The Road Taken (5 page)

Chapter Five

In the spring of 1917 America entered the war. Feelings were mixed about United States involvement in a place so far away, in a conflagration that seemed to have so little to do with this country. Many people still didn’t want to send American doughboys to Europe to fight, but because the Germans were so openly hostile to the U.S., and France and England were in such danger, President Wilson (who had won his first term on an election platform of “no war”) had finally decided war was unavoidable. The propaganda machine cranked up to make the war into a noble cause. Anti-war demonstrators were dealt with harshly; some were lynched in the streets by angry mobs.

On the other hand, this war to rescue the “decadent” Old World seemed romantic to a lot of young men. They felt they were knights from the novels they had read in school. None of them had ever known a war, much less one three thousand miles away. There were grizzled veterans of the Civil War still living, with their tales of violence and death, but that was the past. These optimistic, eager, strong young American men felt they were Ivanhoe.

“Over there,” the popular song went, “Over there . . . the Yanks are coming . . . the drums rum-tumming . . . And we won’t come back till it’s over over there.”

Along with the other healthy local young men, Tom Sainsbury was drafted. Therefore, because they would be separated for what might be a long time, he and Rose decided to become officially engaged a year earlier than they had planned. She had a tiny diamond to wear on her left hand before he left for Fort Riley in Kansas, and she wrote to him every night. Tom had been lucky enough to be kept stateside, in the Quartermaster’s Corps, building and repairing things, but as the war effort escalated Rose worried that he might be sent overseas. She knew he wanted to go, that he had requested it, and that frightened her most of all.

Her letters were passionate and effusive, since you could say what you wanted to a man as long as you were far away. She pretended to be strong, but she wasn’t, and some nights, after she had sealed her letter with a kiss, she was unable to sleep at all.

Their small town had turned into a boom town because of the war. The war effort had increased the demand for products from the local rubber factory, and that in turn led to fifteen hundred people being employed there, in that one place, a quarter as many people as had been living in the entire town in the year of Rose’s birth. They were mostly immigrants—from Italy, Portugal, and the Portuguese Islands—who had joined the original Yankee settlers and the Irish, the blacks, and Native Americans, to make Bristol a kind of mini country itself, or so it seemed to Rose.

“Dearest Tom,” Rose wrote. “I hope and pray every day for you to be well and safe,
here
in the United States! You wouldn’t recognize what has happened to our peaceful little hometown. I wonder what it will be like after the war is over. Meanwhile, last summer, when we were so happy, seems like another world. We are all trying to be brave because you are so brave. I know you’re doing your part and the Army is proud of you. Your skills are needed on the home front, and you mustn’t think you aren’t just as vital to the war effort as the men who went to Europe. Please try to write to me if you can and reassure me. . . .” Then she crossed out “and reassure me,” because she didn’t want to whine. “The only news I have since yesterday is very good news—Maude is expecting a baby! She is so lucky that Walter, as a husband, has been deferred. Now that he will be both a husband and a father he is even safer.”

She often thought that she and Tom should have gotten married too, then he wouldn’t be in the Army. But she didn’t say so in her letters. He had been patriotic, wanting to do his part in the war, and he might even have enlisted, married man or not. Why did men think war and danger were so exciting? Didn’t they know what could happen to them?

“I’m so proud of you, dearest Tom,” she wrote, keeping her feelings to herself, hoping she didn’t look like a future nagging wife. “And our country is proud of you too. I think about you, I dream about you, and I imagine our future marriage and its private moments with so much longing.” Of course, she did not know what those “private moments” were, but she relived his kisses, and was sure that he would know even if she didn’t. “All my love and a thousand kisses, Rose.”

That winter was unusually cold, with shortages of fuel, especially coal. People bought Liberty Bonds, and there was food conservation, with wheatless and meatless days, because so much was needed to feed the troops. Celia and Maude rolled bandages for the Red Cross, and Hugh collected scrap metal for the war effort. While the women were busy he also volunteered to take care of his two younger sisters; he had the patience to play with them for hours. William complained because the income tax, which had only been around for four years, had already been heavily increased. He said it penalized the middle class and the poor, and that the rich were “getting away with it.” No one could stand the income tax; it was a kind of shock. But money had to be raised for the war.

