A ROOM OF OUR OWN
Follette, Isabel B. La
A Room Of Our Own By Isabel B. La Follette KILLED IN ACTION." The casualty lists from the Atlantic and Pacific fronts these recent weeks have brought us many thousands of these telegrams from the...
...She would lie on the Navajo rug by my bed and When she would whimper at night I'd lean out and gently turn her over to rest her poor leg...
...Williams, whom many of you will recall as one of Phil's staff at the Governor's office, later at N.P.A...
...I have had a lot of craft work and as soon as possible I shall try to get a job working with wounded soldiers...
...Here is one wife and mother at least who has renewed her vow to the motto that "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty...
...Yet I left the Williams' home with new courage as I recognized that here again was a demonstration of American spirit...
...Yes, Britain took that lesson to her heart...
...Such a blow fell on the first of our immediate circle in the death in France of Henry...
...You know what I have been thinking...
...A sunny, loyal individual whom everyone liked and to whom the children were especially devoted, he entered service early in the war and worked his way from a private to captain in chemical warfare, leaving for England early last Spring...
...I don't dare write their wives yet for fear of giving them a shock, but one day we shall know...
...Wars are bred while an inattentive public permits ruthless interests to have their way, and when most ©f us wake up it is too late...
...Henry's lovely young bride was just as courageous and generous...
...Through the utter desolation of personal grief, these two women could think of others and what they could do with their lives to help meet the problems that grip us all...
...The casualty lists from the Atlantic and Pacific fronts these recent weeks have brought us many thousands of these telegrams from the War Department into as many homes throughout our country...
...Against the human hopefulness we all have that, as put by Henry's wife, "it can't have happened to Hank—and to me" is the fact that it did happen...
...I will have to find something to do as soon as I'm able...
...headquarters, and then with Bob in Washington...
...If it were one's unique fate it would be bitter enough, but to think that man's stupidity allows these wholesale catastrophes to take place every 25 years is beyond words !' " "That's just it" replied Henry's, mother...
...That's the insupportable part," I exploded, "the magnitude of the misery, yet some people seem to feel they are bolstering one by saying, 'Hard luck that your husband's been gone so long and that your boy is going, but millions of other women are going through the same thing.' I bite my lips to keep from bursting forth, 'That's the horror of it...
...But I witnessed another triumph of character as she looked into her bleak future...
...As I sat with his widowed mother and young widow in the first agonizing hours after the blow fell, I was bowed down with the thought of the many thousands of similar grief-stricken homes...
...I can't grasp it yet...
...I only pray that that wonderful group of men in his company, many of whom I knew intimately, didn't have to go too...
...Didn't you write in your column once," asked Henry's wife, "about the English losing the flower of their youth in the last war and their refusing to repeat that mistake again ?" "You mean Lloyd George's statement...
...It seemed as if I simply couldn't bear it to see Mrs...
...The Big Question We cannot pick up a paper or a magazine without facing the fact that it is not only the death of many thousands of the flower of our country that must be weathered by our nation, but the by-products of war in soldier and civilian mental smash-ups, the cost of broken homes, in "delinquent" youth, involving our whole population...
...The dominating note in the room was the photographs of Henry at various ages up to his handsome pictures taken at the time of his wedding last January...
...And as I thought it over later I wondered if this urge for national self-preservation, demonstrated so thoroughly by Britain's statesmen in this war, as learned in World War I, will not be brought home to us Americans as a result of World War II...
...she asked me...
...I put him standing guard at Henry's picture waiting until he comes home...
...Henry loved Ming...
...Do you remember when Ming (our chow dog) broke her leg and how Henry brought her home here for a while so the children would not play with her...
...Williams' last remaining stake in life snatched from her, leaving her, a woman who had bravely met many tragedies in her life, rudderless...
...The big question is, can we keep the iron in us today when the natural reaction of peacetime follows...
...Williams noted with a smile, "See the china dog Esther gave me as a little joke last Winter...
...I never prayed for Henry alone but for all the men in our armed forces...
...This can't have happened to Hank—and to me...
...The Magnitude Of The Misery As we sought for momentary release from the staggering reality, Mrs...
...And all these personal and social problems to be handled in the midst of economic revolution...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 29
