It is said that this is not a singing war and
that is true. The soldiers fight and work under a load of worry. They know
deeply that the destruction of the enemy is not the end of this war. And almost
universally you find among the soldiers not a fear of the enemy but a fear of
what is going to happen after the war. The collapse of retooled factories, the
unemployment of millions due to the increase of automatic machinery, a
depression that will make the last one look like a holiday.
They fight under a banner of four unimplemented
freedoms—four words, and when anyone in authority tries to give these freedoms
implements and methods the soldiers hear that man assaulted and dragged down.
It doesn’t matter whether the methods or the plans are good or bad. Any
planning is assorted at home. And the troops feel they are going to come home
to one of two things—either a painless anarchy, or a system set up in their
absence with the cards stacked against them.
Ours is not a naive Army. Common people have
learned a great deal in the last twenty-five years, and the old magical words
do not fool them any more. They do not believe the golden future made of words.
They would like freedom from want. That means the little farm in Connecticut is
safe from foreclosure. That means the job left when the soldier joined the Army
is there waiting, and not only waiting but it will continue while the children
grow up. That means there will be schools, and either savings to take care of
illness in the family or medicine available without savings. Talking to many
soldiers, it is the worry that comes out of them that is impressive. Is the
country to be taken over by special interests through the medium of special
pleaders? Is inflation to be permitted because a few people will grow rich
through it? Are fortunes being made while these men get $50 a month? Will they
go home to a country destroyed by greed? If anyone could assure them that these
things are not true, or that, being true, they will not be permitted, then we
would have a singing Army. This Army can defeat the enemy. There is no doubt
about that. They know it and will accomplish it, but they do not want to go
home to find a civil war in the making. The memory of the last depression is
still fresh in their memories.
They remember the foreclosed farms, the
slaughtered pigs to keep the prices up, the plowing under of the crops, because
there was not intelligence enough in the leaders to devise a means of
distributing an oversupply of food. They remember that every plan for general
good life is dashed to pieces on the wall of necessary profits.
