The weekly tribune and the Cape County herald. (Cape Girardeau, Mo.) 1914-1918, 1917-09-29

| uayS tnat Try the souls OF humankind.
Repatriation, always bitter to the pa
triOt, becomes an overwhelming bur-
| den to the American in these times
when their country, the nOblest of
them all, is about to strike the most
| tremendous and majestic blow ever
| struck by a nation at war. Even to be
expatriated to friendly ally may well
prove ranking to an American who
possesses a full measure Of patriotic
pride, and to be marOoned from the
civilized world in the ranks of our en-
envy is proving as bitter as hemlock to
numbers of true Americans at heart.
Among these the most poignant suffer
| ers are the erstwhile American girls,
now the wives of enemy aliens, who, in
their distress, have, almost to a wom-
an, identified themselves with the Red
Cross of their husbands countries.
They feel that, at least in this one re-
spect, they may conscientiously quiet
their broken hearts with the thought
that they do a work which the great
United States in its honest myriads Of
hearts will heartily approve.
Among the more prominent Of those
who suffer thus appears the former
Gladys Vanderbilt, who has been an
angel of mercy in Austria-Hungary
and who now finds herself unwittingly
arrayed against her home land and
family.
Her husband is a staff captain with
General Dankl in that dangerous Ga
lician region where the Russians once
hoped to make the critical drive of
the war. Her brother, Col. Cornelius
Vanderbilt, is now in the field in the
United States with the Twenty-second
engineers. preparing to seek the Eu-
ropean battlefelds too, where it IS
within the realm of possibility that he
will find himself directly and person
ally opposed to the dashing young man
who married his sister.
So there is sad young woman over
in the far land, laboring for the Red
Cross, the wounded and for q cause
that is not that of her family and the
friends of her childhood. Indeed, it
was the death of her own brother.
Alfred G. Vanderbilt. that had as
much to do with molding American
sentiment against the Teutonic powers
as any one incident of the war. What
ever may be the fact of the real cause
of the underlying break, the public
mind holds most prominently the sink
nf of
sentiment, and the most prominent vic
tim of that ocean disaster was her own
brother, sent to watery grave by a
torpedo that came from q U-bOat.
One brother dead as a nOncOmbatant
victim of war, another in khaki ready
to fight. couple of nephews wearing
the uniform of America and scores Of
relatives and friends either in the
ranks or in the councils Of the repub-
lie, the position of this unfortunate
young woman is indeed one of the most
pathetic stories of the whole cataclysm
that is shaking the world.
While she is by reason of these
queer international complications the
most striking figure in the marital
horrors of Cupid, she does not stand
alone. A score of titled women, a few
hundreds without titles, but still wOm-
en- with hearts and loves, are in the
same boat.
And the most pitiful phase Of the
whole situation is that their adopted
countries do not trust them, in spite
of any sacrifice they may make.
Studying the records of ages. one finds
that time and again some woman of
high place and mind has cast to the
winds love, personal wishes and even
life itself to serve her own land.
There is a higher law that is not
defined that says to every man and
every woman that personal ties are
secondary to the grand duty of pa
triOtism. and it is this higher law that
makes the officials of the central mill
tary powers fear and distrust any
wife whose land is not their own.
Bismarck. the Iron Chancellor, put
the thought into concrete form when
he issued an order that no German
diplomat in the service of his country
might marry a foreigner. The order
fell into disregard when the kaiser
took the reins completely in his own
hands until shortly before the Euro
pean war, when it was revived. In
the meantime there had crept into the
German and Austrian diplomatic soci-
pty a number of brilliant American
women who are now under tie ban of
the old military law and who are alien
enemies of their native land without
being trusted friends of the one to
which Cupid led them.
Thus II was Lillian May Lapghaul,
a beauty of Louisville, KY, came to be
the bride of the late ambassador 10
Washington, Speck Won Sternburg. and
likewise through the hiatus there came
to Count Johann Heinrich Won Berns-
.torff. his successor in this country,
Miss Jeanne Luckmeyer, one of the
fairest of the daughters of New York.
And Miss Constance Hoyt was another
of the rich Americans who went to the
diplomatic court of Germany through
her wedding to Baron Won Stumm.
In many cases American girls with