Labels
by . Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1926. 12mo. viii+292 pp. $2.00.
LAST year, while visiting friends in Maine, I chanced to go by boat from Rockland to Castine, and on the boat I fell into a conversation with a college youngster who was interested in ideas and in writing. We discussed many things and drifted on to the war. ‘Tell me,’ said I, ‘what does your generation think of the war, what does it make of the whole terrible business?’ Like the honest, straightforward youngster that he was, the lad answered, frankly and without hesitation,
this: ‘Those whom I know and run with all regret that we were not old enough to get into it.’
I understood the point of view perfectly, for it was a good deal my own at the same age, but as I thought it over later it struck me that those of us who were in the war, actually in it, I mean, not on the edges of it (and, having been there, still ventured to think of ourselves as men of civilized attitudes), had failed, and that our failure might perhaps be the most terrible in history. For all young men who watched machines kill their fellows, young men who knew what it meant to have a blinded comrade with half his face torn away hold one by the shoulders till he died, should have shouted the truth at the world till the world turned to hear; we should have broken the glass of old lies with stones, and used an axe upon the door of prejudice. Not a one of us should have stopped till we had let in the sunlight and air.
The theme of Labels, which is the readjustment to life of young folk who know the truth about the war and are determined to say so boldly, is surely as poignant a matter as may be found in literature. Forced to ‘make conversation’ with his own mother for the first time in his life, Dick Wickens, the young soldier of the book, turns to Madge, his war-nurse sister. ‘Doesn’t she understand what’s been going on?’ he asks. ‘Does n’t she know?’ And again he asks, ‘Have we got to go on living as if nothing had ever happened, to pretend for the rest of our lives, to let the thing run on in the same old way like a lot of helpless idiots?’ The scene where Dick’s brother Tom, a conscientious objector, comes home half-starved from his prison camp, and is unexpectedly defended by the disillusioned, haunted, and embittered young soldier, is stirring drama.
In the end Madge, the war nurse, Tom, the conscientious objector, Dick, the soldier, and the older folk even, manage to find some way ‘to give back a meaning to things.’
Labels is a fine, courageous book worthy of every friendly and thoughtful mind. The reader may find attitudes in it with which he may violently disagree. I think he will agree with the reviewer, however, that the book makes a dramatic and moving story, and that its bold attack on the stupidity, the hypocrisy, the cruelty, and the vile lying which are the corner stones of bloodshed is one we all ought to appreciate and aid.
HENRY BESTON