The Pittsburgh Press (December 1, 1944)
I DARE SAY —
New pattern
By Florence Fisher Parry
Last Sunday in Syria Mosque, the first rows were occupied by men in our Armed Forces. They sat there, straight, attent and grateful. Surcease was theirs awhile, respite from the dreadful business in which they were engaged, the business of learning how best to kill.
That is what every uniform you see on every man in every branch of our Armed Forces means: the art of killing, the job of killing. Those who think of it in any other way indulge delusions.
The boys in uniform sat quietly, their hands loose in their laps, hands that were being trained to kill in one fashion or another. Some were the hands of musicians, some of poets, painters, writers; some had the gift of sculpture in their nerve ends; some the compassion of healing; some the absolute precision that is the gift of surgeons.
There they lay for a while on the knees of uniforms, while up there, on the stage, a young violinist played, young Nathan Milstein, with a feather touch…
Unused formula
The other day I sat in a circle of writers, many of them poets, whose eyes seemed to me a little more shiny and removed than those of the rest of us there. Here is a sonnet written by one of them, Mabel Meadows Staats:
I know the age-old pattern spring will trace
On barren earth above my heedless dust;
How drifting snow of petals will efface
The winter’s thawing mound; and how, upthrust,
The purpling iris-stalks will mark the lane;
The fragrant pear be murmurous with bees,
And darling swallows streak their blue domain
Where poplars lift their slender filigrees.I think that each recurring spring has meant
That earth forgives the desolation wrought
By winter’s hostile siege, and will relent
With other gracious springs when I am naught.
Why, then, is Man, whose tragic wars increase,
So slow to learn God’s pattern for His peace?
Yet – and here is the paradox – what immense good comes out of evil! What growth out of destruction! I looked at these boys in front of me at Syria Mosque, boys drawn from every state, from farm and factory, office and school; and already, in three years or less, they were a different breed, a breed apart, above the rest of us, stronger, surer, better men.
There are eight million of these now readied, complete for war, and three million men still training here at home. That means that of our whole population one out of 13 is an improved human product. That means that after this war 10 million men or maybe fewer will be absorbed into our population again, our stocks improved.
How astonishing it is, how terrible and sad that it takes war to do this… that it takes furious killing.
Telltale
Now there are those who say that this experience our men have had will not have changed them; that they will pick up just where they left off; that what has happened to them in this war will be to them but an occasionally remembered dream.
And there are those, who, on the other hand, lament the insensate scar tissue that they will carry, where once was sensitiveness and high delicate feeling.
Whichever it is, this will be true:
They will come back with all their sin and laughter.
Their memories and wounds and vacant places.
They will not speak. No, but forever after
A story will be written on their faces…