian children thirteen and fourteen
years old! How could any man fail to hate and to fear a government
which committed such atrocities? How could he remain untroubled at
the thought that he might be assisting such a government to victory?

Jimmie was honest, he was trying to face the facts as he saw them;
and when he stopped to think, when he remembered the things he had
done in company with "Wild Bill" and "Strawberry" Curran and
"Flathead Joe" and "Chuck" Peterson, he could not deny that he had
been, however unintentionally, helping the Kaiser to win the war. In
his arguments with others, Jimmie dared not tell all he knew about
such matters; so, when he argued with himself, his conscience was
troubled, and doubt gnawed at his soul. Suppose it were true, as
Comrade Dr. Service had tried to prove to him, that a victory for
the Kaiser would mean that America would have to spend the next
twenty or thirty years getting ready for the next war? Might it not
then be better to forego revolutionary agitation for a while, until
the Kaiser had been put out of business?

There were not a few Socialists who argued this way--men who had
been active in the movement and had possessed Jimmie's regard before
the war. Now they denounced the St. Louis resolution--the "majority
report" as it was called. When this report was carried in referendum
by a vote of something like eight to one, these comrades withdrew
from the party, and some of them bitterly attacked their former
friends. Such utterances were taken up by the capitalist press; and
this made Jimmie Higgins indignant. A fine lot of Socialists, to
quit the ship in the hour of peril! Renegades, Jimmie called them,
and compared them with Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold and
such-like celebrities of past ages. They, being exactly the same
sort of folk as Jimmie, answered by calling Jimmie a pro-German and
a traitor; which did not make it easier to persuade Jimmie to listen
to their arguments. So both sides became blinded with anger,
forgetting about the facts in the case, and thinking only of
punishing a hated antagonist.




VI



All over the country now men were sending their sons to the
training-camps, and putting their money into "liberty-bonds". So
they were in no mood to listen to argument--they would fly into a
rage at the least hint that the cause in which they were making
sacrifices was not a perfectly just and righteous cause. There was
an organization called the "People's Council for Peace and
Democracy", which attempted to hold a national convention; the
gathering was broken up by mobs, and the delegates went wandering
over the country, trying in vain to get together. The mayor of
Chicago gave them permission to meet in that city, but the governor
of the state sent troops to prevent it! You see, the people of the
country had learned all about the organization for which Jerry
Coleman had been working--"Labour's National Peace Council"; and
here was another organization, bearing practically the same name,
and carrying on an agitation which seemed the same to the average
man. The distinction between hired treason and super-idealism was
far too subtle for the people to draw in a time of such peril.

It was becoming more and more the fashion to arrest Socialists and
to suppress their papers; the government authorities in many places
declared the "majority report" unmailable, and indicted state and
national secretaries for having sent it out in the ordinary routine
of their business. Jimmie received a letter from Comrade Meissner in
Leesville, telling him that Comrade "Jack" Smith had been given two
years in the penitentiary for his speech in the Opera-house, and the
other would-be speakers had been fined five hundred dollars each.
Several issues of the Worker had been barred from the mails, and now
the police had raided the offices and forced the suspension of the
publication. All over the country that sort of thing was happening,
so now if you argued with Jimmie in favour of the war, his answer
was that America was more Prussian than Prussia, and what was the
use of fighting for Democracy abroad, if you had to sacrifice every
particle of Democracy at home in order to win the fight?

Jimmie really believed this--he believed it with most desperate and
passionate intensity. He looked forward to a war won for the benefit
of oppression at home; he foresaw the system of militarism and
suppession riveted for ever on the people of America. Jimmie would
admit that the President himself might be sincere in the fine words
he used about democracy; but the great Wall Street interests which
had run the country for so many decades--they had their secret
purposes, for which the war-frenzy served as a convenient cloak.
They were going to make universal military service the rule in
America; they were going to see to it that every school-child
learned the military lessons of obedience and subordination. Also
they were going to put the radical papers out of business and put a
stop to all radical propaganda. Those Socialists who had been
trapped into supporting the President's war-programme would wake up
some morning with a fearful dark-brown taste in their mouths!

