James Montgomery Flagg, 1918 |
America is privileged
to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and
happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no
other.
--Woodrow
Wilson, 1917 War Message to Congress
On April 2, 1917, American president Woodrow Wilson, who had
won a close election in November 1916 by campaigning on the slogan He kept us out of the war, called a
special session of Congress and asked that the United States declare war on
Germany.
Wilson's War Speech to Congress, April 1917 |
Wilson argued that Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare –
showing no mercy even for hospital ships – demonstrated “reckless lack of
compassion or principle” and constituted “warfare against mankind.” He
condemned the German government for having “filled our unsuspecting communities
and even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues
everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within and
without.”
Mindful of the large number of German-Americans, Wilson asserted,
“We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but
one of sympathy and friendship. It was
not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering upon that war.”
But he made it clear that American troops would be called
upon to kill German soldiers, estimating that the “addition to the armed forces
of the United States already provided for by law” would involve “at least
500,000 men.”
Wilson urged Congress to declare war, proclaiming that the
fight would be “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of
its peoples….The world must be made safe for democracy.” And he reassured the
country that their allies in the war (Great Britain, France, Italy, and
Russia) shared these goals. Referring to
the recent Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the tsar, Wilson asked, “Does
not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the
future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been
happening within the last few weeks in Russia?” The American president seems
not to have been gifted with prophetic abilities.
In the wake of Wilson’s address to Congress and the
declaration of war that was made four days later on April 6, 1917, many
Americans wrote poems that commented on the momentous event. Gertrude Smith
was a student at Adelphi College; her poem “America at War” was included in the
1917 volume Poets of the Future: A
College Anthology. I can find no further record of the poet nor of any
future poems she may have written.
America at War
America,
If thy sons can go to war
Thinking —
If men democracy-trained can fight
And not glory in it
Or be afraid of it
Or be afraid of it
But earnestly regret that war must be —
If they can follow thy banner
And know
That its red does not represent blood
But sunrise,
That its white
Is not death but deliverance,
That its stars
Are not pilots for warships
But makers of poetry —
O America,
Then shall democracy conquer
And war shall never more be.
—Gertrude Smith
Unlike many of the early British poems of the Great War
written by men who had been educated in the classics and taught to reverence the action and honor of
battle,* Smith urges a cerebral approach to the war, one centered in the mind
and not the heart. The
“democracy-trained” soldiers of America must regret the war even as they train
for combat, and the poem urges American soldiers to repudiate aspirations of
glory in battle.
Howard Chandler Christy |
The colors of the American flag that will go before the men
embody values of hope and deliverance, not bloodshed nor death, and the stars
of the flag serve as guides not to warships, but to poets. The closing lines of
the poem echo the catchphrase of the conflict that had already dragged on for 979
days: with America's help, this would be “the war to end all wars.”
Smith’s poem was reprinted in Poems of the War and of the Peace, published in 1921. Other poems
in the anthology included Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” Rupert Brooke’s
“The Soldier,” Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen,”and Siegfried Sassoon’s “The
Attack.”
One-hundred years later, Smith’s poem “America at War” may
seem naïve and idealistic to modern ears, but it echoes Wilson’s speech to Congress and reflects
the mood of many Americans in 1917, before Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, and the Meuse-Argonne, before anyone had any way of
knowing that 116,516 American soldiers would never return home from the war.
*For example, see Julian Grenfell's "Into Battle."
Gertrude Smith is included in the List of WW1 American, Australian, Canadian, New Zealand and South African poets at the back of Catherine W. Reilly’s “English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography” (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1978).
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