This wilfully static realism explains at once the qualities and faults of Miss Cather’s war novel, “One of Ours.” The American critics have not been very benevolent towards this book. The first and autobiographical part of it is excellent. Faithful to her philosophy of art through reminiscence, the author describes the youth of a child of the prairies, also a victim of Puritanism. Eugene Willer, the hero of “One of Ours,” is one of those American youths whose restlessness is increasingly preoccupying the moralists and the sociologists. His is a soul filled with desire and easily wounded by the things which surround him. Miss Cather has told, with her usual minute realism, the sad story and tragic death of this misunderstood youth. A tender and loving boy, Eugene expected too much of life, and was hurt in his first encounter with it. He had married a frigid woman, a “crystal cup.”[54] His wife slammed the door in his face on their wedding night. The unfortunate youth had no taste left for life after that. Hear him exhaling his dejection in the moonlight, like Salammbô on her high terrace, or Carol Kennicott in her Gopher Prairie garden. The moon which illuminated the romantic enthusiasms of yore is nothing more than a mirror for the deceptions of this American René. How many agonies has this pale moon of the prairies shone upon! Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of people who talked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives dwelling in darkness--never seen from birth to death. Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all.... The people whose hearts were set high needed such intercourse--whose wish was so beautiful that there were no experiences in this world to satisfy it. And these children of the moon, with their unappeased longings and futile dreams, were a finer race than the children of the sun. This conception flooded the boy’s heart like a second moonrise, flowed through him indefinite and strong, while he lay deathly still for fear of losing it. Thus lamented the hero of “One of Ours,” a true _Obermann_ of the prairie, seeking an ideal and a reason for existence. Then came the war. How tragic is life, and how poor in resources is the soul of man if it needs violent death to give it a meaning! The American pacifists have shunned Miss Cather’s war novel. They have not felt the bitter philosophy which exudes from it. Was it her fault if those whom an army leader called “the élite of the best men that ever were in America” went, in search of exaltation, to dye with their blood the slopes of Belleau Wood? When are we going to have a Freudian interpretation of the war as a supreme and tragic derivative to inhibition?[55]