1672 
9V RURAL NEW-YORKER 
HOPE FARM NOTES 
□ 
We’d 
ihose 
Undo Isaac- Randall was the last Grand 
Army man -in our town. All the other old 
comrades had passed on. As a boy I used 
to try to imagine what “the last Grand 
Army man” would be like. Poets and ar¬ 
tists have tried to picture him, but when 
you actually see him you know how far 
the real must travel to reach the ideal. 
For poet and artist would have us look 
upon some calm, dignified man. carried by 
the wings of great achievement far above 
the mean and petty things of life which 
surround us like a thick fog in a narrow 
valley. For that, I fear, is what most of 
us find life to be unless the memory of 
some great sacrifice or some great devo¬ 
tion can lift our heads up into the per¬ 
petual sunshine. Those who knew Uncle 
Isaac saw little of the hero about him. 
He was just a little, thin, nervous man, 
very deaf, irritable and disappointed. No 
one can play the part of a deaf man with 
any approach to success unless he be a 
genuine philosopher, and Uncle Isaac was 
unfitted by nature for that. Sometimes in 
Summer, when the sun went down, you 
would see the old man standing in the 
barn looking off to the crimson West, 
over the purpling hills where the shadows 
came creeping up from the valley. A 
man with some poetry and philosophy in 
him would see in the darkening notch 
where the hills gave way to let the road 
pass through an approach to the beautiful 
gate through which wife and children and 
old comrades had passed on, to wait for 
him beyond the hills. But Uncle Isaac 
was cursed with that curiosity which is 
the torture of the deaf—he saw the hired 
man up on the hill talking to the neigh¬ 
bor’s boy, and his burning desire was to 
know what they were talking about. 
***** 
The Great War came, and Uncle Isaac’s 
two grandsons volunteered. Before they 
shipped overseas they came back to the 
farm—very trim and natty in their brown 
uniforms. It irritated the old man to 
think that these boys—hardly more than 
babies—hardly to be trusted to milk a 
kicking cow—should be sent to fight 
America’s battles. And those little rifles! 
They were not much better than popguns, 
compared with his old army musket. The 
old man took the gun down from the nail 
where it had hung for years. He had kept 
it polished, and the lock with its percus¬ 
sion cap was still working. He would 
show these young sniffs what, real warfare 
meant. So they went out. in the pasture 
—the old soldier carrying his musket, 
carefully loaded with a round bullet—- 
pushed in with the iron ramrod. In order 
to show these boy soldiers what real war¬ 
fare might be. the old man sighted the 
musket over the fence and aimed at a 
board about •'100 yards away. The bullet 
went at least five feet wide, while the old 
musket kicked back so hard that Uncle 
Isaac winced with the pain. Then one 
of the boys quietly raised his “popgun” 
and aimed at a bush at least half a mile 
away across the valley. In a fraction of 
a minute he fired half a dozen bullets 
which tore up the ground all around that 
bush. Then the boys hung one of their 
brown uniforms on the fence across the 
pasture, and put grandpa’s old blue coat 
beside it. You could hardly distinguish 
the brown coat, against the background, 
while the blue coat stood out. like a tar¬ 
get. It. was hard for the old man to 
realize that both he and his musket be¬ 
longed to a vanished past. The boys 
looked at. the gun and at grandpa march¬ 
ing home—trying to throw his old shoul¬ 
ders back into military form—and smiled 
knowingly at each other as youth has 
ever done in the pride of its power. They 
could not see—who of us ever can see?— 
the spiritual forces of patriotism which 
walked beside the old man, waiting for 
the time to show their power. 
***** 
The weeks went by. and day by day 
Grandpa read his paper with growing in¬ 
dignation. You remember how for months 
the army in France seemed to stand still 
before that great “Hindenburg line” 
which stretched out like an iron wall in 
front of Germany. It seemed to Uncle 
Isaac as if his boys and the rest of the 
army were cowards—afraid to march up 
to U.e line and fight. One day he threw 
down his paper and expressed himself 
fully, as only an old soldier can. 
“I told you those boys never would 
fight. At the Battle of the Wilderness 
Lee had a line of defense twice as strong 
as this Hindenburg ever had. Did Gen¬ 
eral Grant sit still and wait for some¬ 
thing to happen? Not much! 
