But if we identified (and I think we did) with the Tommies who were marching into France, we sure as hell did not appreciate what the British Navy was doing: seizing American ships and removing from their holds contraband items such as flour, wheat, copper, cotton, and oil; mining the North Sea; blacklisting dozens of American firms suspected of doing business with the Germans (none of England’s damn business, since we were, after all, neutrals); or even — and this really galled — raising the American flag on her own ships whenever German submarines were in hot pursuit. A lot of the German-American people in Eau Fraiche felt, and probably rightfully, that our diplomatic restraint in dealing with British violations of our neutrality merely indicated we weren’t neutral at all; we had, in effect, cast our lot with the Allies as early as the beginning of 1915. Well, maybe so. I myself was pretty confused, though I have to admit that by February, I began to lean toward the Allies again; that was when the Germans said they’d sink any enemy ship in the waters around the British Isles, and maybe a few neutral ships, too, if they couldn’t determine their national origin, which was sometimes difficult to do through the periscope of a submarine. Not only did they say they’d do it, but they actually did do it. and whereas searching ships and seizing merchandise was one thing, sinking them was quite another. I don’t think anybody in Eau Fraiche, not even those whose sympathies were with the Germans, condoned the actions of the U-boat commanders, who were already being pilloried in the press for their “wanton disregard of American life.”
I guess the sinking of the Lusitania could have been the last straw if President Wilson hadn’t kept his head. For me, it was the last straw; I was ready to go downtown with some of the other kids and smash Mr. Moenke’s store window (we had begun calling him “Monkey the Hun-kee” by then), but my father got wind of the scheme and told me if I left the house he’d beat me black and blue when I returned. I don’t know if it was my father’s warning or Mr. Wilson’s restraint that changed my mood of black rage to one of patience. In a speech on May 10, three days after the sinking, the President said, “The example of America must be a special example. The example of America must be the example not merely of peace because it will not fight, but of peace because peace is the healing and elevating influence of the world and strife is not. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right. There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight.”
I liked what he said.
It reminded me of something my father had once said when I’d been having a lot of trouble with a skinny kid who was a head shorter than me. I told my father I was going to knock the kid cold the next time he said anything nasty to me, and my father said, “What pleasure will you get from killing a cripple?” So I never did fight with that kid because after that I felt sorry for him whenever he picked on me. I knew I could beat him up, and I realized my father was right; there’d be no pleasure at all in taking him apart. I didn’t know whether or not the United States could beat Germany (the idea of going to war with people who were cutting off babies’ hands was frankly terrifying) but it seemed to me nonetheless that President Wilson was correct in saying there was such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. If we knew that war was wrong, then we were only compounding the crime by reacting to warlike acts in a warlike manner. If we really believed the world had gone insane, then behaving insanely ourselves was no way to effect a cure.
Later, when Wilson’s exchange of notes with the Germans got stronger and Bryan resigned as Secretary of State, I didn’t know what to think. I admired Wilson, but now he seemed to be saying that he was ready to risk war if respect for human life was at stake. This seemed to me contradictory. If you respected human life, if you were protesting so strongly against the drowning of the 114 Americans who had sailed on the Lusitania (even after the Germans had taken out a newspaper advertisement warning they would sink any vessel carrying the flag of Great Britain or her allies), then how could you risk sending more Americans to die in a war which was none of our business in the first place? Wilson said he was for peace. Okay. But when Bryan refused to sign the President’s second strongly worded note to the Germans, he said “I cannot go along with him in this note. I think it makes for war.” All right then, Bryan was for peace. But the Eau Fraiche Record reprinted an editorial from the New York World which said that Bryan’s resignation was “unspeakable treachery not only to the President but to the nation.” Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt, who was for preparedness but also for peace, mind you, said, “No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency,” and in almost the very next breath said, “I am sick at heart over the actions of Wilson and Bryan.”
I’m telling you, it was difficult to know what to think.
And to make matters worse, we Tylers began having a few internal problems of our own along about then. My older sister Kate had run off with a drummer from Arizona, a swarthy slick-haired character who everybody said was part Indian. The local opinion was that he had made her pregnant during the month of July while trying to sell tractor parts in town, and whether this caused my father’s heart attack or whether the suspicion that he was part Indian did it, I can’t say. The attack came in August, a massive pain knocking him to the forest floor as he brought back his ax, six smaller pains shuddering through his body as he tried to call for help. They got him over to the hospital in Eau Claire just in time, the doctors said, because the next two spasms would have killed him if he hadn’t been in bed and close to medication.
I was only fifteen and still in high school, but I was the oldest of the two boys in the family, my brother John being four at the time, so naturally I had to take a job. The doctors said my father needed at least six months’ rest (turned out to be eight months after all was said and done) but that afterward he could once again lead a “healthy, productive life” — those were their exact words. They took me on at the lumber camp immediately, even though I couldn’t tell a bow saw from a pile of sawdust; my father had been working for them for twenty years, and they were more than willing now to come to his assistance.
In the midst of everything that was happening in America and in the world, there was a tranquillity to those woods, a calming regularity to the monotonous chok of ax against trunk, the rasping of the saws, the laughter of the men, the chittering of the forest animals. At night, I would sit outside on the steps of the bunkhouse and, deprived of my helpful newspaper battle maps, try to sort out what was happening over in Europe; but I found I could hardly even sort out what was happening over in Eau Fraiche. I think that at that point in my life, fifteen years old and going on sixteen, there were only two things of any importance to me: the fact that I could step in and support Mama and my brother and sisters; and the fact that a girl named Nancy Ellen Clark was madly in love with me.