Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus Homo sapiens; species, Texicana; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never in his life prayed for the President of the United States. The reason for these startling facts was that Wilson was an unreconstructed rebel and wore pinned in his shirt, just over his heart, a little butternut badge which his grandfather had worn in ’63—a symbol of the dead Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

We used to sing him a gay song which ran:

We called him “Johnny Reb,” “Tex,” or “Stonewall Jackson,” just as it happened to strike us.

Wilson was disturbed about something. “The Socialists are right,” he said, thoughtfully, drawing his six feet two from the chair beside my office desk. “There’s only one way to prevent wars—kill the spirit of patriotism. Look at that old fool out there!” he continued, bitterly, pointing toward a gray-bearded Landsturm soldier in shapeless flat service cap, faded gray-green uniform and high hob-nailed boots, who, with gun on shoulder, strode along the pavement of the Graanmarkt on his way to the Kommandantur: “That old fellow is probably a toy-maker in Nuremberg or a barber in Munich, and here he is wandering round Belgium ready to die for Kaiser and Vaterland!”

“Mankind’s a failure,” I acknowledged cheerfully. “Go on, Wilson.” I knew these moods.

“The trouble is this,” he drawled. “There are five old Belgians in the outer office who have come to ask about their pension money. It’s the first time I’ve had to do with Yankee pensioners. They were here yesterday,” he went on, impressively, “and for a solid hour I listened to one of ’em making patriotic speeches and telling me how he fought and bled and died for my country—my country!—a damned Yankee pensioner.”

I laughed gleefully, and Wilson turned on his heel. “Sit down, you Johnny Reb,” I gasped. “What’s it all about? Are they Belgian citizens who fought in our Civil War?”

“‘Civil War’!” he quoted. “There you go again! Haven’t I explained to you that you mustn’t call it the ‘Civil War?’ It’s the ‘War between the States.’”

A timid, eminently respectful knock interrupted us, and Peeters, the clerk, thrust his head through the half-open door, bowing to each of us in turn. “The men have come,” he announced.

“What men, Peeters?”

“The men who saw Mr. Wilson yesterday.” He coughed apologetically. “The men for the pensions. They want to see you, sir.”

I looked at Wilson, who was still meditating flight and cursing under his breath. “Send them right in, Peeters. Mr. Wilson and I are delighted to see them.”

“Delighted, are we?” my victim snarled; then his voice changed to honeyed sweetness—the sweetness underlying all Southern courtesy and hospitality, which is the sweetest in the world. “Aah, goeden dag, myneheeren, quel plaisir de vous revoir! Mynheer van der Aa, Mynheer de Vos, Mynheer Dekkers, Mynheer van Oolen, Mynheer Anderson.” He introduced them with a flourish—a little file of old men, dressed in dingy Sunday best, with heavy leather shoes in place of the customary slippers or wooden blokken, each holding his cap in his hand, each bearded and bewhiskered, each with thick weather-worn skin and little eyes folded deep in wrinkled cheeks. These were the pensioners.

The first of them was scarcely five feet high. Little black eyes snapped out from beneath his bushy brows, and he wore a sweeping white moustache and an imperial. The second was tall and had once been blond; now he was bald as a prophet, and his great white beard swung from his heavy head like a broad pendulum ticking off the minutes. The third was blind; his graceful, narrow head tilted forward, a flickering smile played about his mouth, and I noticed that when his attention was strongly attracted his eyes occasionally turned up with a strange abortive movement, as if he might take the darkness by surprise and change it into light. The fourth man stood straight and soldierly, his knees tight together, his great feet splayed out from his ankles, and his arms hanging perpendicularly. He had an ox-like head, and his wide shoulders were heavy and stooped with age. The fifth man was an aged negro, and feeble-minded.

Peeters handed me a little paper which I read aloud: “Jan van der Aa, Pieter de Vos, Georges Dekkers, Willem van Oolen, David Anderson. Is that right?”

“Ja, ja, mynheer”—“Parfaitement, monsieur”—“Yes, sair,” the voices quavered.

“Don’t you all speak English?” I demanded. “You’re entitled to American pension money, yet you don’t speak our language? Vous ne parlez pas——”

The little man with the imperial burst into volcanic speech. “Sir,” he ejaculated, “they have forgotten the Eengleesh, but I—I speak it pairfectly.”

Wilson sighed. “Yes, hang it, he does!” he whispered to me. “He’s the damnedest, convincingest, Fourth-of-July orator you ever listened to. Now he’s off! You can’t stop him!”

