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                          THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM




[Illustration:
 THE ALTAR OF
 FREEDOM

 BY
 MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

 BOSTON AND NEW YORK
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
 The Riverside Press Cambridge
 1917]




           COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

               COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

                          ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                         _Published April 1917_




                          THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM


     Remember, boy, that behind all these men you have to do with,
   behind officers, and government, and people even, there is the
   Country Herself, your Country, and that you belong to Her as you
   belong to your own Mother.
                                          _The Man Without a Country._

We are virtually at war. By the time this is published, perhaps the
declaration will have been made.

And even now, all over the country, on this bright spring day, there are
mothers who are waiting to know what they must do. Mothers who are
facing the day with heads up and shoulders back, ready to stand steady
when the blow falls; mothers who shrink and tremble, but ready, too; and
other mothers, who cannot find the strength to give up to the service of
their country the boys who will always be little boys to them.

I love my country. There is nothing she can ask that I will not do. I am
ready to live for her or die for her. Last stand of the humanities on
earth, realization of a dream and fulfillment of an ideal, my home, my
native land,—that is America to me. Because I am a woman, I cannot die
for my country, but I am doing a far harder thing.

I am giving a son to the service of his country, the land he loves.

When I was a child, I lived on a quiet, tree-shaded street in this very
city where now I am writing this. And, late in May of each year, when
the ailanthus trees were in blossom, the street put up fresh curtains
and red-washed the brick pavements. The cobblestones were swept, too.
And then the procession came.

I was twelve, I think, before I began to get a lump in my throat as the
long line of veterans went by. It was a long line then. I did not know
exactly why I cried, except that those men and those tattered flags
stood for something heroic and very sad. I know now, but it has taken
years to put it into words, and in those years the line has shortened to
a handful. Even the one-armed drummer has gone now. The street, which
was rough and hard to march on in those days, has been made smooth for
their feet, but few are left who can march to that quiet God’s-acre on
the hill above.

Now I know why, as a child, I wept. Those men had fought for something
that was a part of me, like my mother, or my home: for my country.

Many years later I again saw marching men. But now the men were young,
and there were no flags and no drums. They were marching into battle.
And they were not fighting for my country.

But they were fighting for the ideal on which my country was founded,
for humanity against oppression and cruelty, for the right of a man to
labor in his own field, for the principle that honor is greater than
life.

I saw them living and fighting, and I saw them dying. I saw strange
nations, men of different tongues and different colors, gathered
together and becoming as one, against a common foe. And then I learned
this: that the world is now but one great nation, drawn close by the
creed that all men are brothers; and that in the midst of that great
nation of the world had broken loose something terrible, something that
must be killed, or the world dies.

Once over there I saw a boy dying in a railway station. He knew two
English words, so he said:—

“All right. All right.”

It was all right with him. He had done his bit, and he knew that there
were others to take his place, and that the world-nation would not rest
until the war-beast was chained. It was “all right.”

And so now, on the brink of war, I know it is all right with us.

We have been the melting-pot, but under the pot there has been no fire.
Now the fire has come, a white flame, and we will fuse at last. But it
will burn and sear. And to that, I wonder, can we say, “All right”?

                 *        *        *        *        *

War is a great adventure, the greatest adventure in the world. The
adventurers go forth to battle, eyes ahead. Mostly they are boys who go,
because war is the young man’s game, the young man’s call. All over
Europe boys have left their homes, with a shame-faced tear or two,
perhaps, but with the great adventure ahead. And they have left at home
a great emptiness, a quiet that is not peace.

Then,—and very suddenly,—they have ceased to be boys on a great
adventure, and are men, fighting men, patriots and soldiers. Something
that had always been theirs had become a thing that had to be fought
for. Not until it was menaced had they known how dear was their country.
The flag had been but a flag. It became a symbol of home.

I have lived to see my country’s flag beside the altar of my church.

Men fight wars, but it is the mothers of a nation who raise the army.
They are the silent patriots. Given her will, every mother in this great
land would go to war, if by so doing she could keep her sons in safety.
It is easier to go than to send a boy.

Yet war is not necessarily death. I try to comfort myself with this.
Perhaps it will help other mothers. It is a hazard, but it is a thing of
vast rewards and much cheerfulness, of democracy, of big moments and
little feasts, of smiles and grumbling, of labor and rest, and of that
joy in his own kind that only the boy knows. And underneath it all,
buried deep and never articulate, is that feeling of doing his bit for
his country, which is the foundation on which a nation rests secure.