No, said Jimmie Higgins, the way to fight war was to resist the
subterfuges, however cunning and plausible, by which men sought to
persuade you to support war. The way to fight war was the way of the
Russians. The propaganda of proletarian revolt, the glorious example
which the Russian workers had set, would do more to break down the
power of the Kaiser than all the guns and shells in the world. But
the militarists did not want it broken that way--Jimmie suspected
that many of them would rather have the war won by the Kaiser than
have it won by the Socialists. The governments refused to give
passports to Socialists who wanted to meet in some neutral country
and work out the basis of a settlement upon which all the peoples of
the world might get together; and Jimmie took the banning of this
Socialist conference as the supreme crime of the world-capitalism,
it was evidence that world-capitalism knew its true enemy, and meant
to use the war as an excuse to hold that enemy down.




VII



Day by day Jimmie was coming to place more of his hopes in Russia.
His little friend Rabin, the tailor, took a Russian paper published
in New York, the Novy Mir, and would translate its news and
editorials. Local Hopeland, thus inspired, voted a message of
fraternal sympathy to the Russian workers. In Petrograd and Moscow
there was going on, it appeared, a struggle between the pro-ally
Socialists and the Internationalists, the true, out-and-out,
middle-of-the-road, thick-and-thin proletarians. The former were
called Mensheviki, the latter were called Bolsheviki, and, of
course, Jimmie was all for the latter. Did he not know the
"stool-pigeon Socialists" at home, who were letting themselves be
used by capitalism?

The big issues were two--first, the land, which the peasants wanted
to take from the landlords; and second, the foreign debt. The
Russian Tsar had borrowed four billion dollars from France and a
billion or two from England, to be used in enslaving the Russian
workers and driving several millions of them to death on the
battlefield. Now should the Russian workers consider themselves
bound by this debt? When anybody asked Jimmie Higgins that question,
he responded with a thunderous "No", and he regarded as hirelings or
dupes of Wall Street all those Socialists who supported Kerensky in
Russia.

When the American government, wishing to appeal to the Russian
people for loyalty in the war, sent over a commission to them, and
placed at its head one of the most notorious corporation lawyers in
America, a man whose life, the Jimmies said, had been sold to
service in the anti-liberal cause, Jimmie Higgins's shrill voice
became a yell of ridicule and rage. Of course, Jimmie's organization
saw to it that the Bolsheviki were informed in advance as to the
character of this commission--something which was unnecessary, as it
happened, because immediately after the overthrow of the Tsar there
had begun a pilgrimage of Russian Socialists from New York and San
Francisco, men who had seen the seamy side of American capitalism in
the slums of the great cities, and who lost no time in providing the
Russian radicals with full information concerning Wall Street!

It chanced that in San Francisco a well-known labour leader had been
charged with planting a bomb to break up a "preparedness" parade. He
had been convicted upon that which was proven to be perjured
testimony, and the labour unions of the country had been conducting
a campaign to save his life--which campaign the capitalist
newspapers had been carefully overlooking, according to their
invariable custom. But now the returned exiles in Petrograd took up
the matter, and organized a parade to the American embassy, with a
demand for the freeing of this "Muni". The report, of course, came
back to America--to the immense bewilderment of the American people,
who had never heard of this "Muni" before. To Jimmie Higgins it
seemed just the funniest joke on earth that a big labour-struggle
should be on in San Francisco, and Americans should get their first
news about it from Petrograd! Look! he would cry--how much real
democracy there is in America, how much care for the working
classes!

So all that summer and autumn, while Jimmie Higgins slaved in the
fields, getting in his country's wheat-crop, and then his country's
corn crop, there was a song of joy and awakening excitement in his
soul. Far over the seas men of his own kind were getting the reins
of power into their hands, for the first time in the history of the
world. It could not be long before here in America the workers would
learn this wonderful lesson, would thrill to the idea that freedom
and plenty might really be their portion.






CHAPTER XV

JIMMIE HIGGINS TURNS BOLSHEVIK

I





Winter was coming, and the farm-workers moved to the cities; but
this year they did not go as down-and-out-o'-works--they went, each
man a little kink. Jimmie wandered into the city of Ironton, and got
himself a job in a big automobile shop at eight dollars a day, and
set to work agitating for ten dollars. It was not that he had any
need of the extra two dollars, of course, but merely because his
first principle in life was to make trouble for the profit-system.
The capitalist papers of this middle-Western metropolis were
furiously denouncing working-men who struck "against their country"
in war-time; Jimmie, on the other hand, denounced those who used
"country" as camouflage for "boss" and made the war a pretext to
deprive labour of its most precious right.

