For Better for Worse
by RANDOLPH RAY
1
A FEW weeks ago, I married a young soldier and his bride. When they came to arrange for their wedding, I pointed out the danger of war marriages.
“I agree with you,” the soldier said emphatically. “I have always been opposed to war marriages.”
I laughed. “All but your own.”
“When I met Jane,” he said, “I fell in love with her at once, but I made up my mind I would not marry while the war was on. Then I spent eighteen months on Guadalcanal. Living in that hell, I made up my mind that if I lived long enough to get back and she would marry me, I would have a few weeks of happiness.”
That longing, that instinct, is true not only of mature men but of young boys — and many of the boys who are going into this war are very young.
“I am reaching manhood,” they think, “and it may be taken from me before I have fully experienced it. I want to establish my own life.”
It is rare for women to experience the same feeling. Their impulse, intensified in time of war, is to give themselves — to give love and comfort and sympathy. Even the young girl is conscious of that sense of pity and sacrifice.
I oppose the war marriage as a rule. It lacks so many of the requirements of an enduring marriage. It is performed in haste, often with little knowledge on either side. In peacetime there is time for adjustment. In wartime there is little or none. Instead, there is separation.
The man is sent away to new lands and new people and new and often overwhelming experiences. The woman remains behind, alone, not sharing those experiences. A gulf is dug, across which it will take infinite patience and intelligence and good will to build a bridge.
There is also the emotional problem of separation. A girl has been awakened physically by marriage and then is left alone. This is not only a source of unhappiness but frequently a source of danger.
in the last war, a young couple married just before he was shipped to France. He returned, impatient to see his wife, eager to go home and begin at last their life together. The girl met him at the pier, but not as he expected. When he took her in his arms, she drew away from him coolly.
“What’s the matter?” he asked in surprise. “Let’s go home so that I can talk to you.”
She shook her head. “You aren’t going home with me.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded, dazed and unbelieving.
“I have not been true to you,” she said. “I am sorry to let you down like this, but I can’t help it. It is impossible for us to go on with our marriage. I want a divorce as soon as possible.”
“But you can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t do this.” His voice rose. “I’ll kill the man.”
He did not kill the other man. The next day he shot and killed himself.
There was another young couple I knew who were married during the war. The man was sent to England. When he returned, everything seemed to be all right, and he and his wife were apparently perfectly happy. Then one day an Englishwoman appeared at the door with her marriage certificate and her baby. And another war marriage had gone on the rocks.
War is having its usual effect in relaxing ordinary safeguards, and hundreds of unwise marriages are taking place in and around the Army camps and in foreign lands. Not only are young couples letting glamour and the exaggerated emotions of wartime carry them away, but young men who are lonely are marrying in many cases women who are little more than camp followers. We are lately beginning to see older women of the demimonde marrying young enlisted men for their allotments.
No one who lived through the First World War is likely to forget the disasters which resulted from the arrival of French war brides in America when the fighting was over. The attempts of both the man and his foreign wife to make an adjustment, handicapped by language, religious barriers, different customs, and diametrically opposed ideas of marriage, rarely resulted in anything but dismal failure.
If a man’s interests and tastes, his culture and sense of values, his attitude toward life, his religion, and his background are similar to his wife’s, they will have a fair opportunity of coming out all right. But if they ignore these differences when they get married in haste, if they know each other so little that they do not even discover what the other is like, they are headed for trouble. The faith of people getting married that “it will come out all right” is like a savage’s faith in black magic.
2
THE wedding, now as always, is the bride’s affair. It is rare for the groom to intervene or to make any suggestions of his own. “It’s your wedding,” I have heard them say a hundred times. “You decide.”
Sometimes, however, the rush and the strain of the war marriage leads to difficulties. There was a young lieutenant who had been engaged to a girl back home for three years. Then his orders came. He was to be sent abroad to an unknown destination. Now if ever, he thought, he must be married. He wired his fiancée and she left for New York at once. Travel not being what it was in peacetime, she came by plane, by train, — no berth, — and arrived the morning of her wedding, after three days of strenuous travel, completely exhausted. There was no time to rest, however. The groom rushed her to a license bureau, then to get a waiver, and then he and his best man, whom the girl had never met, brought her to the church.
The first I knew of it was when the distracted bridegroom rushed into my office.
“Are you ready to be married? ” I asked.
“Ready!” he exclaimed. “She says she won’t marry me!”
“Ask her to come in here,” I suggested, and in a few moments two extremely flustered young officers arrived with a girl whose tear-stained face was drawn with fatigue. It was obvious that she was so exhausted that the very thought of marriage appalled her.