“You are Jan van der Aa?” I interrupted, after the first sentence.

“Jan van der Aa, sir,” he acknowledged, bowing, and continued impressively: “Sirs, you see beforre you five men who fought in the Grrand Arrmy of the Rrepublic, in the grrandest arrmy of the grreatest rrepublic of the earth.” He rolled the rr’s like thunder down the valleys of his speech. “It was not for nothing that we fought. Liberrty and Union are not little things. They are eterrnal. They are the same in everry country and in everry time. We five were at Gettysburrg and Cold Harrbourr, de Vos was at Antietam, Dekkars was wounded at Atlanta, I was at Chickamauga underr Thomas, Anderson was at Peterrsburrg”—the strange, foreign accent turned the familiar battle names into mighty voices, voices to conjure dead men from the grave and dead deeds from the old books where they lie buried; the man before us was a born orator, he was winsome, sweet, powerful, pathetic, by turns—“Forrt Fisherr, Culpeperr Courrt-House, Vicksburrg, Shiloh, Champion’s Hill, Cairro, Chattanooga.” The tremendous words rolled forth; the file of old men stirred; they awoke and threw up their heads as he trumpeted forth these names, and I seemed to see them young again and soldiers of the Republic.

But Van der Aa stopped abruptly. He turned half apologetically to the others, speaking a most vulgar and harsh Flemish: “’k Heb ’t verget—I’d forgotten what we came for—our moneys,” he said. “Sirs”—he addressed Wilson and me once more—“our pension moneys are overdue. We have received nothing since Antwerp was captured. The American Consul-General writes, but we receive nothing. Will you tell Washington of us? The Government have forgotten; we are far away, and so they have forgotten us.”

I turned inquiringly to Wilson.

“Oh, tell them you’ll get their money for them. Tell them anything,” he whispered, harshly, fumbling his handkerchief. “Stop that devil of a Van der Aa! You don’t understand; that man can talk you to tears!”

“Mr. Wilson knows all about the case,” I said. “He will cable to Washington the first time he goes to Rotterdam. We shall do everything in the world to get your money.”

Van der Aa thanked me with a gesture and a low bow, and repeated my words in Flemish to the others. They thanked us slowly. “And now, sirs——” he began again.

“Stop him, for God’s sake!” groaned Wilson.

“Mynheer van der Aa——”

“——the only things men gladly die for, freedom and union. Freedom and union, one and inseparable, now and forever.”

The spell came over us like a ghost—the ghost of something high and splendid—and the voice of America spoke in conquered Belgium. Not through American lips, but through the lips of an alien; and not the voice of America to-day, divided, disunited, enslaved in a thousand ways to fear and base interests; not the America, I suppose, of the sixties, blatantly provincial, cursed with over-confidence, torn with civil war; but the voice of the ideal America—that America of the spirit which Lincoln must have seen as Moses saw the Holy Land from Mount Nebo, the America which may be, which must be; the mighty nation like a city set upon a hill, with the glory of heaven shining upon her, and young men and women singing in her streets.

I mopped my eyes; Wilson coughed and blew his nose. The five old men stood imperturbable, and Van der Aa spoke on and on. He was pitiless and glorious. As he talked I saw a flag borne to the tops of tall mountains, flung over precipices, whipped through morasses and dismal swamps, flung up from the sea and set firm in rocky earth; and that flag was the American flag—the flag of Wilson’s country and my country. These men had followed that flag—these five aliens. I saw freedom and union like simple things, things to be held in the hand as well as in the heart; necessary, elemental, homely things. And I saw the world-wide war which is waged in every land against freedom and union—the fight of caste against caste, of class against class, of masters with slaves, of the state against its citizens, of the thousand and one Frankenstein monsters of commerce and industry and politics and religion, fighting against the human beings who have created them. Everywhere I gazed there was war.

“Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever,” concluded Van der Aa, his right arm outstretched to emphasize his last period, the eyes of the blind man straining up to catch the vanished sun.

Next morning Wilson’s motor car arrived an hour late at the office, and I noticed that from a staff wired to the wind-shield there floated a little American flag.

“Yes,” he said, defiantly, “I say kill patriotism and you kill war. I’m taking the first step. I used to be for the South against the world, now I’m for America against the world, and maybe some day I’ll be for all the world against the world.

“I’ll see you late to-night,” he added, very seriously. “I’ve got to go to Rotterdam to cable Washington about those old pensioners.”