There was a Socialist local in Ironton, still active and determined
in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by the police,
and most of the party's papers and magazines barred from the mails.
You could always get leaflets printed, however; and if you could no
longer denounce the war directly, you could jeer at England's
exhibition of "democracy" in Ireland, you could point to the profits
of the profiteers, and demand conscription of wealth along with
conscription of manhood. Some American Socialists became almost as
subtle as that German rebel of pre-war days, who, desiring to
lampoon the Kaiser, wrote an account of the life of the Roman
Emperor Agricola, reciting his vanities and insane extravagances.

Late in the autumn came an event which should have troubed Jimmie
Higgins more deeply than it did. Along the Izonzo river the Italian
armies were facing the Austrians, their hereditary enemies; they
were at the end of a long, exhaustive, and for the most part
unsuccessful campaign, and the Italian Socialists at home were
carrying on precisely such a warfare against their own government as
Jimmie Higgins was carrying on in America. They were helped by the
Catholic intriguers, who hated the Italian government because it had
destroyed the temporal power of the Pope; they were helped by the
subtle and persistent efforts of Austrian agents in their country,
who spread rumours among Italian troops of the friendly intentions
of the Austrians, and of the imminence of a truce. These agents went
so far as to fake copies of the leading Italian newspapers, with
accounts of starvation and riots in the home cities, and the
shooting down of women and children. These papers were given out in
the Italian trenches, before a certain mountain-sector where the
Austrian troops had been fraternizing with the Italians; and then,
during the night, the Austrian troops were withdrawn, and picked
German "shock-troops" substituted, which attacked at dawn and drove
through the Italian lines, sweeping back the army along a
hundred-mile front, capturing some quarter of a million prisoners
and a couple of thousand cannon--practically all the Italians had.

That Jimmie Higgins did not pay more attention to this terrifying
incident was in part because he read it in the capitalist papers and
did not believe it; but mainly because his whole attention just now
was centred on Russia, where the proletariat was about to make its
bid for power. Now you would see how wars were to be ended and peace
restored to a distracted world!

The moderate Socialist government of Kerensky was pleading with the
capitalist masters of the Allied nations for a statement of their
peace terms, so that the workers of Russia might know what they were
fighting for. The Russian workers wanted a declaration in favour of
no annexations, no indemnities, and disarmament; on such terms they
would help fight the war, in spite of all the starvation and
suffering in distracted Russia. But the Allied statesmen would not
make any such declaration, and the Russian workers, backed by all
the Socialists of the world, declared that the reason was that these
Allied statesmen were waging an imperialist war--they did not intend
to stop fighting until they had taken vast territories from the
German powers, and exacted a ransom that would cripple Germany for a
generation. The Russian workers refused point-blank to fight for
such aims, and so in November came the second revolution, the
uprising of the Bolsheviki.

Almost their first action when they took possession of the palaces
and government archives was to publish to the world the secret
treaties which the rulers of England, France and Italy had made with
Russia. These treaties formed a complete justification for the
attitude of the Russian revolutionists--they showed that the Allied
imperialists had planned most shameless plundering; England was to
have the German colonies and Mesopotamia, France was to have German
territory to the Rhine, and Italy was to have the Adriatic coast,
and to divide Palestine and Syria with England and France.

And here was the most significant fact to Jimmie Higgins--these
enormously important revelations, the most important since the
beginning of the war, were practically suppressed by the capitalist
newspapers of America! First these papers printed a brief item--the
Bolsheviki had given out what they claimed were secret treaties, but
the genuineness of these documents was gravely doubted. Then they
published evasive and lying denials from the British, French and
Italian diplomats; and then they shut up! Not another word did you
read about those secret treaties; except for one or two American
newspapers with traditions of honour, the full text of those
treaties was given in the Socialist press alone! "And now," cried
Jimmie Higgins to the working men in his shop, "what do you think of
those wonderful allies of ours? What do you think of those Wall
Street newspapers of ours?" Could any working-man who had such facts
put before him fail to realize that Jimmie Higgins had a case, and a
most important work in the world to do, in spite of all his unreason
and his narrowness?




II



Jimmie was now in the seventh heaven, walking as if on air. A
proletarian government at last, the first in history! A government
of working-men like himself, running their own affairs, without the
help of politicians or bankers! Coming out before the world and
telling the truth about matters of state, in language that common
men could understand! Disbanding the armies, and sending the workers
home! Turning the masters out of the factories, and putting
shop-committees in control! Taking away the advertising from the
crooked capitalist papers, and so putting them out of business! Our
little friend would rush to the corner every morning to get the
paper and see what had happened next; he would go down the street so
excited that he forgot his breakfast.

