And so, in my innocence, I stood up and talked about all these things in front of those rooms full of football players with long, unpronounceable names: and because they saw that I myself liked my own subject matter, they tolerated it, and even did a certain amount of work for me without too much complaint.
The classes were a strange mixture. The best elements in them were the football players and the seminarians. The football players were mostly on scholarships, and they did not have much money, and they stayed in at night most of the time. As a group, they were the best-natured and the best-tempered and worked as hard as the seminarians. They were also the most vocal. They liked to talk about these books when I stirred them up to argue. They liked to open their mouths and deliver rough, earnest, and sometimes sardonic observations about the behavior of these figures in literature.
Also, some of them were strong and pious Catholics with souls full of faith and simplicity and honesty and conviction, yet without the violence and intemperance that come from mere prejudice. At Columbia it had been pretty much the fashion to despise football players as stupid: and I don’t maintain that they are, as a class, geniuses. But the ones at St. Bona’s taught me much more about people than I taught them about books, and I learned to have a lot of respect and affection for these rough, earnest, good-natured, and patient men who had to work so hard and take so many bruises and curses to entertain the Friars and the Alumni on the football field, and to advertise the school.
I wonder what has happened to them all: how many of them got shot up in Africa or the Philippines? What became of that black-haired, grinning Mastrigiacomo who confided to me all his ambitions about being a band-leader; or that lanky, cat-faced villain Chapman whom I saw one night, after a dance, walking around chewing on a whole ham? What have they done with that big, quiet Irishman Quinn, or Woody McCarthy with his long bulbous nose and eyebrows full of perplexity and his sallies of gruff wit? Then there was Red Hagerman who was not a Catholic, and who looked like all the big cheerful muscle-bound football players they believed in in the nineteen twenties. He went off and got himself married towards the end of that year. Another one called “Red” was Red McDonald, and he was one of the best students in the class, and one of the best people: a serious young Irishman with a wide-open face, all full of sincerity and hard work. Then there was the big round-faced Polish boy whose name I have forgotten, who grabbed hold of the tail of a cow which dragged him all around the pasture on the day of the sophomore beer-party at the end of the year.
The most intelligent students were the seminarians or the ones that were going to enter the seminary: and they were the quietest. They kept pretty much to themselves, and handed in neat papers which you could be relatively sure were their own original work. Probably by now they are all priests.
The rest of the class was a mixture of all kinds of people, some of them disgruntled, some of them penniless and hard-working, some of them rich and dumb and too fond of beer. Some of them liked to play the drums and knew how. Others liked to play them and did not know how. Some of them were good dancers and danced a lot. Others just went uptown and played the slot machines until the last minute before midnight, when they came back to the college in a panic-stricken rush to get in before the time limit was up. One of them, Joe Nastri, thought he was a Communist. I don’t suppose he had a very clear idea of what a Communist was. One day he went to sleep in class and one of the football players gave him the hot-foot.
Of all the crowd, it could not be said that they were very different from the students I had known in other colleges. With a few exceptions, they were certainly no holier. They got drunk just as much, but they made more noise about it, and had less money to spend, and were handicapped by the necessity of getting back to the dormitory at a certain time. Twice a week they had to get up and hear Mass, which was a burden to most of them. Only very few of them heard Mass and went to Communion every day—outside of the seminarians.
However, most of them clung with conviction to the Catholic faith, a loyalty which was resolute and inarticulate. It was hard to tell just how much that loyalty was a matter of conscious faith, and how much it was based on attachment to their class and social environment: but they were all pretty definite about being Catholics. One could not say of them that, as a whole, they led lives that went beyond the ordinary level demanded of a Christian. Some of the most intelligent of them often startled me with statements that showed they had not penetrated below the surface of Catholicism and did not really appreciate its spirit... One, for instance, argued that the virtue of humility was nonsense, and that it sapped a man of all his vitality and initiative. Another one did not think there were any such things as devils....
All of them were serene in their conviction that the modern world was the highest point reached by man in his development, and that our present civilization left very little to be desired. I wonder if the events of 1943 and the two following years did anything to change their opinions.
That winter, when I was talking about the England of Langland and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Webster, the war-machine of totalitarian Germany had turned to devour that island, and morning after morning when I glanced at The New York Times in the library, between classes, I read the headlines about the cities that had been cut to pieces with bombs. Night after night the huge dark mass of London was bursting into wide areas of flame that turned its buildings into empty craters and cariated those miles and miles of slums. Around St. Paul’s the ancient City was devastated, and there was no acre of Westminster, Bloomsbury, Camden Town, Mayfair, Bayswater, Paddington that had not been deeply scarred. Coventry was razed to the ground. Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Newcastle were all raided, and the land was full of blood and smoke.
The noise of that fearful chastisement, the fruit of modern civilization, penetrated to the ears and minds of very few at St. Bonaventure’s. The Friars understood something of what was going on: but they lost themselves, for the most part, in futile political arguments if they talked about it at all. But the students were more concerned with the movies and beer and the mousy little girls that ran around Olean in ankle socks, even when the snow lay deep on the ground.
