Chapter X: Saints and Sinners

Many a pia mater has been stretched to aching in the past few years by thoughts of death and its harvest of human flower in first, fresh bloom. Mystics have tried to give death a symbolic significance; they would have us believe that it has or will have a repercussion in some occult way beneficent to the world and those who are allowed to tarry here. "What is this grave which the world was coming in its heart and in its daily practices to treat as final? May it not be that the answer of the whole world, which is busy with the question, will bring into being a new adaptation of living to dying--a new Death?" is the way one of them expresses herself. Were we concerned herein with death, either new or old, we might deny her premise any foundation, and reason therefore that any conclusion she might incline to draw must be false and misleading. The world has in its heart to-day a yearning for promise and proof of immortality such as its composite heart has never had. That Christianity as practised fails to satisfy that yearning, does not justify the allegation that the thinkers of the world have become materialists.

Historians and critics who view the question from a biologic angle profess to see in war a contribution to our evolutionary progress: it kills many of the most virile, but it kills also the weaklings, actual and potential. The virile who remain push the weaklings to the wall, particularly in the procreative contest. It puts a premium on prowess and valor, and makes the race franker and braver, more resolute and more efficient; it uproots decadency; it sacrifices the grain to get rid of the tare; it plucks the flower that the thistle may be eradicated. The philosopher accepts it as a part of God's programme: some he allows to succumb to bullets, others to germs. The latter is the wise man, for he accepts things as they are, and at the same time tries to shape their course in a way that will give him and those he loves, which is all mankind, the greatest safety.

We get accustomed to and become tolerant of everything save pain. Even in such upheaval as the World War it was beyond belief how little the mechanism of daily life was disjointed. Fifteen millions of men and more were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, and yet the ordinary events of daily life were very little disturbed. People seemed to have time for work, for play, for relaxation, for contemplation. I was always reminded of this by reading the papers and observing people in theatres, concert-halls, stadia, churches, restaurants, and public places generally. I realize full well that one cannot sit still and nurse either his griefs or his hopes; that man is so constituted that he must display activity in some form. But I never fully realized that man is chronically happy. And yet it must be so, for how otherwise could he come out from prisons rotund and well-nourished, or from dark filthy tenements with a smile on his face? How else could we be so pleasure-seeking and pleasure-displaying as we were in those agonal days of the war?

The war put many things out of joint, but it did not divorce man from felicity save in individual instances or for short periods of time. The thing that the war dislocated most was further tolerance of the paradoxes of the Christian religion, the irreconcilability between preached and practised Christianity. Every one admits that the fundamental principles of Christianity are perfect and beautiful--that is, they are as perfect and as beautiful as the finite mind can grasp. But nothing can be more imperfect and uglier than the way in which the professional pietist practises it. There isn't a tenet, as formulated by its Founder, or such perfect disciples as St. Francis of Assisi, to which the professing or professional Christian conforms even approximately; and because his fellow man, prostituting it in some similar way to conform with his personal bias, does not agree with him, he proceeds to point the finger of scorn at him and to hail him as infidel and unbeliever.

I have no intention of prophesying whether the church will weather the storm in which it is now floundering or not. I think very likely it will. One reason for so thinking is that it has weathered all previous storms; one of them five hundred years ago was of severity that will never be forgotten. Since then education and enlightenment have lifted man from the supine obedience and resignation of the domestic animal, and he has demanded, and in a measure obtained, his worldly rights. This encourages me to believe that he may soon demand his spiritual rights: liberation from the tyranny imposed upon his mind by the Junkers of the church, freedom to look upon God as the fountainhead of wisdom, mercy, and love who mediates succor to the poor, the mourning, and the meek more willingly than to the rich, the joyous, and the arrogant; liberty to live according to the mandates of Christ and to die in confidence that his pledges will be redeemed. Another reason is that man must have a religion. Individual man can live without it, but collective man cannot, and there is not the slightest sign of the second coming of Christ. Religion was never so openly repudiated as during the Great War, and it never wielded as little influence on the determinations of man's conduct as it does to-day. Those who convince themselves otherwise make themselves immune to the teachings of experience.