Jimmie had made a new acquaintance in Ironton; the little tailor,
Rabin, whose name was Scholem, which means Peace, had given him a
letter to his brother, whose name was Deror, which means Freedom.
Each afternoon when the automobile factory let out, Jimmie would get
an evening paper and take it to Deror's tailor-shop and the two
would spell out the news. By God, look at this! Did you ever hear
the like? The man in charge of the Bolshevik foreign office was a
Marxian Jew who had helped edit the Novy Mir, the revolutionary
paper which Scholem had read to Jimmie! He had been a waiter in the
Waldorf-Astoria hotel, and now he was giving out the secret
treaties, and issuing propaganda manifestoes to the international
proletariat.

The American capitalist press was full of lies about the new
revolution, of course; but Jimmie could read pretty well between the
lines of the capitalist press, and the few Socialist papers that
were still in business, and which he read at the headquarters of the
local, gave him the rest of what he wanted. To Jimmie, of course,
everything the Bolsheviki did was right; if it wasn't right it was a
lie. The little machinist knew that the Bolsheviki had repudiated
the four-billion-dollar debt which the government of the Tsar had
contracted with the bankers of France, and Jimmie knew perfectly
well what was the lying power of four billion dollars.

The American papers were shocked because the Russian Socialists were
deserting the cause of democracy, and giving Germany a chance to win
the war. The American papers called them German agents, but Jimmie
did not take any stock in such talk as this. Jimmie was familiar
with the "frame-up" as it is operated against the workers in
America. He saw that the first thing the Bolshevik leaders did was
to make an appeal to the revolutionary workers of Germany. The
Russian proletariat had shown the way--now let the German
proletariat follow! Literature was printed and shipped wholesale
into Germany, leaflets were dropped by aviators among the German
troops; and when Jimmie and Deror read that the German generals had
protested to the Russians against such practices, they laughed aloud
with delight. Well might the war-lords squeal; they knew what was
coming to them! And when in January Jimmie and Deror read of the
revolting of a brigade of German troops, and a strike of several
hundred thousand working men throughout Germany, they thought the
end was at hand. The little tailor got up in local Ironton and made
a motion that it take to itself the name "Bolshevik"--which motion
was carried with a whoop. And these American Bolsheviki went on to
consult with the labour-unions, suggesting that they should form
"shop-committees", and prepare for the taking over of industry
a la Russe!




III



But something went suddenly wrong with the newly built revolutionary
steam-roller. The German military chiefs seized their strike-leaders
at home and threw them into jail, or shipped them off to the front
trenches to be slaughtered. By terrorism, shrewdly mixed with
cajolery, they broke the strike, and sent the grumbling slaves back
to their treadmill. And then the German armies began to march into
Russia!

It was the crisis to which Jimmie Higgins had been looking forward
ever since the war began. Tolstoi had taught that if one nation
refused to fight, it would be impossible for another nation to
invade it; and while Jimmie Higgins was no mystic or religious
non-resistant, he agreed in this with the great Russian. No workers
in an enemy army could possibly be brought to fire upon their
peace-proclaiming brothers!

And here at last was the test of the theory; here were German
Socialists ordered to march against Russian Socialists--ordered to
fire upon the red flag! Would they do what their masters, the
war-lords, commanded? Or would they listen to the clamorous appeals
of the international proletariat, and turn their guns against their
own officers?

All the world saw what happened; it saw the glorious revolutionary
machine, in which Jimmie Higgins had put all his trust, run into a
ditch and land its passengers in the mud. The German armies marched,
and the Socialists in the German armies did exactly what the
non-Socialists did--they fired upon the red flag, as they would have
fired upon the flag of the Tsar. They obeyed the orders of their
officers, like true and loyal Germans; they drove back the
Bolsheviki in confusion, taking their guns and supplies, and
destroying their cities; they led off the Russian women and children
into slavery, precisely as if they were Belgian or French women and
children, destined by the German Gott as the legitimate prey of
Kultur. They sacked Riga and Reval, they overran all the Eastern
portions of Russia--Courland, Livonia, Esthonia; they moved into the
rich grain country of Southern Russia, the Ukraine; they landed from
their ships and took Finland, wiping out the liberties of that
splendid people. They were at the gates of Petrograd, and the
Bolshevik government was forced to flee to Moscow. Of all which
military feats the German Socialist papers spoke with stern pride!