“I don’t want to be married,” the girl sobbed.
“Of course,” I reassured her, “I will not marry you if you are not in love.”
“But I am in love,” she wailed. “I just don’t want to marry anyone.”
It was difficult not to smile. “Well, you need not be married today. Suppose you wait until tomorrow when you will have had a good rest.”
Here the bridegroom intervened. His jaw was thrust out stubbornly. “We have only two days. If she won’t marry me today, I won’t marry her at all. She can go straight back home.”
They were both so much in love and both so angry that the situation was extremely entertaining — for the onlooker.
“You act like a brute,” she exclaimed.
It was obvious that we were not getting anywhere, and I sent them both away. “When you are sure you want to be married,” I told the girl, “I will marry you.”
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said. The bridegroom looked more obstinate than ever.
About six o’clock that same evening they returned, the girl’s face radiant and smiling above the orchid on her shoulder. I married them. Then I sent for the young husband.
“Look here,” I said. “ I am old enough to be your father and I want to talk to you. You say you have only two days, but in two days you can ruin a lifetime of happiness. Remember that.
“Your generation seems to know everything. But no matter how sophisticated you may appear to be, your wife has had very little experience. You must be careful in your relationship with her. Any impetuosity on your part now may spoil your marriage entirely.”
They went away and a few days later I received a letter from them. He was going abroad and she was returning home to wait for him. It was all right with them, they said, and they were very happy.
3
BETWEEN 1940 and 1942, births rose 15 per cent in the United States. The reasons were many: —
1. Men going overseas wanted to see their babies before they left, perhaps never to return.
2. Men who wished to avoid going to war decided to have children at once, so that they might be deferred.
3. War brides, ignorant of birth control, had babies whether they wanted them or not.
4. War brides, eager to keep something of their husbands, wanted children at once.
5. The increased prosperity of wartime encouraged people who had been too poor to have a child to have one while wages were high.
The birth rate usually fluctuates with the prosperity of the country. The first four years of the Depression saw a marked decrease in the birth rate; with returning prosperity, it began to mount. In 1942 it soared to three million babies a year. What this will do to post-war economy and to the employment problem of the future is incalculable. But the people who are having babies in the flush of prosperity overlook or forget the fact that, although post-war conditions may bring a sharp decline in income, the baby will continue to be entitled to the best they can give it.
Post-war America will not be a land of limitless opportunity. Jobs will be scarce. No one who remembers the Depression can forget what happens when masses of people, through no fault of their own, are thrown out of work. The great lands of the West are occupied; there are more people than ever to care for; and even at our peak of prosperity, millions lived on the very brink of starvation.
There arc, among my opponents on this question, many who have strong arguments to offer. Occasionally, I hear parents say that they hope their newly married daughter will have children at once, war or no war, because children are the best stabilizing force that marriage can have.
At a dinner party, a mother told me: “ I am strong for having children. I have two married daughters. One of them is expecting a baby and I hope the other soon will. I want them both to have children, and I am willing to take care of them.”
That, however, is unusual. Most parents say flatly, “I cannot bring up another family.”
Recently, a father told me that he had been discussing war marriage with his young daughter. “I told her,” he said, “that my prayer has been to see her grow up before anything happens to me. I said that if she married, my advice was not to have children while her husband was away and she would be dependent on me for support.”
He looked up soberly. “Another family to support! Another generation to be responsible for! I don’t think, at my age, I could face it.”
At the beginning of the war, a young girl married a soldier who was killed in one of the early engagements. Little more than a child herself, cared for first by her parents and then by her husband, she discovered she was left to take care not only of herself but of her baby as well.
Her parents were elderly; they had brought up their own children and, with their responsibilities discharged, had begun to know the restfulness of a quiet life. But they could not let a helpless girl handle her problems alone, and the young widow and her baby came to live with them. Because of her youth, the time came when inevitably her sorrow decreased and her healthy young body longed for fun and gayety. It was the grandparents, of course, who took on the responsibility of the child — a task difficult for them because, in their old age, a child was confusing; difficult for the child as well, who needed young parents, with their tolerance of noise and mischief.
Although she may be very young, barely out of school, the war bride may have to shoulder an immense responsibility — be housekeeper, and breadwinner, and learn to do for herself things that she had always taken for granted would be done for her. And she cannot whine about it or indulge in selfpity. Her courage and gayety of heart and strength of spirit here will be her husband’s mainstay and morale builder abroad.
If, on top of this, she brings a child into the world, when she herself is little more than a child, her difficulties are increased immeasurably and, as a rule, so are those of her immediate family.