I think it was in November that we all lined up, students and secular professors, in De la Roche Hall and gave our names in to be drafted. The whole process was an extremely quiet and unmomentous one. The room was not even crowded. You didn’t even have the boredom of waiting.
I gave my name and my age and all the rest, and got a small white card. It was quickly over. It did not bring the war very close.
Yet it was enough to remind me that I was not going to enjoy this pleasant and safe and stable life forever. Indeed, perhaps now that I had just begun to taste my security, it would be taken away again, and I would be cast back into the midst of violence and uncertainty and blasphemy and the play of anger and hatred and all passion, worse than ever before. It would be the wages of my own twenty-five years: this war was what I had earned for myself and the world. I could hardly complain that I was being drawn into it.
II
IF WE WERE ALL BEING PULLED INTO THE VORTEX OF THAT fight, it was being done slowly and gradually. I was surprised when my brother was cast back into the solid area of peace—relative peace. It was one rainy night in the fall that he appeared in Olean in a new shiny Buick convertible roadster with a long black hood and a chassis that crouched low on the road, built for expensive and silent speed. The thing was all fixed up with searchlights, and as for my brother, he was not in uniform.
“What about the Navy?” I asked him.
It turned out that they were not giving out commissions in the Naval Reserve as freely as he had supposed, and he had had some differences of opinion with his commanding officers and, at the end of a cruise to the West Indies and after an examination of some sort, both my brother and the Naval Reserve were mutually delighted to end their association with one another.
I was not sorry.
“What are you going to do
now, wait until you are drafted?”
“I suppose so,” he said.
“And in the meantime?...”
“Maybe I’ll go to Mexico,” he said. “I want to take some pictures of those Mayan temples.”
And, as a matter of fact, that was where he went when the weather got cold: to Yucatan, to find out one of those lost cities in the jungle and take a pile of kodachromes of those evil stones, soaked in the blood that was once poured out in libation to the devils by forgotten generations of Indians. He did not get rid of any of his restlessness in Mexico or Yucatan. He only found more of it among those blue volcanoes.
Snow comes early to St. Bonaventure’s, and when the snow came, I used to say the little hours of the Breviary walking in the deep untrodden drifts along the wood’s edge, towards the river. No one would ever come and disturb me out there in all that silence, under the trees, which made a noiseless, rudimentary church over my head, between me and the sky. It was wonderful out there when the days were bright, even though the cold bit down into the roots of my fingernails as I held the open Breviary in my hands. I could look up from the book, and recite the parts I already knew by heart, gazing at the glittering, snow-covered hills, white and gold and planted with bare woods, standing out bright against the blinding blue sky. Oh, America, how I began to love your country! What miles of silences God has made in you for contemplation! If only people realized what all your mountains and forests are really for!
The new year came, 1941. In its January, I was to have my twenty-sixth birthday, and enter upon my twenty-seventh, most momentous year.
Already, in February, or before that, the idea came to me that I might make a retreat in some monastery for Holy Week and Easter. Where would it be? The first place that came into my mind was the Trappist abbey Dan Walsh had told me about, in Kentucky. And as soon as I thought about it, I saw that this was the only choice. That was where I needed to go. Something had opened out, inside me, in the last months, something that required, demanded at least a week in that silence, in that austerity, praying together with the monks in their cold choir.
And my heart expanded with anticipation and happiness.
Meanwhile, suddenly, one day, towards the beginning of Lent, I began to write poems. I cannot assign any special cause for the ideas that began to crowd on me from every side. I had been reading the Spanish poet, Lorca, with whose poetic vein I felt in the greatest sympathy: but that was not enough, in itself, to account for all the things I now began to write. In the first weeks of Lent, the fasting I took on myself—which was not much, but at least it came up to the standard required by the Church for an ordinary Christian, and did not evade its obligations under some privilege to which I was not entitled—instead of cramping my mind, freed it, and seemed to let loose the string of my tongue.
Sometimes I would go several days at a time, writing a new poem every day. They were not all good, but some of them were better than I had written before. In the end, I did not altogether reject more than half a dozen of them. And, having sent many of the others to various magazines, I at last had the joy of seeing one or two of them accepted.
Towards the beginning of March, I wrote to the Trappists at Gethsemani asking if I could come down there for a retreat during Holy Week. I had barely received their reply, telling me they would be glad to have me there, when another letter came.
It was from the Draft Board, telling me that my number was up for the army.
I was surprised. I had forgotten about the draft, or rather I had made calculations that put all this off until at least after Easter. However, I had thought out my position with regard to the war, and knew what I had to do in conscience. I made out my answers to the questionnaires with peace in my heart, and not much anticipation that it would make any difference to my case.