IV



Poor Jimmie Higgins! It was like the blow of a mighty fist in the
face; he was literally stunned--it was weeks before he could grasp
the full meaning of what was happening, the debacle of all his
hopes. And it was the same with Ironton's Bolshevik local; all the
"pep" was gone out of its proceedings. To be sure, some noisy ones
went on shouting for revolution the very next day--men, who had been
talking formulas for twenty or thirty years, and had no more notion
of a fact than they had of a pseudopodium. But the sensible men of
the group knew that their "St. Louis resolution" was being shot to
death over there in the trenches before Petrograd.

It was interesting especially to see Rabin. The common belief of
Americans was that a Jew could not be induced to fight; they told a
story about one who cried out to his son, asking why he was letting
another boy pummel him, and the son whispered in reply, "Keep still,
I got a nickel under my foot!" All through the war the Jewish
Socialists in America had been, next to the Germans, the most ardent
pacifists; but now here was a social revolution managed by Jews,
here was a Russian government which gave the Jews their rights for
the first time in history! So the little Jewish tailor stood up
before these American Bolsheviki, and with tears running down his
cheeks declared: "Comrades, I am already tru vit speeches; I am
going into dis var! I vill put myself vit de Polish Socialists, vit
de Bohemian Socialists--I fight de Kaiser to de death! So vill fight
every Jewish Socialist in de vorld!" And this was no mere
braggadocio--Comrade Rabin actually proceeded to shut up his
tailor-shop, and went away to join the "red brigade", which was
being organized by the Jewish revolutionists of New York!

If the German war-lords had set out deliberately to ham-string the
American Socialists, to make it impossible for them to go on
demanding peace, they could not have acted differently. They dragged
the helpless Bolsheviki into a peace-conference at Brest-Litovsk,
and forced them to cede away all the territories that Germany had
taken, and on top of that to pay an enormous indemnity. They planned
to compel the new Russian government to become a vassal to the
Central Powers, working to help them enslave the rest of the world.
The German armies went through the conquered territories, stripping
them bare, robbing the peasants of every particle of food, beating
them, shooting them, burning their homes if they resisted. They gave
to the world such a demonstration of what a German peace would mean,
that everywhere free men set their teeth and gripped their hands,
and swore to root this infamous thing from out civilization. Even
Jimmie Higgins!




V



Yes, even Jimmie! He made up his mind that he would work as hard as
ever he could, and produce as many automobile-trucks as he could.
But alas, a man cannot be hounded and oppressed all his life, cannot
have hatred and rebellion ground into the deeps of his soul, and
then forget it over-night because of certain intellectual ideas,
certain new items that he reads in his paper. What happened to
Jimmie was that his mind was literally torn in half; he found
himself, every twenty-four hours of his life, of two absolutely
contradictory and diametrically opposite points of view. He would
vow destruction to the hated German armies; and then he would turn
about and vow destruction to the men at home who were managing the
job of destroying the German armies!

For these men were Jimmie's life-long enemies, and were no more able
to forget their prejudices over-night than was Jimmie. For example,
the lying capitalist paper which Jimmie had to read every morning!
When Jimmie had read a patriotic editorial in the Ironton Daily Sun,
it had become utterly impossible for him to help win the war that
day! Or the politicians, seeking to use the war-cry of democracy
abroad to crush all traces of democracy at home; to "get" the
radicals whom they hated and feared, and by means of taxes on
necessities and a bonded debt to put the costs of the war on to the
poor! Or the capitalists, making fervid speeches about patriotism,
but refusing to give up the whip-hand over their wage-slaves!

Jimmie Higgins was working in a factory, making automobile-trucks
for the armies in France; and the owners of the factory would not
let the men have a union, and so there was a strike. The bosses made
an agreement to take everybody back and permit a union, and then
proceeded treacherously to violate the agreement, getting rid of the
most active organizers on this or that transparent pretext. Jimmie
Higgins, trying to help with the skill of his hands to make the
world safe for democracy, was turned out of his job and left to
wander in the streets, because a big profit-seeking corporation did
not believe in democracy, and refused to permit its workers any
voice in determining the conditions of their labour! The Government
was trying to deal with emergencies such as this, to put an end to
the epidemic of strikes which was hindering the war-work everywhere;
but the government had not yet got its machinery going, and meantime
Jimmie's little feeble sprout of patriotism got a severe chill.

