driven from home and the homes destroyed. No
churches were bombarded. Men in this country who after many years
had built up a trade in Europe were not forced to close their mills and
turn into the streets hundreds of working men and women.
It is in the by-products of the war that the waste, cruelty, and stupidity
of war are most apparent. It is the most innocent who suffer and
those who have the least offended who are the most severely
punished. The German Emperor wanted a place in the sun, and,
having decided that the right moment to seize it had arrived, declared
war. As a direct result, Mary Kelly, a telephone girl at the Wistaria
Hotel, in New York, is looking for work. It sounds like an O. Henry
story, but, except for the name of the girl and the hotel, it is not
fiction. She told me about it one day on my return to New York,
on Broadway.
"I'm looking for work," she said, "and I thought if you remembered me
you might give me a reference. I used to work at Sherry's and at the
Wistaria Hotel. But I lost my job through the war." How the war in
Europe could strike at a telephone girl in New York was puzzling; but
Mary Kelly made it clear. "The Wistaria is very popular with
Southerners," she explained, "They make their money in cotton and
blow it in New York. But now they can't sell their cotton, and so they
have no money, and so they can't come to New York. And the hotel
is run at a loss, and the proprietor discharged me and the other girl,
and the bellboys are tending the switchboard. I've been a month
trying to get work. But everybody gives me the same answer. They're
cutting down the staff on account of the war. I've walked thirty miles a
day looking for a job, and I'm nearly all in. How long do you think this
war will last?" This telephone girl looking for work is a tiny by-product
of war. She is only one instance of efficiency gone to waste.
The reader can think of a hundred other instances. In his own life he
can show where in his pleasures, his business, in his plans for the
future the war has struck at him and has caused him inconvenience,
loss, or suffering. He can then appreciate how much greater are the
loss and suffering to those who live within the zone of fire. In Belgium
and France the vacant spaces are very few, and the shells fall among
cities and villages lying so close together that they seem to touch
hands. For hundreds of years the land has been cultivated, the fields,
gardens, orchards till
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