I wish I could always remember these things. I have panicky times, when
the sun dies for me, and my world goes black. But I am like the other
mothers. I shall go through with it, and I would not have things
otherwise. I would not have my son do other than he is doing. He is
still in his ‘teens, but he is a man, and this is his country. I have
not raised him to be a shirker.

Only—this is a matter for everybody. It is not my war, or his, or the
war of those other college boys who are always the first to go. Just as
we all benefit by the country, so must we share—and share alike—its
dangers.

Unless it is your war, this is not a democracy. If, as in the past, we
have allowed the few to do our political thinking for us, as even now in
the churches the few earn for all of us the right to call this a
Christian land, if in this war we allow the few to fight for us, then as
a nation we have died and our ideals have died with us. Though we win,
if all have not borne this burden alike, then do we lose.

Sometimes, in these last troubled days, when every newsboy on the street
under my window has been crying War, I cover my eyes and see that
gallant little first army of England, springing to the call, and facing,
without hope, the great trained German army. It was the best England
had, and it is gone, almost to a man—because the mothers of England had
not insisted that every man in the empire bear his share.

What if now your boy and mine could be a part of a vast trained army?
His chance would be better. Better? There would be no war. You and I,
trembling for what may come, are paying the price of not having risen,
an army of women, and demanded what now may come too late.

Because we did not rise this situation confronts us. For this is what a
volunteer army means in this country to-day. For every high-spirited lad
like yours and mine who goes out to fight, there are a hundred, a
thousand, men of fighting age and strength who will not go, men who have
no country, but only a refuge from the oppression of Europe.

Are we to suffer that they may live? Is this liberty of ours, this Land
of the Free, without price? And will those hold it dear whom it has cost
nothing?

Yet, so great is my faith in this great nation, so sure am I that the
principles on which it is built are enduring, that I believe all these
things will be set right in time. The one thing that matters now is to
do our part, to show to the world that America still believes that there
is such a thing as honor, and such a word as right.

For—and this I believe as I do in my country—we are to end this war.
And that is the greatest privilege a nation of the world may have. We
have sat by, through such horrors as have turned the world to blood. But
now we can come in our strength, and mighty strength it will be. So rich
we are! So strong! So young!

And the enemy is old—jaded and crafty and old: as old as cruelty is
old. We are young and tireless and unafraid.

I have seen a sixteen-year-old Belgian sentinel keeping watch over a
part of the German army, and all its science was powerless against his
keen young eyes.

But we must pay the price. And the cost falls heaviest on the women.

No woman has the right to hold her son back if he desires to go to war.
It is the fruition of the years in which she sought to make him a man.
It is the vindication of his manhood. It is the crystallization of those
very ideals which she taught him with his prayers.

I decline to believe that there are mothers who will not let their boys
strike back when they are attacked.

But it is hard. Always the relation between mother and son is very
close. As the boy grows up, the mother faces this, that he needs more
than she can give him. He is still her world, but she is no longer his.
Life calls, work and play and love, and sometimes battle. And the mother
cannot hold him.

Everywhere are mothers, women who have patched small garments and tied
up little wounds, who have built up a house of life out of millions of
loving services, whose world has been the four walls of home.

To such women comes the call for their sons, who are still to them,
though men grown, but the little boys of the stockings, and the small
wounds, and Christmas trees, and the Fourth of July.

I do not fear for these women, but we cannot minimize what they do. They
will send their sons, because they know that a nation is but a great
home, consisting of many small ones. Homes are the units of a nation, as
men are of an army. And these women know that our homes are only safe so
long as the country is. They know too that peace has fled from the earth
and cannot be brought back but by God and the sword.

Perhaps my own experience will be helpful. I am a home-woman, although
now and then my profession has called me to strange places. Our family
life has been very close. And, while I have little fear for myself, I am
a coward for my children.

When, some weeks ago, war began to come close, I weakened, and I wrote
my oldest son a letter. I was willing to have him do his duty, but I
asked him to wait. Womanlike, I wanted time. I felt that surely this
cross was not for me to bear so soon.

Then,—and may he forgive me for telling this, because of its
purpose,—after a day or two, he wired, asking his father and myself if
we wanted him to be a quitter.