The paucity of men who have the capacity for constructive statesmanship is pitiable, but how trifling is such a capacity compared with that required to formulate the tenets of a livable new religion! The practices of the church to-day are not those of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when it was steeped in every conceivable kind of depravity, licentiousness, simony, wealth, power, arrogance, avarice, and flattery; when it betrayed its mission to protect the weak; when it fornicated with the princes of the world; when it crucified Jesus in the name of egoism. But in what way has it espoused the sacred cause of the lowly, the best-beloved of Him who died that eternal happiness might be vouchsafed us? If Christ's vicar could remain silent without being called to account as was the case a few years ago when we were offering our fathers on the sacrificial altar for the liberation from slavery of God's ebony image, it is not likely that he will be called on to explain a similar silence during the Great War. I do not profess to say, not even to know, the attitude of the hierarchy which governed the Roman Catholic church toward the war. If it was Germanophile or Austrophile, it was more wicked than the harlot of Babylon. I should say the same had it been Anglophile or Francophile. The man who can believe that the temporal head of the church is the infallible spiritual guide of her adherents cannot believe that it should take sides against any of her own people. "The house divided against itself must fall." What I should like from the church is a definition of her attitude toward war. She teaches her children what their conduct should be about indulging their genesic extent, about the property and person of their fellow men, about intemperance of language and of appetite. Why not about war? What troubles me with the church is not so much the determination to keep her children in ignorance, nor that she has her back to the door which opens upon a vista of the world's progress and advance, hoping that she may keep it closed in the face of the divine forces of evolutionary progress which are seeking to push it open. That might be tolerated, but not her arrogation of self-sufficiency, her assumption of self-satisfaction, her boasted immutability, her sanctimonious semblance of resignation, her mumblings of archaic sayings in a language that neither its votaries nor one-half its priests understand, her profession to protect the weak and aid the poor while at the same time she bends the knee to the rich and traffics with emperors.

Though I lived nearly two years in the city where the church's mediæval gorgeousness is more striking than in any other city of the world, and where its chief stronghold is, it was rarely that its practices or its preachings disturbed my spiritual equanimity, my belief in God, or my fathomless faith. Nearly every day my duties took me through the Piazza of St. Peter and along the Vatican Gardens, and my thought was more often of his mediæval predecessors than of the voluntary "prisoner" who, while occupying the sumptuous palace, eats out his heart because he is not allowed to be a temporal sovereign--in other words, to be the antithesis of Him whose vicar he claims to be.

One morning, after I read the communiqués and had that glow of satisfaction in the accomplishments of my fellow men, that feeling of pride which every ally had during the last weeks of the war, I turned the paper and saw the arresting headline, "Translation of the Bones of St. Petronius," and I read:

"This morning at eight o'clock the Holy Father, accompanied by the
pontifical court, repaired to the Sistine Chapel, where were
gathered the residents of Bologna who had come to Rome for the
occasion. The pope, clad in sacred vestments, celebrated the mass
and gave communion to those present. After the mass Cardinal
Gusmimi, Archbishop of Bologna, gave a brief discourse, while the
pope sat on the throne. The pope then responded, recalling the
religious glory of Bologna and the life of the sainted Bishop
Petronius. He then covered himself with other sacred vestments
appropriate for the occasion and assisted the archbishop of Bologna
in taking from the provisory urn the bones of that saintly man who
had yielded this life for a place in the heavenly hierarchy many
years ago, and placed them in the urn offered by the Bolognese;
having done this, he placed the urn on the altar. The ceremony
lasted upward of two hours."

