To them it was a matter of indifference, until nineteen-seventeen,
who won the war so long as one side smashed the other and was quick about
it.
Owners and directors of copper mines--but let us draw a veil over the
sincere robust instincts of human nature.
The Club of Seven Arts was proudly and vociferously pro-German. Not that
they cared a ha'penny damn really for Germany, but it was a far more
original attitude than all this sobbing over France...and then there was
Reinhardt, the Secessionist School, the adorable jugendstyl. And the
atrocity stories were all lies anyway. The bourgeois president resigned,
but no one else paid any attention to them.
In nineteen-seventeen a few declared themselves pacifists and conscientious
objectors, and, little recking what they were in for, marched off
triumphantly to a military prison, feeling like Christ and longing for a
public cross.
The others, those that were young enough, shouldered a gun and went to the
front with high hearts and hardened muscles. Democracy ueber alles. The
women enlisted in the Red Cross and the Y.W.C.A., and worked with grim
enthusiasm, either at home or in France.
VI
By this time California, almost on another planet as she was, with her
abundance unchecked, and her skies smiling for at least three-fourths of
the year, admitted there was a real war in the world, as bad (or worse) as
any you could read about in history.
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