The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me — John Shaqi
The Martial Adventures of Henry and MeWhite, William Allen
History
The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me
White, William Allen
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
As we went down into the valley of the Marne where division after
division of the French army was quartered upon the population,
thousands in a village, where normally hundreds were sheltered, we
realized what social chaos must stalk in the train of war. Every
few weeks these soldiers go to the front and other soldiers come
in. Fathers, husbands, sweethearts of peace times are at the front
or dead. The visiting soldiers come "from over the hills and far
away," but they are young, and the women are young and beautiful,
and they live daily with these women in their houses. Moreover,
the emotions of France are tense. Death, doubt, fear and hope lash
the home-staying hearts every day. And amid those raw emotions
comes the daily and hourly call of the deepest emotion in the human
heart. It comes honestly. It comes inevitably. And then, in a day
or an hour, the lover is gone, and new faces appear in the village,
in the street, in the home. Five millions of men during the last
three years and a half have passed and re-passed, through those
fifty miles or so back of the firing line in which soldiers are
quartered for rest, where in times of peace less than a million men
have lived. And the women are the same honest, earnest, aspiring
women that our wives and sisters are, and the men are as chivalrous
and gentle and as kind.
For nearly an hour we had been going through these villages crowded
with soldiers--kindly French soldiers who were clearly living
happily with the people upon whom they were billeted. Then Henry
burst forth, "My good Heavens, man--what if this were in Wichita
or Emporia! What if your house and mine had ten or twenty fine
soldiers in it, and we were away and our wives and daughters were
there alone? Thousands and thousands of these young girls flitting
about here were just little children three years ago when their
daddies left. What if in our streets soldiers were quartered by
the hundreds in every block, with nothing in the world to do but
rest! What would happen in Wichita and Emporia--or back East in
Goshen, New York, or out West in Fresno or Tonapah? What an awful
thing--what a hell in the earth, war is!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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