I came to my senses then, and the necessary permission to enlist was
signed and sent. Then I sat down and wrote to him, and said we would
stand squarely behind him in whatever he did.

Easy? It was the hardest thing I have ever done. But I am glad now. I
would never have forgiven him, I think, had he failed his country. But I
nearly failed him.

So I have given one son, and I stand ready to give my other two, if
their country needs them, when they are old enough to go.

But I am finding some things to cheer me. There is, for instance, the
knowledge that the scandals of the Southern camps during the Spanish War
will not be repeated. There we lost ten boys from disease to every one
killed in battle. Think of it! We learned nothing from that war, but we
have learned greatly from the war in Europe. There will be no cruel and
useless waste of life from disease. On the Mexican border there was
practically no sickness, although the natural conditions were in favor
of it. We have sanitarians, now, and water supplies will be watched. The
inoculation against typhoid, too, has eliminated the disease, both in
the European armies and here. Because it is waste that we fear.

We are trying to feel, we women, that no cost is too great, if needful
to preserve our country. But we will never be reconciled to waste of
life through negligence. And this I promise, now. Let such negligence
occur, and let me know of it, duly investigated, and I will make the
press of the country ring with it, to the eternal shame of those who are
responsible.

I have been to war, and I know this: that men living in fearful
surroundings may be kept healthy by proper care. This care is what we
demand, those of us who cannot fight, but who are bearing our own
burdens, nevertheless.

One or two things have helped to make our decision hard for us. Perhaps
the most important is this: there is no great hatred of the enemy,
however much we abominate the things the German Government has driven an
acquiescent people into doing. We all know Germans here whom we like and
respect. We see them, family folk, sober and industrious and
God-fearing, all about us. They are not Huns or vandals. And all the
knowledge we have of a nation gone mad to order hardly counteracts the
effect of the friendly human contacts of our daily lives with the
Germans we know.

We forget that the German we know has come here to escape the very thing
that has wrecked the old world; that in coming to this land of the free
he has followed an ideal as steadily as back in the fatherland his
kindred are following after the false gods of hate and war.

He is German, but he is not Prussian, although he may be Prussian-born.

Then, too, women know too much now of war to enable them to make the
sacrifice easily. War has become more than a word. It is become reality,
and only its horrors live for them. And so far but little emphasis has
been laid on the great things for which we will fight. We talk in
numbers. We stress the fine points of international law. We think of
bond issues and submarines and guns—and the women sit and roll bandages
and brood, and care little for all these things. Why not something of
the real reason for this war, of the hatred for ruthless cruelty, the
contempt for our rights, the scorn of the little nations, and of the
privilege of helping to bring back to a world that is destroying itself
the priceless boon of peace?

How afraid we are of airing our love of our country! How shame-facedly
we rise to the national anthem! How many excuses a man will give for
going to war, except the fundamental one that he loves his country and
is going to stick by her though the heavens fall!

Little boys, these men of ours, hiding their deepest feelings with a
gibe!

Some things we women must learn, and now is the time to learn them.
Sacrifice is an old story to women. They have always known it. But not
sacrifice to an abstract ideal. Sacrifice to an ideal, then,—and
personal service.

_And this personal service, mothers of America, is not rolling bandages
for the other woman’s son._

That hurts, but it is true. This is no time for evasion. And it is not
because I have made my sacrifice that I say it. It is because, unless we
all give, unless our army is large enough, those who have failed in
their duty are sending the best youth of the country to death. It will
be murder.

In return for what we give, we women of America have the right to demand
certain things. First of all we can and must demand time that our boys
may be trained. We have taken a long time to go into this war. And
because the country would not believe that we must eventually be
involved, we have lost precious years.

When, now nearly two years ago, I came back from the war in Europe, I
brought with me two convictions: First, that the German Government had
thrown aside its mask of law and order, and was following war along
lines so atrocious that it must be checked or civilization dies. Second,
after conferring with men high in the Allied Governments, that sooner or
later we should inevitably find ourselves involved: it was but a matter
of time.

I came home terrified. I tried to talk about it. It seemed to me that we
could not sit back unarmed, with only our brave little army,—less than
a single day’s losses in battle over there,—and do nothing.

But I was as a voice crying in the wilderness. I was not alone, of
course, in my wilderness. There were many, but the country heard us not.
It listened to Belgium, and sent aid. It helped the pathetic little
French orphans. It shook its head over the Roll of Honor in the
“Illustrated London News,” and it went to church on Sundays and thanked
God that we were out of it.

