The Brooklyn Daily Eagle from Brooklyn, New York • Page 62

THE SUNDAY REVIEW, A "Man's War" as We Saw It by George Currie 16 a Books a OVER' HERE: 1914-1918. By Mark Sullivan. Being the fifth volume in the series "Our Times." Charles Scribner's Sons. R. SULLIVAN'S entertaining record of reminders of things but recently past has arrived at dent warning by the German Ambassador to American citizens, demanding they stay from Allied ships, and as one recalls one's own indignation because President Wilson's answer to this exhibition of frightfulness was only another note, it dawns upon one that the forces of war are far more easily aroused and put to work than are they held in leash Unlike the professional pacifist who reached the apotheosis of bombastic futility in the expedition to get the boys out of the trenches by Christmas how far off that visionary, well-intentioned and severely ridiculed adventure seems now! the bulk of the veterans who today say that if there's another war "they'll have to come and find me," learned to their own great cost what Mr.

Sullivan so aptly says, that "war under modern conditions meant hardship, dirt and death, and very little glamour or romance." Sagely Mr. Sullivan reminds us that Americans had had the benefit of more than two years of watching the western front and it was patent that the first flush of patriotism would round up all the volunteers that strange motley of the adventurous, youthful curious, those anxious to get away from private problems of responsibility and those yearning to bury themselves and their past in a great redemption and leave the American forces far short of the country's requirements. All were agreed that bad as getting into the war must be nothing could be worse than flinching from waging it to a successful termination. However, conscription smacked of autocracy; Mr. Sullivan gives full credit to President Wilson and Secretary of War Baker for their subtle camouflage of the less palatable aspects of the draft.

They dressed it up with proclamations, surrounded it with an almost religious fervor of honor and glory. And whereas Great Britain had shrunk from conscription America practically began its fight conscripted for action. Today no sensible citizen believes we would even think of fighting another great war without it. And some of us doubting Thomases suspect no other President could be elected on a platform whose major plank was simply: "He kept us out of war." My own first vote was cast for Hughes. And there are generation-coming up with the same ideas.

Naturally this volume of "Our Times' is occupied almost entirely with the war. It was the overshadowing menace of the period, and even the arrival of prohibition had its roots in the war need of thrift in consumption of foodstuffs You may have forgotten, perhaps, that President Wilson decreed that the alcoholic content of brewed aftei January 1918, was to be reduced to 2.75 percent by weight. Tell that to those wise young men who then were in short pants; they may not be so contemptuous of our present 4 percent weight. It is interesting to have recalled the fact that two of the outstanding successes of 1917's Broadway were "Lilac Time" and "Out There," war plays both, replete with tugs at the heartstrings and devoid of such harrowing disillusion as was to follow in "Journey's End," after the "war had buried its dead and the world had gone to work to rake up the debris. It is even more interesting to be reminded that as late as 1920 we were all frothing at the mouth over the escape of that greatest of all the slacker Grover Cleveland Bergdoll.

We have long since freed ourselves from the hysteria which made of honest sauerkraut "liberty cabbage." We can today be amused that Cincinnati, of all places, forbade pretzels at the free lunch counters of its saloons. In the West the height of something or other was attained when "German measles" became "liberty measles," and Mr. Sullivan dryly recollects that even the harmless dachshund became a "liberty pup." "In the crusade one spot stood out: November 5, 1918, citizens of Berlin N. by a vote of 933 to 5S6, decided that the name of their town was not so humiliating as to demand a change," we read and today feel like giving Berlin N. a pat on the back.

After all, the emancipated Reds caused us to reprint our geographies when they renamed St Petersburg "Leningrad." The world then, as now. had great faith in names It all seems strangely unreal, this recollection of Mr. McAdoo's going about with great ostentation in Washington his trousers patched gaudily as a reminder to the citizens to save cloth. Walter Camp's class in calisthenics or the lawn of Congressman William Kjnt for elderly and too plump Cabinet members; the burning of Bob La Follettc in effigy; the revocation of an honorary degree to Von Bernstorff by Brown University; the expulsion of George Sylvester Viereck by the Poetry Societ; and the Authors League; the ban placed upon Fritz Kreisler by the Mayor of East Orange, N. the great truth hardly noticed at the time, that the American people, committed to freedom and "rugged individualism," could be coaxed into surrendering the greatest freedom of all, the right to do with their lives as they saw fit.

But nothing so patly illustrates the mood of the time as that almost ridiculous phrase of President Wilson: "To make the world safe for democracy." Today we behold Stalin, dictator of the Proletarian Dictatorship; Hitler, Grand the World War. and even a most casual inspection of its contents will serve to bring home the fact that the forces unloosed upon the earth at Armageddon are still with us. in restraint only because of the spiritual exhaustion occasioned by their performances not only on the field of battle but also down through the lines of communication to steel hearth, wheat fields, coal mines and water-front docks. When the War Industries Board reduced the 232 kinds of buggy wheels to four; the 150 different colors of typewriter ribbons to five; the styles in pocket knives from 6,003 to 100; the 287 styles and sizes of motorcar tires to nine and standardized even baby carriages, its laudable purpose was to release more men to bear arms. In effect, however, it was to install although at the time it was not foreseen the elements of standardization into all industry, so that the only overproduction at the time was labor.

The efficiency which eliminated human hands in factories was greatly admired in 1917 and in 1918. but today, alas, it has become the tail that is wagging the dog. Beyond all doubt the Machine Age would have come into its own, but its progress, save for the war. would probably have been slower, giving us time to devise ways and means of giving occupation to those it threw out of work. The War Industries Board, so necessary in the prosecution of the campaign in Europe, sprang the monster upon us and the height of irony is that the country, from international banker to longshoreman, should have cheered so lustily the contraption which American Frankensteins were so cleverly assembling.

The war is over but the overgrown Machine Age isn't. And even our philosophers have been able to invent no more useful a formula for its supervision and control than the extremely piffling and utterly negative "Grin and bear it." Mr. Sullivan's present volum? is disquieting to one grown pacifist from experience and conviction, rather than from emotional conversion to an idealistic crusade. Well I remember Professor Barrett Wendell, eyes flashing from beneath shaggy eyebrows and voice rumbling from behind a beard that would have done a medieval emperor of the Holy Roman Empire proud, as he sat behind his desk on the rostrum of Emerson Hall, dismissing the class in Comp. Lit.

I. because, so he said, he was unable to continue he was so indignant and shocked by the sinking of the Lusi-tania. We shuffled out of the room, thirsting for German blood. "Huns." we called them and looked askance when the chemistry professor began his lecture as though the sinking of the Lusi-tania was but a piece ith the wreck of the Hesperus or a July Fourth drowning at an overcrowded beach. But as one reads Mr.

Sullivan's eloquently bald, bare and dispassionate remembrance of the incident; as one reads the appallingly brutal and Impu iUd-tzs Bc from Ar-i i far tm Mai em em eBe tea Ar-mea-tiarae par lex Mad em ois elk boat ix.man-tien.Sha baa -at barn kUtol a for tj 1 sk-j far la woa. ILuttmtmm front Mark Sullivan's "Over here: 1914-191S'.