These things cannot be overstated. Anyone who
can reassure these soldiers that such things will not happen again will put a
weapon in their hands of incredible strength. What do the soldiers hear?—that
Mr. Jones is calling Mr. Wallace names; that Mr. Jeffers is fighting with Mr.
Ickes; czars of this and that are fighting for more power and more
jurisdiction.
Congress, in a kind of hysteria of immunity
from public criticism, has removed even the machinery of relief which might
take up the impact of a new depression; black markets are flourishing and the
operators are not little crooks, but the best people. The soldiers hear that
the price of living is going up and wages are following them. A soldier is not
a lone man. He usually has a family dependent to a large extent on the money he
can allot, and his pay does not increase with the cost of living.
These are the things that he hears. The papers
are full of it, the letters from home are full of it—quarreling, anxiety,
greed. And, being a soldier, he cannot complain. He is forbidden to complain.
You cannot have that kind of thing in an army. He is not cynical, but he is
worried. He wants to get this war over with, and to get home to find what they
have done to his country in his absence. The Four Freedoms define what he wants
but unless some machinery, some foundation, some clear method is shown, he is
likely to believe only in that freedom which Anatole France defined—the equal
freedom of rich and poor to sleep under bridges.
THEATER PARTY
LONDON, July 18, 1943—It was late afternoon of
the English summer and in one of London’s innumerable outlying districts the
motion-picture house was comfortably filled. There were some soldiers who had
been wounded and were on their way to recovery. There were women of the
services off duty for a few hours. Some civilian women were there for a quick
picture after shopping and there were factory workers off shift. Down in front
were rows of children, crowding as close to the screen as they could get.
It was just an average afternoon at the
pictures. The house was comfortably filled but not crowded. In special places
were some men in wheel chairs from the hospital. The picture was I Married a
Witch with Veronica Lake—a fantasy comedy wherein a New England witch of
Puritan times returns to life and falls straight into the traditional bedroom
comedy—neither a distinguished piece of work nor a bad one. The children loved
the picture and believed it because they believe all moving pictures.
