For them she organized her
little entertainments. For them she played and sang in the evenings,
when the field range in the kitchen was cold, and her blistered
fingers stumbled sometimes over the keys of the jingling camp piano.
Gradually, out of the chaos of her early impressions, she began to
divide the men in the army into three parts. There were the
American born; they took the war and their part in it as a job to
be done, with as few words as possible. And there were the
foreigners to whom America was a religion, a dream come true, whose
flaming love for their new mother inspired them to stuttering
eloquence and awkward gestures. And then there was a third division,
small and mostly foreign born, but with a certain percentage of
native malcontents, who hated the war and sneered among themselves
at the other dupes who believed that it was a war for freedom. It
was a capitalists' war. They considered the state as an instrument
of oppression, as a bungling interference with liberty and labor;
they felt that wealth inevitably brought depravity. They committed
both open and overt acts against discipline, and found in their
arrest and imprisonment renewed grievances, additional oppression,
tyranny.
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