“People hate the Germans so much,” Rose wrote to Tom, “that they are actually kicking dachshunds in the street!”

Conscription speeded up. There was compulsive universal draft now, and military training for the hundreds of thousands of new recruits.

Ben Carson, who had received military training at Yale in the Student Army Corps, was going to be shipped overseas. He came back to Bristol on leave before he left, and Maude took Rose to the tea his sister Gloria (whose new husband was now a serviceman in Europe) gave for him.

He looked very official and serious in his uniform. “I’m so eager to join ‘The Great Adventure,’” he said.

“The great adventure?” Rose said, surprised.

“That’s what Theodore Roosevelt called it,” Ben said, “and I think that’s very apt and inspiring. This will be the most exciting thing that has ever happened to any of us.”

Rose didn’t answer. She didn’t want to insult or discourage him when he was about to go off happily to save freedom, although she had to turn her face away. How naive these soldiers were to think it was only an adventure when their lives were at stake, she thought, upset. All her life she had been taught that men were more practical than women, that they were more intelligent; but now she was beginning to think that women were the ones capable of rational thought, while men, with their uniforms and guns and marching songs, were the instinctual ones.

“How is Tom doing?” Ben asked.

“He’s well, thank you,” Rose said.

“Still at Fort Riley?”

“Yes. They need him there.”

She was glad when she and Maude left. “You could have had him,” Maude said to her while they were walking home.

“Ben?”

“Yes. He’s always had a soft spot for you.”

“But I hardly know him,” Rose said, insulted. “And besides, he knows I’m engaged.”

“Yes, he does. And I think he’s very sorry.”

“So what?” Rose said. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Why are you so angry?”

“Everybody thinks that because his family has money and he’s going to be a lawyer, that Ben Carson is a good catch,” Rose said. “To me he’s only the man you sat next to me at your dinner party to make Tom jealous, and it worked, so for that I’ll remember him.”

“I thought you’d be flattered, that’s all,” Maude said mildly.

“I’m worried about Tom. In every letter lately he mentions that he wants to go overseas. I don’t know what to do.”

“It’s not in your hands,” Maude said. “In the end, the Army will decide.”

But in the end, there was something worse than the Army.

The influenza epidemic started at Fort Riley the following winter, in 1918, when a mess cook complained of a sore throat and achiness. It spread through the troops, and to the general population, and was taken abroad to France, and then to all of Europe, by soldiers. It was said that a person could start out for work, feel ill on the streetcar, and be dead before he got to his destination. If you were not dead in three hours you were certainly dead in three days. There was no cure, unless you had a mild case and simply got well. Entire families were wiped out. The flu particularly struck young, healthy people at the prime of their lives. People were hemorrhaging, dying as literally “bags of blood,” drowning as their lungs filled with fluid. At Fort Riley the dying kept up at such a pace that finally beleaguered morticians stacked the bodies outside where they froze like cordwood. Schools, churches, and businesses closed, and a call was put out for women to nurse the sick in the barracks that had been turned into hospitals. In all, half a million Americans, and twenty million people worldwide, would die.

Tom Sainsbury, “safe” at Fort Riley, was one of them.

If it had not been for the enormity of the epidemic, and the daily evidence of it in front of her eyes, Rose thought she might not have survived the death of her beloved fiancé and the end of her dreams. But by the time she received the news that she would never see Tom again, she was already in such a state of numbed shock that she could hardly comprehend it.

“We have walked into hell,” she told Maude.

Maude, nursing her firstborn baby son, Walter Junior, only nodded. She brushed her lips across her baby’s head, grazing his soft red hair, the color of his father’s. For now, her husband was well and safe. But there would be no Tom Junior for Rose.