Not long ago, a distressed young bride came to pour out a familiar story. She had been married only two weeks when her husband was sent overseas. Now she was going to have a baby, and the only thing she could do was go home to her family. It was difficult from every standpoint — physiological, psychological, and financial. The girl was very young, unready for the responsibility of bringing up a child without her parents’ aid.
“You see, ” she said, wiping her eyes, “we are so much in love, and when I knew he was going to war, I wanted to have his child so that — no matter what happened — something of his would be mine. But I didn’t look ahead.”
“Have you money enough to see you through?” I inquired.
She shook her head. “My parents are going to look after me.”
The girl was silent for a moment, and then she burst out rebelliously, “It isn’t fair that money should be so important in having a baby!”
4
BUT money, of course, was not the most important part of her problem. She was tackling alone the business of bringing up a child — a job that takes a father as well as a mother. The great increase in juvenile delinquency of recent months is an indication that both parents are needed for the task of bringing up a child. Without supervision, with both parents engaged in the war or war industry, living in congested areas, children are becoming war casualties on a huge scale. In some sections, the number of children brought before the juvenile courts has increased by 20 per cent.
One has only to look at Germany for a grim warning. During the last war, juvenile delinquency in Germany increased 50 per cent because of lack of supervision or discipline, the breaking-up of homes, and ill-advised child labor. It was from the ranks of this dispossessed youth that the Nazis drew their recruits.
It is unfortunate that money must play a part in the business of bringing up children. But since it is an inescapable fact, the war bride must take it into consideration. The expenses of a baby begin, not end, with its birth. For many years, until education has been provided, the problem of the child’s support is going to rest squarely on the mother’s shoulders if her husband is killed in action.
Many of these young war brides overlook that point. Some of them are unprepared to support themselves, let alone a child; and if they are able to earn a living, the bringing-up of the child most probably will be left in the hands of other people — the grandparents, if they are able and willing to undertake it, or nursery schools.
True, the government provides an allowance for the widow and the child, but it will require more than that to make them independent and selfsupporting.
In other words, the young mother in wartime is caught on the horns of a dilemma. If she is to take care of her child, she must have a job; if she has a job, she cannot take care of her child. The nurseries are crowded with children whose mothers are obliged to work and leave them in the hands of someone else. The result is often constant anxiety on the part of the mother and a sense of insecurity on the part of the child.
The young mother who must support her child in wartime — and long after, if her husband is killed or returns physically disabled — is faced with another problem. Many industries refuse to hire a pregnant woman, or dismiss her as soon as they discover the fact. She and her child then become, in spite of themselves, objects of charity.
An essential point which these optimistic parents overlook is the conditions under which their children must live in wartime. Never have families been so divided as they are today. The scattering of families in Europe — perhaps permanently— is on a vaster scale than ever before in the history of the world. The separation of families in England is unprecedented. The same condition is arising in the United States. The men are in the armed services or in war industries, the women in industry or living with relatives. Families are shifted from small farming areas to overcrowded industrial areas, from small towns to congested cities. Inadequate and crowded quarters, temporary and dingy rooming houses, and trailer camps are not the places in which to care for babies and small children.
One of the tragedies of this war is that non-belligerents have been its chief victims — women and children murdered, undernourished, shell-shocked. It has been, to a heartbreaking extent, a children’s war. Starving children in France, physically and mentally undeveloped; nerve-shocked children in England. And in America? Even here, war has reached out in intangible ways. The anxiety of parents leads to insecurity in the children; the child labor problem is back, with nearly three million children between fourteen and seventeen engaged in agriculture and industry.
The great increase in births since Pearl Harbor has been regarded by some officials in the government as an attempt by many men to keep from going to war. I do not believe this is always true. In all wars, the mating instinct has been part of the sense of survival, of the desire of a man to reproduce himself, to leave something behind him. A child, the soldier feels, is something of himself that will remain if he is killed.
Yesterday’s mail brought me a letter from a soldier whose marriage I performed four or five years ago. The letter came from a sweltering jungle, but it was a gay letter, and proud. “ I have just had word from my wife,” he wrote, “that we have a son. Nothing makes me want to live more than to get back and see my baby. I feel like Galahad, stronger than ten.”
Much of what has been said here has a gloomy cast. Not everything is well with the war family. There are grim problems to handle. The shortrange picture seems dark. But the long-range picture is brighter than may at first appear. It takes steady vision to see it, but the light is there. Go back to ancient or medieval history and there is no reference to the family at war. No one cared. History concerned itself only with the kings and the generals. But for many years past, all that has changed. History concerns itself today not merely with the leaders but with the people and their families and their problems. Today, because we care greatly, these problems may be solved, if we are willing to work for their solution.