Seventeen

Two young friends of mine were sitting across the campfire talking to me about life and war and hopes for the future. There were seventeen, going on eighteen, and already the army had taken their measure. This was the last year at home, the last year of doing what they wanted to do, their last year of the old freedoms for a while, and naturally they were thinking of many things.

"Do you know," said one of them, "I wonder how it would feel to go flying over a town and dropping bombs on people you have never seen?"

"I don't know," answered the other, "but I imagine it would be much like reading about an accident somewhere a long ways off that happened to people you've never heard about."

And that, I thought, was as good an answer as could be given to the question of impersonal destruction that now is so big a part of modern warfare. Then they began talking about the idea of hating Germany and Japan and I saw in their eyes the same feeling I have seen in the eyes of countless other young fellows going to war. There was no hatred there, no particular resentment or fury, for the war had not touched their homes, or many of their friends and acquaintances as yet. To them it was still big and impersonal. If cities had to be destroyed, if innocent civilians had to be sacrificed, then it was simply a part of a job to be done to make the world a decent place to live in.

And I hoped as I sat there listening to these two youngsters talk that they would never lose the simplicity of their belief, that they would never have to learn to hate as individuals, that they would hate only wrong and evil, would fight only injustice and cruelty, that ideas would be their enemies, not people.

The fire was dying and the stars above were brilliant. Orion was at his best and the Pleiades and Cassiopea and the Great Dipper shone as they only can shine over the woods where there is no dust to fog your vision. The boys lay on their backs watching the heavens and thinking great thoughts and it was then I told them of an idea of mine that explained the relationship of all life. I told them that the same life that flows in a man's veins flows also in leaves and flowers, that the substance called protoplasm was identical no matter what type of cell sheltered it, that all life was related and possibly started from some central source of creation, that animals, plants or men, Japanese, Germans, Chinese or Americans were all driven by the same primordial force, that underneath there was no difference.

The only difference between men, I told them finally, was the difference in ideas, that wars were always the result of the growth of wrong ways of thinking and evil ideals.

"Ideas!" said one of the boys, sitting bolt upright. "That is what we are fighting about. That is what I wanted to know."

He lay back once more and looked at the stars and I knew his young soul was abrim with new understanding and peace.