Jackson was too overwhelmed to reply at once.
"As a matter of fad," Clayton went on, "it's a national move, in a way.
You don't owe any gratitude. We need our babies, you see. More than we
do hats! If this war goes on, we shall need a good many boy babies."
And his own words suddenly crystallized the terror that was in him. It
was the boys who would go; boys who whistled in the morning; boys who
dreamed in the spring, long dreams of romance and of love.
Boys. Not men like himself, with their hopes and dreams behind them. Not
men who had lived enough to know that only their early dreams were real.
Not men, who, having lived, knew the vast disillusion of living and were
ready to die.
It was only after Jackson had gone that he saw the fallacy of his own
reasoning. If to live were disappointment, then to die, still dreaming
the great dream, was not wholly evil. He found himself saying, "To earn some honorable advancement for one's soul."
Deep down in him, overlaid with years of worldliness, there was a belief
in a life after death. He looked out the window at the little, changing
group. In each man out there there was something that would live on,
after he had shed that sweating, often dirty, always weary, sometimes
malformed shell that was the body. And then the thing that would count
would be not how he had lived but what he had done.
This war was a big thing. It was the biggest thing in all the history
of the world. There might be, perhaps, some special heaven for those who
had given themselves to it, some particular honorable advancement for
their souls. Already he saw Jackson as one apart, a man dedicated.
Then he knew that all his thinking was really centered about his boy. He
wanted Graham to go. But in giving him he was giving him to the chance
of death. Then he must hold to his belief in eternity. He must feel
that, or the thing would be unbearable. For the first time in his life
he gave conscious thought to Natalie's religious belief. She believed in
those things. She must. She sat devoutly through the long service; she
slipped, with a little rustle of soft silk, so easily to her knees.
Perhaps, if he went to her with that?