The Publisher by Alan Brinkley Read Free Book Online

this goes through, and a third of the Yale R.O.T.C. is commissioned, it will make ’em sit up and take notice.” Harry and his friends immediately went into town and ordered custom-made officers’ uniforms from a local tailor. 35
    Harry complained occasionally about the rigors of camp life. When the officer trainees who had not received commissions were sent home, he described them as “lucky dogs.” On the whole, though, he embraced the military ethic with uncritical enthusiasm and strove to adapt himself to its demands. “In the army,” wrote the person who had spent a year and a half of the war living comfortably on the Yale campus when he was not away on vacation, “we thoroughly despise any young man who is able bodied, and who by his own choice gets into any kind of uniform but the line uniform. Even men who are doing the sine qua non jobs of the quartermaster department etc. etc. get a slant-eyed look. And as for any young man in a YMCA uniform,—well, of course, we are gentlemen enough not to smile.” Nothing now was more important than the war, which Harry—like many others—considered a battle for the survival of civilization and the defeat of German barbarism. Colleges “no longer exist,” he said, and “the one greatest thing to do now is to fight, with all the life one has, that the continuity of history toward the truth and the right of things shall be maintained. Everything else is subservient, or, ifit does not serve this purpose, is simply to be annulled for the time being.” His ambition now was “to have my next birthday in France, wearing silver (1st Lieutenant!).” 36
    But Harry and the other Yale men did not go to France. For the next month or so they were shuttled back and forth from one camp to another, undergoing additional training themselves or helping to train others. “Words cannot begin to picture my disgust with the idea,” Luce complained. “Here’s a case where one has to ‘grin and bear it’ without there being anything to bear it for,—no principles at stake, no glory to achieve!” His frustration was all the greater because it was becoming clear that “peace is unquestionably at hand.” There was, he said, “not one of us that isn’t sorry he hasn’t seen France, not a one that wouldn’t almost sell his soul to go there tomorrow.” By late October, with the prospects of making it to the front becoming dimmer by the day, almost everyone in the Yale officer corps was becoming restless and bored, suddenly seeing the “infinitesimal details” of the artilleryman’s life not as a prelude to glory but as the tedious, mechanical process it actually was. 37
    The armistice found Harry, Brit, and the others in Louisville, en route to another training assignment. They spent three days staying in a downtown hotel, eating in restaurants, smoking cigars, reading, idling, and thinking about the future. Harry found it difficult to disengage all at once from the new military ambitions the war had inspired in him. He thought about entering an officers’ training program and winning a promotion before being discharged, and he even toyed briefly with becoming an officer in the regular army after the war. But in the end he left the military almost as quickly as he could (“I have absolutely lost all military ambitions,” he wrote at the time), less than a month after the armistice. 38
    He went immediately to New York, where he spent much of the Christmas holidays planning feverishly for his return to Yale. The competition for most of the positions in campus organizations was now over, but Harry had other unfulfilled ambitions: to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa and, most of all, to be tapped for the most prestigious of the Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones. He set out to accomplish them both in the remaining semester of his junior year. 39
    The Yale to which he returned in January 1919 was, he once lamented, “a very poor place in which to get educated.” That was in