In my fancy I saw a lot of able-bodied men thus engaged while those whose spiritual destinies they had elected to shape were being slaughtered on battlefields, struggling with wounds and disease in hospitals, contending with cold, thirst, hunger, and indescribable discomfort. What was the purpose of it, what benefit did it mediate, what enlightenment flowed from it? If Petronius was a good man, if he loved his fellow men, and if he did all that was within his power to do to make them better men, more capacious for a full life here and more worthy of eternal life, why should they not allow him to enjoy his reward in the bosom of the Lord? How can they enhance his happiness, what does mankind gain by taking the semblance of that which once formed a framework for his spirit and transferring it from one vessel to another while mumbling or chanting over it? What deep symbolism attaches itself to this attempt to stay nature in gathering the ashes of Petronius to their ultimate destiny? Would not these men give a better account of their stewardship to their Master were they to devote their time and their strength and their minds to the betterment of the physical and spiritual lot of those poor, desolate, forsaken unfortunates with whom I spent the afternoon--a trainload of men who had been imprisoned in an enemy country and who were returning to Italy to die of the dreadful disease that had been thrust upon them by those insatiate monsters of cruelty, the Austrians?

I have rarely spent two hours more steeped in misery than I did that afternoon at Forte Tiburtino, where I went to visit the enormous hospital constructed around that old fort. It was intended to be used for temporary concentration of the sick and wounded soldiers sent from the front, until their disorders and diseases could be interpreted sufficiently to indicate where they should be sent for most speedy restoration to health. The protracted inactivity on the battlefronts of Italy had allowed the hospital to remain for many months unutilized. When Austria decided to send back to Italy a number of the men captured in the Caporetto disaster, upon whom she had thrust tuberculosis through starvation and every conceivable deprivation, it was decided to use this hospital for their shelter until they should die or be sufficiently nurtured to be sent to parts of the country whose climate is favorable to recovery from that disease. Two or three times a week a trainload of two hundred or more of these pitiful creatures arrived, many of them in a dying state. As a rule, they had been _en route_ for a week, and, though the Swiss Red Cross and the Italian Red Cross both attempted to make some provision that would contribute to their comfort, very little evidence of their efforts was to be seen.

Forte Tiburtino is three miles beyond Rome on the road to Tivoli. The train is switched at the Portonaccio station to the rails of the tramway and goes directly to the gates of the hospital. It was the first day of autumn, the wind was blowing a gale, whereby the unfortunates arrived in a cloud of dust which must have added to their suffering. But that was as nothing, I fancy, compared with the pain and ignominy put upon them by the antics of one of my countrywomen clad in the uniform of an American relief organization, an affable Amazon who, approaching her physiological Rubicon, had begun to display somatically and emotionally the results of disturbance and inadequacy of those wondrous internal secretions that give elasticity to the skin, lustre to the hair, sparkle to the eye, and appearance of health to the _tout ensemble_. She but heightened her painful plainness by a stereotyped smile which, while displaying a row of long teeth, set at an obtuse angle, accentuated the aquilinity of her nose and the prognathousness of her jaw. Everywhere I looked she was there. Every place I went I heard her: "Bentornato," "Benvenuto," "Aspetti un memento, farò la sua fotografia." The ways of the Lord are obscure. Otherwise one could explain why he did not let these poor devils die without having thrust upon them this presence, voice, and affected cheer. I saw them, weak and prostrated as they were, shrink from her as one might shrink from a famished alligator.