It was about eight years since we had all stood under the banner in the gymnasium at Columbia, and the Reds had shouted and stamped on the platform, and we had all loudly taken a pledge that we weren’t going to fight in any war whatever. Now America was moving into position to enter a war as the ally of countries that had been attacked by the Nazis: and the Nazis had, as their ally, Communist Russia.
Meanwhile in those eight years, I had developed a conscience. If I had objected to war before, it was more on the basis of emotion than anything else. And my unconditional objection had, therefore, been foolish in more ways than one. On the other hand, I was not making the mistake of switching from one emotional extreme to the other. This time, as far as I was able, I felt that I was called upon to make clear my own position as a moral duty.
To put it in terms less abstract and stuffy: God was asking me, by the light and grace that He had given me, to signify where I stood in relation to the actions of governments and armies and states in this world overcome with the throes of its own blind wickedness. He was not asking me to judge all the nations of the world, or to elucidate all the moral and political motives behind their actions. He was not demanding that I pass some critical decision defining the innocence and guilt of all those concerned in the war. He was asking me to make a choice that amounted to an act of love for His Truth, His goodness, His charity, His Gospel, as an individual, as a member of His Mystical Body. He was asking me to do, to the best of my knowledge, what I thought Christ would do.
For a war to be just, it must be a war of defence. A war of aggression is not just. If America entered the war now, would it be a war of aggression? I suppose if you wanted to get subtle about it, you could work out some kind of an argument to that effect. But I personally could not see that it would be anything else than legitimate self-defence. How legitimate? To answer that, I would have had to be a moral theologian and a diplomat and a historian and a politician and probably also a mind-reader. And still I would not have had more than a probable answer. Since there was such strong probable evidence that we were really defending ourselves, that settled the question as far as I was concerned.
I had more of a doubt on the question of whether it was really necessary or not. Did we really have to go to war? A lot of people were asking themselves that question, and argument about it was rather hot among some of the Friars at St. Bonaventure’s. As far as I could see, it was a question that no private individual was capable of answering: and the situation was getting to be grave enough for it to be necessary to leave the government to make its own choice. The men in Washington presumably knew what was going on better than we did, and if, in a situation as obscure as this one was, and as perilous, they thought war was getting to be necessary—what could we do about it? If they called us to the army, I could not absolutely refuse to go.
The last and most crucial doubt about the war was the morality of the means used in the fight: the bombing of open cities, the wholesale slaughter of civilians.... To my mind, there was very little doubt about the immorality of the methods used in modern war. Self-defence is good, and a necessary war is licit: but methods that descend to wholesale barbarism and ruthless, indiscriminate slaughter of non-combatants practically without defence are hard to see as anything else but mortal sins. This was the hardest question of all to decide.
Fortunately the draft law was framed in such a way that I did not have to decide it. For there was a provision made for those who were willing to help the country without doing any killing. As I say, I couldn’t tell just how much those provisions would mean in actual practice, but they looked nice on paper, and the least I could do was take advantage of them.
And therefore I made out my papers with an application to be considered as a non-combatant objector: that is, one who would willingly enter the army, and serve in the medical corps, or as a stretcher bearer, or a hospital orderly or any other thing like that, so long as I did not have to drop bombs on open cities, or shoot at other men.
After all, Christ did say: “Whatsoever you have done to the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.” I know that it is not the mind of the Church that this be applied literally to war—or rather, tha
t war is looked upon as a painful but necessary social surgical operation in which you kill your enemy not out of hatred but for the common good. That is all very fine in theory. But as far as I could see, since the government was apparently holding out an opportunity to those who wanted to serve in the army without killing other men, I could avoid the whole question and follow what seemed to me to be a much better course.
After all, I might be able to turn an evil situation into a source of much good. In the medical corps—if that was where they put me—I would not be spared any of the dangers that fell upon other men, and at the same time I would be able to help them, to perform works of mercy, and to overcome evil with good. I would be able to leaven the mass of human misery with the charity and mercy of Christ, and the bitter, ugly, filthy business of the war could be turned into the occasion for my own sanctification and for the good of other men.
If you set aside the practically insoluble question of cooperation that might be brought up, it seemed to me that this was what Christ Himself would have done, and what He wanted me to do.
I put down all my reasons, and quoted St. Thomas for the edification of the Draft Board and got the whole business notarized and sealed and put it in an envelope and dropped it in the wide-open mouth of the mailbox in the Olean post office.
And when it was done, I walked out into the snowy street, and an ineffable sense of peace settled in my heart.
It was a late, cold afternoon. The frozen piles of snow lay along the swept sidewalks, in the gutters, in front of the small, one-story buildings on State Street. Presently Bob O’Brien, the plumber at the Olean house, who lived in Alleghany, and who used to fix the pipes when they went wrong up at the cottage, came by in his car. He stopped to give me a ride.
He was a big, jovial, family man, with white hair and several sons who served as altar boys at St. Bonaventure’s Church in Alleghany, and as we passed out of town on the wide road, he was talking about peaceful and ordinary things.
The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition Page 41
