“This morning
I saw 20,000 French war orphans, who are supported by Americans, march down the
Champs Élysées past our Ambassador and the President of France, each carrying a
little American flag, and many carried a second flag with the name of the state
in which their protector lives. They seemed nice, healthy children, not forlorn
orphans, and very proud of the flag they carried. Certainly that flag never
looked so beautiful to me before.”
Cather, like
many American writers of her day, was a reflexive, non-ideological patriot. She loved her country. The
sight of the American flag stirred pride, not petulant narcissism. Once again,
after helping to win the Great War, the U.S. was Good Samaritan to the world.
Cather continues:
“All those
children will grow up loving our country and our people. After the parade I
stopped a number of the children and greeted them and one little boy would
point to himself and say ‘I am Michigan,’ and a little girl would say ‘I am Tex-ass.’
The French always make the best of things, and these youngsters are so proud of
being protected by the citizen of a great State, they regard it as a
distinction as well as a charity, and they try so hard to speak a few English
words.”
On May 27,
1918, Lt. Grosvenor P. “P.G.” Cather, the novelist’s cousin and her Aunt
Frances’ son, was killed during the Battle of Cantigny. He was posthumously
awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. In a letter to her Aunt Frances on
June 12, while preparing to submit the manuscript of My Ántonia to Houghton Mifflin, Cather writes:
“Everything
seemed strange and unreal to me on the day I saw G.P.’s name in the New York
paper, under that glorious title ‘killed in action’ which sets men off from
their fellows. I feel proud and humble to be one of those bearing the name that
your son put in such a place of honor.”
Cather
closes her July 4 letter to Aunt Frances with these words: “This Fourth of July
in Paris is the most American ‘Fourth’ I have ever spent—no noise or row, but
real feeling about something real, all the ceremonies solemn and beautiful.”
[The quoted
passages are drawn from The Selected
Letters of Willa Cather, 2013.]
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