They opened the side doors of the cars and put steps against them; the white-clad orderlies came down first, and then began the procession of the weak, the emaciated, the forlorn, the desolate. Some were able to descend unaided, others had to be helped, one on either side, and still others dropped inert and corpse-like, across the strong back of an orderly who carried them the few feet to a stretcher. Now and then one would step out with an air of attempted jauntiness and a feeble smile, but for the most part it was a procession of those who had lost hope, who had abandoned faith in every one and everything, and who read over the portal, "_Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate_." It is some such procession that Dante must have encountered frequently in his passage through the infernal regions. "_Nulla speranza gli comforta mai nonchè di posa, ma di minor pena._" Not only did their faces reveal absolute despair but their bodies were reduced to such a state of emaciation that they were scarcely recognizable as human beings. Major Pohlmanti afterward told me that the majority of them had lost upward of forty per cent in weight, some of them, indeed, as much as sixty per cent. Many of them were so scantily clad that their chests and legs and arms were bare. Some were without socks, and their bony feet, thrust into cloth shoes with wooden soles, gave the finishing touch to what seemed to be animated skeletons covered with dirty brown paper which had been soaked in putrid oil. After those who were able to get on their feet had passed out came those who were practically in the throes of death, and those whose minds had been dethroned by suffering and privation. One was able to keep the sob in his throat until _they_ appeared, and then the effort to suppress it was impotent. Indeed,

They had a rendezvous with death
When Spring brings back blue days and fair,

and they are reconciled that he shall take their hands and lead them into his dark land, as Alan Seeger said in those precious lines which will ornament his memory for many a day.

The procession slowly wound its way within the gates, and I supposed that they would be conducted and helped lovingly and tenderly to the pavilions ready to receive them; that they would be undressed and given hot, stimulating nourishment by nurses and orderlies recruited, perhaps, from those who had come before and whom nature had been kind enough partially to restore. But immediately they were confronted with a species of Italian bureaucracy which hindered their progress toward this haven of rest and of solace toward which they had been looking forward for many days, perhaps months. They were segregated in a large, barnlike structure a few yards within the gate, permitted to sit on rude, unbacked, uncomfortable benches, and compelled to await their turn until their names and their histories and an enumeration of their possessions could be recorded. I felt that God would have been kind if he had stamped across their brows the letter V to stand for virtue and valor, as he stamped the letter A upon the breast of Arthur Dimmesdale to testify to the people of New England the frailty of that Puritan parson, which was revealed to his parishioners when they gathered together to listen to the confession of his sins and to decide his punishment. There they sat, inanimate, inert, resigned, awaiting what the Italian Government might have in store for them with the same indifference as they awaited that which nature had in store for them.

Never again shall I believe that the victim of tuberculosis is optimistic and hopeful. It may be that their obvious and striking forlornness was the expression of starvation and not of disease. Only about thirty per cent of them, I am told, showed signs of active tuberculosis after the ravages of inadequate and unsuitable food have been overcome. I saw and talked with many of their predecessors, and especially those who had been there a number of weeks, sufficiently long for them to have gained in weight and in strength, but even they were still branded with that expression which hopelessness comes nearest to describing.

It occurred to me that perhaps these were the men who sat down on the sides of the road and in the fields before that great disaster in the Friuli and were resigned to being taken captive, and that the resignation which they then displayed had been stamped on them gradually day after day since then, until now it had become indelible. Life had had no joy or poetry for them. Neither the present nor the future had been tinctured with pleasure nor flavored with hope, and since that day they had been silently awaiting that which now seemed imminent--translation.

I could not but contrast the event of the morning with that of the evening. Probably every one of these boys and men had been brought up in the faith which the Holy Father claims is the only true one. They had been taught that God is Justice. They had been imbued since earliest infancy with the belief that, next to loyalty to God, their most sacred duty was to their country. In their own way they had done their best for both, and this was their reward. Their expressions of despair, their manifestations of hopelessness, their silent portrayal of their abandonment needed no explanation. The saint in the Vatican was having his reward on earth, and the sinners in Forte Tiburtino looked for theirs only in heaven.

"Ahi giustizia di Dio! tante chi stipa
Nuove travaglie e pene, quanto io viddi?
E perchè nostra colpa si ne scipa?"

"Ah, Justice Divine! who shall tell in few the
Many fresh pains and travails that I saw?
And why does guilt of ours thus waste us?"