Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 110, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1915 — WAR BECOMES HABIT [ARTICLE]

WAR BECOMES HABIT

People Quickly Adapt Themselves to New Life. —— ~ r ~~ iTake It Carelessly Like Life on Volcano—Boys All Expect to Fight and Are Not Uneaay Over Prospect. ’

By GABRIEL DELAGARDE.

(Correspondent Chicago Dally Newa.) Amiens, France. —In the last few days 1 have made inquiries among many persons to find out the state of mind of the civil population as regards the war generally. I have talked with tradespeople, manufacturers, retired merchants, ordinary laborers, other employees—as many as possible of each. It is easy to enter upon a conversation; at the present time it is not necessary to rack one’s brains to find a subject, and the subject is inexhaustible. People have grown wise. The fantastical reports which at the beginning of the war were invariably believed fall now on skeptical ears. Moreover, thiqgs are now in order. The other day, at a prominent hairdresser’s shop in town, a man announced to those who would listen that the Germans had just entered Albert. An officer, who was being shaved, interfered, had the man arrested, and for his imprudence he passed eight days in prison. Who would imagine, while walking through the streets tof Amiens, that the Germans were 30 kilometers (about twenty miles) from here, not more? The soldiers from the trenches do not come here, or if they do the officers and men are obliged to come clean and in good style. Automobiles only have the right to be dirty. The population, it appears, must not sef the war in an unfavorable light.

So the people are gradually growing accustomed to this abnormal state of affairs, just as the inhabitants of a to*wn near a smoking volcano go about their business without giving it a thought. As a friend of mine, a literary man of these parts, said to me: “War? It’s a matter of habit; heart, soul, mind, all become daily hardened to it. We have adapted ourselves to our new life.”

And the remark is just It applies to the people, especially to the men who have remained here. Air the young men are alike; that is, the great majority.-. They realize that, if the war lasts, their turn will come to go to t|ie front and it causes them no uneasiness. ' Y

There is the mental anguish which affects all without distinction, with terrible equality, from the minister to whom we are indebted for the three years’ service law and who has just lost his son, to the poor little woman who chars to make a living, whose husband is a prisoner in Germany. This it is which makes war odious, which creates the fiercest hatreds both in the hearts of the soldiers and the civil population. One day I returned from Albert with a poor woman, who has no one at the front, hut who has witnessed the ruin of a town by a bombardment. She stretched out her thin arms with the suppleness of a cat as she said: “Let the women have a hand. Deliver to me four ‘bodies’ only, and I will undertake to put out the eyes of those highwaymen.” The refugees suffer and have suffered materially. They are virtually the only ones. One may say that, far from increasing misery, the war has diminished it. Such a wave of official and private charily has swept over the country! Nearly all of the poorer classes receive from the state either an Indemnity for their enforced idleness or relief because of the war. ! Am I to pity the manager of a large factory who told me he had lived on an income of 500,000 francs before the war, and now doesn’t spend 10 francs a day? No, because he himself does not complain and accepts it in the proper spirit, even though, instead of having his automobile waiting for him at the station, he is obliged to walk, with an alpine sack on his back in place of a valise. He says that he has never felt better. Like others, he noon adapted himself to this new state of affairs.