Jimmie got drunk and wasted a part of his money on a woman of the
street. Then, being ashamed of himself, and still plagued by the
memory of his dead wife and babies, he straightened up and resolved
to start life anew. He found himself thinking about Leesville; it
was the only place in the world where he had ever been really happy,
and now since Deror Rabin had gone East, it was the only place where
he had friends. How were the Meissners getting on? How was Comrade
Mrs. Gerrity, nee Baskerville? What was Local Leesville thinking
about Russia and about the war? Jimmie took a sudden resolve to go
and find out. He priced a ticket, and found that he had enough money
and to spare. He would take the journey--and take it in state, as a
citizen and a war-worker, not as a tramp in a box-car!






CHAPTER XVI

JIMMIE HIGGINS MEETS THE TEMPTER

I





When Jimmie Higgins stepped off the train at Leesville, it was a
blustery morning in early March, with snow still on the ground and
flurries of it in the air. In front of the station was a public
square, with a number of people gathered, and Jimmie strolled over
to see what was going on. What he saw was a score of young men, some
in khaki uniforms, some in ordinary trousers and sweaters, being
drilled. Jimmie, being in the mood of a gentleman of leisure,
stopped to watch the show.

It was the thing he had been talking and thinking about for nearly
three years: this monstrous perversion of the human soul called
Militarism, this force which seized hold of men and made them into
automatons, moving machines which obeyed orders in a mass, and went
out and did deeds of which none of them taken separately would have
been capable, even in their dreams. Here was a bunch of average nice
Leesville boys, employees of the shops near-by, "soda-jerkers" and
"counter-jumpers", clerks who had deftly fitted shoes on to the feet
of pretty ladies. Now they were submitting themselves to this
deforming discipline, undergoing this devilish transmogrification.

Jimmie's eye ran down the line: there was a street-car conductor he
knew, there was a machinist from the Empire, also there was a son of
Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of Leesville.
And suddenly Jimmie gave a start. Impossible! It could not be!
But--it was! Young Emil Forster! Emil a Socialist, Emil a German,
Emil a student and thinker, who had penetrated the hypocritical
disguises of this capitalist war, and had fearlessly proclaimed the
truth every Friday night at the local--here he was with a suit of
khaki on his rather frail figure, a rifle in his hand and a look of
grim resolve on his face, going through the evolutions of
squad-drill: left, right, left, right, left, right--column left,
march--one, two, three, four--left, right, left, right--squad right
about, march--left, right, left, right--squad left oblique
march--and so on. If you are to form any picture of the scene you
must imagine the swift tramp of many feet in unison--thump, thump,
thump, thump, thump, thump; you must imagine the marchers, with
their solemnly set faces, and the orders thundered out by a
red-faced young man of desperate aspect, the word MARCH coming each
time with a punch that hit you over the heart. This red-faced young
man was the very incarnation of the military despot as Jimmie had
pictured him; watching with hawk-like eye, scolding, pounding,
driving, with no slightest regard for the feelings of the slaves he
commanded, or for any of the decencies of civilized intercourse.

"Hold those half-steps, Casey! Keep your eye on the end man--you'll
have him splitting his legs if you don't wait for him. Column left,
march--one, two, three, four--now you're all right--off with
you--that's better! Put a little pep into your feet, Chalmers, for
God's sake--if you go marching into Berlin like that they'll think
it's the hospital squad! By the right flank, column fours, march--
watch your distance there, end man! How many times do you want me to
tell you that?"--and so on and on--tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp--while a small boy standing beside Jimmie, evidently a truant
from school, chanted over and over: "Left--left--the soldier got
drunk and he packed up his trunk and he left--left! And do you not
think he was right--right?"




II



Now if you have ever stood about and watched outdoor exercise or
games, on a day in March with snow on the ground and a keen wind
blowing, you know how it is--you have to stamp your feet to keep
warm; and if in your neighbourhood there are twenty left feet
smiting the ground in unison, and then twenty right feet smiting the
ground in unison, it is absolutely inevitable that your stamping
should keep time to the smiting; also the rhythm of your stamping
will be communicated upwards into your body--your thoughts will
keep time with the marching squad--tramp, tramp, tramp,
tramp--left, right, left, right! The psychologists tell us that one
who goes through the actions appropriate to an emotion will begin to
feel that emotion; and so it was with Jimmie Higgins. By a process
so subtle that he never suspected it Jimmie was being made into a
militarist! Jimmie's hands were clenched, Jimmie's jaw was set,
Jimmie's feet were tramping, tramping on the road to Berlin, to
teach the Prussian war-lords what it meant to defy the free men of a
great republic!