An obstructive Congress, instructed from its constituencies, refused to
listen to talk of preparation. The Army tried to get a hearing, and the
Navy tried, but both failed. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party
that we are to-day as we are, although, insomuch as our President is
head of the Army and of the Navy, it is the Democratic Party which will
control the war.

It was, indeed, that stanch old Democrat, Thomas Jefferson, who said:—

“We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens and make
military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can
never be safe until this is done.”

Later on he went still further:—

“I think the truth must be obvious that we cannot be defended but by
making _every_ citizen a soldier.”

It is the fault of a great people who have forgotten or have never
learned that the world is only one tenth as large as it was when this
Republic was founded. And that, instead of being isolated from this war,
the conflict is and has been from its beginning but just over the edge
of the horizon.

What else must we demand, now that the war-beast is creeping closer,
when his head is reared above the skyline? What else have we a right to
ask, we women who cannot sit in the seats of the mighty, but to whom the
nation must turn for soldiers, now and in future generations?

We can ask this: This country of ours has been hag-ridden by politics.
We have the right now to demand that party lines be forgotten, and that
the nation act as a whole, politically; that the best man serve,
regardless of his party.

This must not be a “party” war. If any man put his party before his
country, that man is a traitor. We are no longer Republican or Democrat
or Progressive. We are Americans.

Not until universal service had removed the war in England from party
lines was there anything adequate done. Then, and only then, did England
begin to put forth her best efforts.

And this we can ask:—

This must not be a bureaucrat’s war.

Civil administration in the field has always failed. War is a highly
specialized business, the most highly specialized business in the world.
And we who give our best have the right to demand the best. We can have
no bungling.

The English Field Marshal Wolseley, writing of our Civil War as a
military expert, said: “The Northern prospects did not begin to brighten
until Mr. Lincoln, in March, 1864, with that unselfish intelligence
which distinguished him, abdicated his military functions in favor of
General Grant.”

War is not a thing for amateurs in high places.

If our own history means anything to us, if the tragic experience of
England has taught us anything, it is that the army in the field should
not be a Washington-controlled army, beyond the supplying of men, arms,
and equipment.

Do you know what a company commander must do in the day’s work? He must
enroll and recruit his company to a strength of one hundred and fifty
men. He must get them clothed, equipped, and fed, and he must keep them
clothed, equipped, fed, doctored, sanitated, cheerful, and amused.

Any woman who has tried to do all of these things for one stirring lad
may multiply these by a hundred and fifty, and no maternal instinct to
help out, and see that the company commander has a full day even in
peace times.

Then he has to drill his men, and in war he has to lead them. He must
give them every chance for life if he can. He must die with them if it
be necessary. But he must do with them the thing he has been assigned to
do.

Is that work for the amateur?

In the Mexican and Civil Wars our professional fighters were Indian
fighters and frontiersmen, splendid and hardy men accustomed to
hardship. But they were not conversant with modern military methods. The
result was civilian officers, taken from shops and offices, and the
further result, in the Civil War, that a struggle which might have ended
in a year took four.

But we did not learn anything from that lesson. For we are about to
commit again the same folly, and from the same necessity.

Then, again, we have the right to demand enough time. Because we have
wasted two years is no reason for hurry now, when haste means sending
our boys untrained against a highly trained enemy.

Do you know that McDowell was urged to take his volunteers into action
by popular clamor and against his better judgment before their
three-months’ enlistment expired, and that the result was the unhappy
battle of Bull Run?

All this means but one thing to me, a mother. It means time to train our
boys and properly equip them. And it means professional military
leaders.

And this is pertinent now, because what we have done before we may do
again. In the Civil War each State was called on for a certain number of
regiments. Prominent men then raised these regiments, and they were
officered by local civilians. That was not such a hardship then, because
our boys were to face other regiments recruited and officered in the
same way.

But surely we will not do this now. I protest. I want the best, not only
for my son, but for all the sons who are so valiantly offering
themselves. I cannot stand back silent, with the memories I have of what
war is, with the death and misery and wanton destruction of Flanders
before me, with the scar of the iron heel of Germany on my heart. _I
protest._

The Plattsburg idea has borne abundant fruit. It has shown three
things:—

1st. That individual training cannot be had in less than several months
of field service.

