I DARE SAY —
Sooner or later…
By Florence Fisher Parry
In the middle of the night, a broken voice on the telephone asked me, from Richmond, Virginia, to find his sister, one of my employees. He had just learned that his daughter and her husband had been killed in the Boston café fire.
A typical young couple, the parents of a beautiful 6-month-old baby, he a captain in the Army, she a sweet young Southern girl, met in reunion to dance together and sit opposite each other and talk, close, to music, as all young things in love are like to do!
All over the country people are getting just such summons to speed east to find the charred remains of their young, loved ones. Four hundred and seventy bodies already counted, and most of them young, and many terribly in love and gallantly trying to be gay before the war parted them.
A busboy lit a match to screw in an electric light globe thoughtlessly removed by a prankish guest… and in a few minutes a catastrophe too horrible to dwell upon… a careless movement of the hand, a hair’s breadth, and tragedy stalking thousands of lives!..
Finite sight
Now we keep thinking of this. It is near, it is real, its horror sickens and appalls us. Yet for three years now we have been hearing of horrors compared with which this disaster in Boston is nothing. Every day in the paper, every hour on the radio, we listen to dispatches out of Russia telling of the death of thousands, thousands. We hear of the Jews and the Poles murdered; of the Greeks and the Chinese starved.
But somehow all this doesn’t spring to life. Its impact is dulled by a dreamy incapacity to accept it. It is still outside us. Only when it comes home does it become real. Even when we hear of the death of our own boys in far lands, or at seam we still can’t seem to encompass it. It has to be one of ours before we accept it realistically. And even so, it is a nightmare it is still touched with dreaminess and insubstantiality.
Yet let a disaster like this terrible Boston fire occur, and it sears into our minds: more than 400 dead! It seems more catastrophic than 40,000 in Russia or China or the South Seas.
But oh, if only accidents this this would serve to impress how vain it is to circumvent what is to be! We flay ourselves because our sons are now “in danger.” Oh, would that they were here, near, dancing in the arms of their dear ones, we waiting here at home happy once more! That’s how all the mothers of those Army and Navy men felt, their boys on leave, able to go to a gay nice nightclub up in Boston and be young and carefree for a while.
And then something like this Boston tragedy occurs, and we know that safety, danger, life, death, are not ours to cajole.
Why yes, there will be casualties in this war, they have just begun to come rolling in now. But we have had casualties at home, shameful and unnecessary casualties. Millions killed who need not have been killed. Thousands of auto deaths each year; thousands of deaths by alcoholic excess thousands of deaths in childbirth caused by neglect; thousands of deaths by tuberculosis because of carelessness and ignorance; thousands of deaths from social diseases; thousands of children dead who need not have been, had care been taken – or offered.
If only out of this war could come a new appreciation of the value of life! This slaughter, already running into the millions, is no less wasteful than that which we countenance in peacetime. Indeed, the cost of us in lives is now arbitrary, unavoidable. There is nothing we can do about it; it is in the hands of the military.
But we can avoid just such catastrophes as that which has put all Boston into mourning.
Trained for it
The interesting thing about the disaster is that the men in uniform there, the officers particularly were the ones to keep their heads and effect rescues. That was, of course, because of their discipline, this holocaust was but a duplicate of that for which they had been trained.
They had come to shore from corvettes, submarines, bombers, destroyers; from murderous tanks, from hand-to-hand fighting.
Even the horrors of that nightclub disaster were not greater, not as great, as those through which they were prepared to pass in battle with the enemy. Had the guests all been men in uniform, I doubt whether, even trapped, they would have lost their dignity and calm. There would have been fewer deaths, not because these trained men would have been braver, but because they knew the meaning of sudden death under horrific conditions.
Suppose, at each sinking of a ship, each blasting of a position, panic such as raged in the Boston nightclub were to seize our men in the Armed Forces?
I get a picture of these Navy officers, these Army men, there with their wives and sweethearts as the fire burst upon them. I get a picture of this young captain and his wife, whose bodies were found together, untouched by mark of hysterical violence.
He had learned how to take death. He had imparted his calm to his wife.
This war is teaching our men lessons, some of which they will carry with them all their lives through.
One will stand them in good stead: they will be able to take death.
It is a great asset, it should make life a braver, nobler thing.