But then something would happen to blast these budding excitements
in Jimmie's soul. The red-faced fellow would break into the rhythm
of the march. "For the love of Mike, Pete Casey, can't you remember
those half-steps? Squad, halt! Now look here, what's the matter with
you? Step out and let me show you once more." And poor Casey, a
meek-faced little man with sloping shoulders, who had been running
the elevator in the Chalmers Building up to a week ago, would
patiently practise marching without moving, so that the rest of the
line could wheel round him as a pivot. The petty tyrant who scolded
at him was determined to have his own way; and Jimmie, who had had
to do with many such tyrants in his long years of industrial
servitude, was glad when this particular one got mixed up in his
orders, and ran his squad into the fountain in the middle of the
drill-ground, and some of them marched over the parapet, sliding
down into the ice-covered basin below. The spectators roared, and so
did the marchers, and the red-faced man young had to join in, and to
come down off his high horse.

The conflict of impulses went on in Jimmie's soul. These marching
men were the "fools" at whom he had been mocking for something over
two years. They did not look like "fools" he had to admit; on the
contrary, they looked, quite capable of deciding what they wanted to
do. And they had decided; they had quit their jobs several weeks in
advance of the time when they would be called for the draft, and had
set to work to learn the rudiments of the military art, in the hope
of thus getting more quickly to France. Among them were bankers and
merchants and real estate dealers, side by side with soda-jerkers
and counter-jumpers and elevator-men--and all taking their orders
from an ex-blacksmith's helper, who had run away to fight in the
Philippines.

Jimmie got this last bit of information from a fellow who stood
watching; so he realized that here was the thing he had been reading
about in the papers--the new army of the people, that was going
forth to make the world safe for democracy! Jimmy had read such
words, and thought them just camouflage, a trap for the "fools". But
here, a sight of wonder before his eyes, a son of Ashton Chalmers,
president of the First National Bank of Leesville, being ordered
about and hauled over the coals by an ex-blacksmith's helper, who
happened to know how to shout with the accents of a pile-driver:
"Shoulder HUMPS! Order HUMPS! Present HUMPS!"

The squad spread itself out for exercise--grasping their heavy
rifles and swinging them this way and that with desperate violence.
"Swing over head and return, ready, exercise--one, two, three, four,
five, six, seven, eight--eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two,
one." It was no joke making those swings in such quick time; the
poor little elevator-man Casey was left hopelessly behind, he could
only make half the swing, and then couldn't get back to place on the
count; he would look about, grinning sheepishly, and then fall into
time and try again. Everybody's face was set, everybody's breath was
coming harder and harder, everybody's complexion was becoming
apoplectic.

"Swing to the right!" shouted the blacksmith-tyrant. "Ready,
exercise--one, two"--and so on. And then he would yell: "No,
Chalmers, don't punch out with your arms--swing up your gun! Swing
it up from the bottom! That's the way! Poke 'em! Poke 'em! Put the
punch into 'em!" And over Jimmie stole a cold horror. There was
nothing on the end of those guns but a little black hole, but Jimmie
knew what was supposed to be there--what would some day be there;
the exercise meant that these affable young Leesville store-clerks
were getting ready to drive a sharp, gleaming blade into the bowels
of human beings! "Poke 'em! Poke 'em!" shouted the ex-blacksmith,
and with desperate force they swung the heavy rifles, throwing their
bodies to one side and leaping out with one foot. Horrible!
Horrible!




III



Man is a gregarious animal, and it is a fundamental law of his being
that when a group of his fellows are doing a certain thing, and
doing it with energy and fervour, anyone who does not do it, who
does not share the mood of energy and fervour shall be the object of
ridicule and anger, shall feel within his own heart confusion and
distress. This is true, even if the group is doing nothing more
worthwhile than making itself drunk. How much more shall it be when
it is engaged in making the world safe for democracy!

The only way the man can save himself is by holding before his mind
the belief that he is right, and that some day this will be
recognized; in other words, by appealing to some other group of men,
who in some future time will applaud him. If he is sure of this
future applause, he can manage to stand the jeers for the moment.
But how when he begins to doubt--when his mind is haunted by the
possibility that the men of the future may agree with those of the
present, who are learning to march in unison, and to poke bayonets
into the bodies of Huns!

