one nation on Earth with a navy big enough to bottle up the German High Seas Fleet
and deny it the high seas?
I heard my father and my husband talking about these matters on 4 August 1914.
Father had come over for dinner but it was not a merry occasion – it was the day of
the invasion of Belgium and there had been extras out on the streets.
Brian asked, `Beau-père, what do you think about it?’
Father was slow to answer. `If Germany can conquer France in two weeks, Great
Britain will drop out.’
‘Well?’
‘Germany can’t win that fast. So England will come in. So it will be a long, long
war. Write the ending yourself.’
`You mean we will be in it.’
`Be a pessimist and you will hardly ever be wrong. Brian, I know little or nothing
about your business. But it is time for all businesses to get on a war footing. What
do you deal in that is bound to get involved?’
Briney said nothing for several moments. `All metals are war materials. But…
Beau-père, if you have some money you want to risk, let me point out that mercury is
indispensable for munitions. And scarce. Mostly they mine it in Spain. A place
called Almaden.’
`Where else?’
`California. Some in Texas. Want to go out to California?’
`No. Been there. Not my taste. I think Ml go back to my digs and get a letter off to
Leonard Wood. Damn it, he made the switch from medical corps to line officer- he
ought to be able to tell me how I can do it.’
Briney looked thoughtful. `I don’t want to be in the engineers again, either. I
don’t belong there.’
`You’ll be a pick-and-shovel soldier again if you wait and join up here.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The old Third Missouri is going to be reorganised as an engineer regiment. Wait
around long enough and they’ll hand you a shovel:
I kept my best unworried mask on, and kept on knitting. It felt like the end of
April, 1898.
The European War dragged along, horribly, with stories of atrocities in Belgium and
of ships being sunk by German submarine boats. One could feel a division building up
in America; the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915 brought the dichotomy sharply
to the fore. Mother wrote from St Louis about the strong sentiment there for the
Central Powers. Her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Pfeiffer, apparently took it for
granted that all decent people supported `the Old Country’ in this struggle – this,
despite the fact that Grossvater’s parents had come to America in 1848 to get away
from Prussian Imperialism, along with their son, who was just the right age to be
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conscripted if they had not emigrated. (Grandpa was born in 1830.)
But now it was `Deutschland Über Alies’ and everybody knew that the Jews owned
France and ran everything there, and if those American passengers had minded their
own business and stayed home where they belonged, out of the war zone, they wouldn’t
have been on the Lusitania – after all, the Emperor had warned them. It was their
own fault.
My brother Edward in Chicago reported much the same sentiment there. He did not
sound pro-German himself, but he did express a fervent hope that we would stay out
of a war that wasn’t any of our business.
This was not what I heard at home. When President Wilson made his famous (infamous?)
speech about the sinking of the Lusitania, the `too proud to fight’ speech, Father
carne over to see Brian and sat there, smouldering like a volcano, until all the
children were in bed or elsewhere out of earshot. Then he used language that I
pretended not to hear. He applied it mainly to the cowardly tactics of the Huns but
he saved a plentiful portion for that ‘pusillanimous Presbyterian parson’ in the
White House. `Too proud to fight! What sort of talk is that? It requires pride in
order to fight. A coward slinks away with his tail between his legs. Brian, we need
Teddy Roosevelt back in there!’