Rose suddenly felt old. She was eighteen years old and she had lost her youth. After Tom’s funeral she pulled into her family and withdrew from the world, like a widow. Because Celia forced her to she did her schoolwork, but like an automaton; and when she was free she played with her little half-sisters, Daisy and Harriette, and with Hugh—who tried uselessly to console her—and rocked her baby nephew, Walter Junior, as if the sight of these still living children could bring her some sort of comfort, the way soft, green spring leaves calm the spirit.

When the war was over and Rose graduated from high school, their yearbook listed as many students who had died of the Spanish flu in the Army as had been killed in the Great War itself. Rose didn’t know what she would do with her life now, and so she did nothing.

Ben Carson came back from France and came to see Rose to pay a condolence call. He was in his civilian clothes, his eyes different. He asked her to take a walk with him, but she didn’t want to, so he sat there in her family’s parlor and sipped at the lemonade Celia had offered him because Rose hadn’t thought of it, and talked about the war.

“We were so stupidly happy,” he said. “Men together in a man’s world. We were knights on a crusade. Our company went off to the battlefield all marching together, singing, with flowers we had picked by the road tucked into our helmets. The fields were so beautiful. The wheat was yellow, there were so many flowers, different kinds of flowers and trees than we’d ever seen at home; France was like an enchanted garden. The cathedrals were so ancient and historical. Even the people were old; perhaps that’s because the people we saw were all that were left to do the farming. Believe it or not, they still used scythes. We were just gaping at everything. For some of us it was the only chance we would ever have to see the big world, to get away from our dull little lives. It’s hard to believe, but we were delighted to be there.

“And then the other part of it came. The real war, the shooting and killing. It was raining; there was mud in the trenches, sucking us in; so much mud that men were actually drowning in it. They had swollen feet, they had maggots, the wounded were screaming in pain. There was nothing to kill the pain. There was so much blood. . . .” He stopped for a moment and his eyes filled with tears, then he controlled himself and went on.

“Those French fields were black and fertile, and men were dying in them of blood poisoning. They were wounded and they either bled to death or died of septicemia. We were summer soldiers, Rose, and we didn’t know a thing.”

“I’m sorry,” Rose murmured.

“I was so young then,” Ben Carson said. “We all were. Do you know Alan Seeger’s poem:
I Have a Rendezvous with Death?
”

“We read it at school,” Rose said.

“We thought it was romantic. We thought being doomed was romantic. We had no idea.”

How could you? Rose thought. You’re just a man. And you were young, besides. But at least he’s apologizing for having been so arrogant. I will give him credit for that. She liked him better now.

“The worst part is,” Ben said, “that although the war changed me, I don’t feel it changed the world. It was too far away and too short. Even now, people don’t really care about the returning veterans.”

Really? Was that true? She didn’t know because she hadn’t read the newspaper in months.

“Your family does,” Rose said. “That’s all that matters.”

“Is it?”

“It is to me. But I’ve lost so much.”

“I know, and that’s why I came here to see you.”

“That was kind,” she said. “Thank you for telling me about the war.”

“Thank you for listening.”

She sighed. Now she wished he would go.

“Perhaps I could come to see you again,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just to see you.”

“I’m still grieving,” Rose said. “I have nothing to say to someone who visits me.”

“You could use a friend.”

“I have friends.” She didn’t want to be impolite, but he was being too pushy. Could Ben Carson possibly, in a million years, think that since he hadn’t been able to rescue the world that he could try to rescue her?

“I’m going back to law school soon,” he said.

Rose held out her hand to say good-bye. “Then I wish you luck.”

When he had gone Celia came in, looking as if she had eavesdropped on the entire conversation, and what was more, as if that was perfectly acceptable. Ever since Rose had started acting like a wooden doll, Celia had treated her as if she were stupid and had no rights, as if she were a real doll, to be placed in position, to be spoken for. “You didn’t have to be rude to him,” Celia said.

“I wasn’t rude,” Rose said.

“He’s a good young man, he’s kind, he’s very intelligent. How well he expresses himself! You could do worse than have Ben Carson for a friend.”