One of the things which brought this destructive doubt to Jimmie's
soul was the sight of Emil Forster, learning to march and to poke.
Emil had been one of his heroes, Emil knew a hundred times as much
as he--and Emil was going to the war! The squad marched away to the
City hall across the square, and deposited its rifles in a room in
the basement, and then Emil came out, and Jimmie went up to him. The
young carpet-designer of course was delighted to meet his old
friend, and asked him to go to lunch. As they walked along the
street together Jimmie asked what it meant, and Emil answered: "It
means that I have made up my mind."

"You're going to fight the German people?"

"Strange as you'll think it, I'm going to fight them for their own
good. Bebel wrote in his memoirs that the way to get democratic
progress in autocratic countries is through military defeat; and it
seems up to America to provide this defeat for Germany."

"But--you were preaching just the opposite!"

"I know; it makes me feel foolish sometimes. But things have
changed, and there's no sense in shutting your eyes to facts."

Jimmie waited.

"Russia, more especially," continued Emil, answering the unspoken
question. "What's the use of getting Socialism, if you're just
throwing yourself down for a military machine to run over you?
You're playing the fool, that's all--and you have to see it. What
hope is there for Russia now?"

"There's the German Socialists."

"Well, they just didn't have the power, that's all. What's more, we
have to face the fact that a lot of them aren't really
revolutionists--they're politicians, and haven't dared to stand out
against the crowd. Anyhow, whatever the reason is, they didn't save
their own country, and they didn't save Russia. They certainly can't
expect us to give them a third chance--it costs too much."

"But then," argued Jimmie, "ain't we doin' just what we blame them
for doin'--turnin' patriots, supportin' a capitalist government?"

"When you're supporting a government," replied Emil, "it make's a
lot of difference what use its making of your support. We all know
the faults of our government, but we know too that the people can
change it when enough of them get ready, and that makes a real
difference. I've come to realize that if we give the Kaiser a
beating, the German people will kick him out, and then we can talk
sense to them."




IV



They walked along for a bit in silence, Jimmie trying to assimilate
these ideas. They were new--not in the sense that he had not heard
them before, but in the sense that he had not heard them from a
German. "How does your father feel?" he asked at last.

"He hasn't changed," replied the other. "And that makes it pretty
hard--it's all we can do to keep from quarrelling. He's old, and new
ideas don't come to him easily. Yet you'd think he'd be the first to
see it--his father was one of the old revolutionists, he was put in
jail in Dresden. I don't suppose you know much about the history of
Germany."

"No," said Jimmie.

"Well, in those days the German people tried to get free, and they
were put down by the troops, and the real revolutionists were driven
into exile. Some of them came over here--like my grandfather. But,
you see, their children have forgotten about their wrongs--they look
back on Germany now, and think of it sentimentally, as it's pictured
in the stories and songs--a sort of Christmas-tree Germany. They
don't know about the Germany that's grown up--the Germany of iron
and coal kings, that combines all the cruelty of feudalism with
modern efficiency and science--the Beast with the Brains of an
Engineer!"

They walked on, Emil lost in thought. "You know," he broke out,
suddenly, "this war has been a revelation to me--the most horrible
you could imagine. It's as if you loved a woman, and saw her go
insane before your eyes, or turn into some sort of degenerate. For I
believed in the Christmas-tree Germany; I loved it, and I argued for
it, I just couldn't bring myself to believe what I read in the
papers. Now I look back, and it seems like a trap that the German
war-lords had set for my mind--reaching way over here into America,
and making me think what they wanted me to! Perhaps I've gone to the
other extreme--I find I distrust everything that's German. Father
accused me of it last night; he was singing an old German song that
says that when you hear men singing you may lie down in peace, for
bad men have no songs. And I reminded him that the nation which
taught that idea had marched into Belgium singing!"

"Gee!" exclaimed Jimmie. He could imagine how old Hermann Forster
had taken that remark!

The young carpet-designer smiled, rather sadly. "He says it's
because I've put on khaki. But the truth is, I'd been full of these
thoughts, and all at once they came to a head. I was drafted, and I
had to make up my mind one way or the other. I decided I'd
fight--and then, when I'd decided, I wanted to get into it right
away." Emil paused, and looked at his friend and asked, "What about
you?"

Jimmie, of course, was a draft-evader, one of the hated "slackers".
Ordinarily, he would have told Emil, and the two of them would have
grinned. But now Emil was in khaki, Emil was a patriot; perhaps it
would not be wise to trust him entirely! "They haven't got me yet,"
said Jimmie; and then, "I ain't so sure as I used to be, but I ain't
ready to be a soldier--I dunno's I could stand bein' bossed like
that fellow does it."