2d. That organization cannot be had even in so short a time.

3d. That professional leadership is necessary as opposed to officers
appointed from civil life at the outbreak of hostilities.

You who considered prayerfully the best doctor for your child when he
was ill, are you going now to place his life in unskilled hands?

This morning I stopped at one of the recruiting stations and talked to
the clear-eyed young soldier on duty.—They are a fine lot, this little
regular army of ours. I like to talk to them. They look me in the eye.
Do you remember teaching your little boys to face the world, head
up?—This young soldier had been seven years in the army. He had one
more year, and unless there was a war, he was going to quit then. He
liked it, but he had done his bit. No, there were not many men applying.
Yes, he guessed we should need all we could get.

Then he gave me this appeal to the young patriots of the country,
flaming now with the fire of that highest emotion of all, love of
country:—

“Men wanted under thirty-five years of age, for the United States Army.
Special inducements to Pharmacists, Musicians, Bandsmen, Electricians,
Clerks, Bakers, Cooks, Barbers, Teamsters, Carpenters, Blacksmiths,
Horseshoers, and other Mechanics.”

God of our fathers! Not special inducements to Patriots, Men who love
their country, Men who believe in liberty, Men who hate cruelty, Men who
would avenge Belgium, Free Men, Fighting Men!

And, farther down, it is not, “Come and do your bit,” “Your country
calls you,” or “Save the Flag.” It offers, forsooth, “a chance to see
the world.” Those are the very words!

So to-day we are on the edge of war, or at war. And we ask, not for boys
of fire and steel, but cooks and teamsters and blacksmiths.

But the American boy has imagination, if our War Department has not. And
he is coming, in his thousands and tens of thousands.

Nothing can hold him back,—not danger, not inadequate preparation, not
anything under the blue sky where once he sailed his kites and sent up
his Fourth-of-July rockets. Not even the mother he loves.

What are we going to do, then, we mothers, when the tumult and the
shouting have died, and the long wait comes? We will pray. The churches
of France are full of kneeling women. And we will work.

There is no spectacular work for mothers in a war. They cannot drive
ambulances, or guide aeroplanes, although they are capable of doing
both. There will be no need of the wig-wagging that some women are so
painfully learning! But they will work for the Red Cross, and they will
make up such little packets as only mothers can make,—toothbrushes and
chocolates and fresh socks and gingerbread, and a Bible and
playing-cards and cigarettes.

And in between times, they will wait, in that quiet that is not peace.

That is what millions of women are doing just now, while you are reading
this.

There are two wars being waged to-day. One is the war of hate, and one
is the war of love. And this last is the bitter war, because it is being
fought in women’s hearts, between their fears and their patriotism. I
know.

And because fear is evil, it will go down to defeat. Women are brave,
and mothers are the bravest of all women, for they have faced the
Gethsemane of child-bearing. They will not weaken now.

Napoleon said, “Give me the mothers of France, and I will make France.”

                 *        *        *        *        *

So this is how I see the situation to-day, as it affects me and others
like me. If I believe in my country, as God knows I do, if I love it,
and that too He knows, I must do my little part, my bit.

This the country must know: that women are ready to do their part. Else
we are not free women, but slaves. And this the country must know, too:
that the women demand that it do its part.

The best of preparation, of skill, of guidance, of every sort of
provision, is what we require and will have.

We will not fail America. Let it not fail us.

But she will not. America, last stand of the humanities on earth,
realization of a dream and fulfillment of an ideal, our home, our native
land, we mothers stand ready.

                 *        *        *        *        *

More than fifty-two years ago an American woman received this letter. It
was written to one mother, but it belongs to all mothers, everywhere in
the world, who have seen their sons go forth to war and leave behind
them those empty places in the heart that are never filled:—

    EXECUTIVE MANSION, _November 21, 1864_.

    DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department
    a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you
    are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the
    field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words
    of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a
    loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you
    the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic
    they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage
    the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the
    cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride
    that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the
    altar of freedom.

    Yours very sincerely and respectfully,

    (Signed)      ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

                                THE END




                         _The Riverside Press_

                       CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS

                               U . S . A.

                           TRANSCRIBER NOTES

    Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where
    multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

    Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer
    errors occur.

[The end of _The Altar of Freedom_ by Mary Roberts Rinehart]





End of Project Gutenberg's The Altar of Freedom, by Mary Roberts Rinehart