Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1918-08-03
THE CASUALTY LISTS
America Can Feel More Than Sorrow and
More Than Pride at the News Of Its
Loss in France

Loss in France
HERE and there you can still find per-
sons who speak of war as if it were
glorious. That is because the war has
for them quality of unreality. 1t is
far away, perceived dimly in flashes and
rumors, tabled thing in tabled place.
1t seems safely removed from all the
things and persons we know.
And now, through the lengthening
casualty lists, the war has struck at the
heart of Philadelphia. 1t is spreading
sorrow in countless Pennsylvania towns.
The wonder and mystery of these days
is suggested in the news that Pottsville,
which had not been even heard Of in
France two years ago, suffered thirty
seven casualties (six killed, thirty-one
wounded) at the Marne!
The mothers of the men whose names
are on the casualty lists will not think
of war as a glorious thing. They will
feel in their hearts that it is unbeliev-
ably cruel, ineXplcable and strange.
They will say that they are glad their
sons died as they did. But they will not
be glad They will know heartbreak and
bewiderment and pain, and they will
pretend bravely because in pretending
they can do last service to a world that
they always serve so variously. The
truth is that men can be glorious in their
courage and in their aims. But war is
not glorious.
For innumerable persons there will be
shocks in the new lists of dead and
wounded War is just revealing itself to
such as these. They will remember init
mately the men who have given up their
lives. They will perceive that it was Bill
this or Eddie that, man who worked
around the corner, who used to drop in
for a cigar or the baseball score, who
was suddenly moved onward and upward,
with the eyes of all the world upon him,
to conservation and martyrdom. 1t was
some one whose manners and gestures
and tones of voice you remember, the
boy of a few years ago, who was killed -
heroes who fought there, but men you
knew. They Uere the Average men,
careless, unpretentious, imperfect like
the rest of us, who proved when the
time came that they had IN them deep
hidden Somewhere, waiting only the need
and the opportunity, the WiU to great
seypice and the light of eralted derotion
to noble ends. Acreage men all Of them,
rho dropped in for cigar or the base
ball scores.
The news of our losses will harden the
resolution of the nation. But it should
do far more than that. 1t should aid to
self-revelation and to self-knowledge.
1t should light within every man new
understanding of the stuff that makes
America. There should be a new sense
of common obligations and, above all,
new sense of intimacy and sympathy
with the chap across the aisle in the
trolley, with the man at the mechanics
bench, with the careless, unconscious
rank and file. Such as they gave US the
heroes and the martyrs of our first deep
plunge into this war.
The nation at large should be wiser
hereafter and stronger. We have moth
ing to regret, no reason to feel that these
men could be saved. There was no other
way. We tried them all. And there
fore we shall overwhelm and conquer
every obstacle.
But in the present moment 1t IS the
acreage man Who stands rerealed a
roblcman. And because Of that 1ce must
learn to hate all liars and to recognise
finally the senseless infamy OF all those
7cho for any reason acould erer again
diride the mass of Americans into cliqhes
and classes with Selfshness, hatred or
bigotry as animating motives. The
cruelty and folly of that familiar prac-
tice is something 1ohich our dead IN
France could hare told as had they lived.