“ ‘Forward by the left flank !’ 
“That was the order, and we went for¬ 
ward. Don’t you know what he said at 
Fort Donelson ? ‘I propose to move on 
your works at once.’ If General Grant 
that’s what he’d say, and 
you’d see old Hindenburg 
surrender! My regiment 
against a regiment from 
I’ll tell you what! Let 
‘Y don’t care,” said Uncle Isaac. 
start, any tray! We’d move on 
breastworks and take our chances! 
And mother wrote about it to her boys 
in the army over in France. The young 
fellows laughed at the thought of those 
old white-haired men, with their anti¬ 
quated weapons, lined up before the death¬ 
dealing power of mighty Germany. It 
seemed such a foolish thing to youth. The 
letter finally came to the white-haired 
colonel of the regiment—an elderly man 
who had in some way held his army place 
in the ocean of youth which surrounded 
him. His eyes were moist as he read it. 
for he knew that when that, group of 
wasted, white-haired men lined up in 
front of the army they would not be alone. 
Down the aisles of history would have 
come a throng of old heroes—the spirit of 
the past would have stood with them. 
They would have stilled the laughter, and 
if these old veterans had started forward 
the whole great army would have thrown 
ofi restraint, broken orders and followed 
them through the “Hindenburg line.” 
But. Uncle Isaac, at home, humiliated 
and sad, went, about the farm with some¬ 
thing like a prayer in his old heart. 
“Why can’t / do something to help? 
Don’t make me know mv fighting days are 
over. What can I do?” 
***** 
And Uncle Isaac finally had his chance. 
Perhaps you remember how at one time 
during the war things seemed dark 
enough. Our boys were swarming across 
the ocean, and submarines were watching 
for them. Food was scarce. Frost and 
storm had turned against us. Money was 
flowing out like water. Spies and Ger¬ 
man sympathizers were poisoning the pub¬ 
lic mind, and the Liberty Loan campaign 
was lagging. Uncle Isaac, reading it all 
day by day in his paper, felt like a man 
in prison galled to the soul by his ina¬ 
bility to help. There came a big patriotic 
meeting at the county town. It was a 
factory town with many European labor¬ 
ers. They were restless and uneasy, op¬ 
posed to the draft, tired of the war and 
not. yet in full sympathy with America. 
Uncle Isaac determined to go to this 
meeting, though his daughter did all she 
could to dissuade him. There was no 
stopping him when he once made up his 
mind, so his daughter let him have his 
way. but she sent old John Zabriski along 
with him. Old John was a German Pole 
who came to this country as a young man 
out of the German army. He‘ had lived 
on Uncle Isaac’s farm for years, and just 
as a cabbage or a tomato plant seems the 
stronger and better for transplanting, so 
this transplanted European in the soil of 
this country had grown into the noblest 
type of American. So the daughter, stand¬ 
ing in the farmhouse door with eyes that 
were a little dimmed, watched these two 
old men drive away to the meeting. 
***** 
They had the speaker’s stand in front 
of the court house. The street was packed 
with a great crowd. Right in front was 
a group of sullen, defiant foreigners who 
had evidently come for trouble. The sher 
iff was afraid of them, and inside the 
court bouse out of sight, but ready for 
instant service, was a squad of soldiers. 
A young man who was running for the 
Legislature caught sight of Uncle Isaac 
and led him through the court house to 
the speaker’s platform, and John went, 
too, as bodyguard. The old veteran sat 
there in his blue coat and hat with the 
gold braid, unable to hear a word, but full 
of the spirit which had come down to him 
from the old days. 
Something was wrong. Even Uncle 
Isaac could see that, and John Zabriski 
beside bun looked grave and anxious. 
That solid group of rough men in front 
began to sway back and forth like the 
movement of water when the high wind 
blows over it. and a sullen murmur, grow¬ 
ing louder, came from the crowd. A small, 
effeminate-looking man was making a 
speech. Very likely his ancestors came 
originally to this country two centuries 
ago. but somewhere back in the years this 
man’s forebears had made a fortune. In¬ 
stead of serving as a tool to spur the fam¬ 
ily oil to finer things it had been spread 
out like a soft cushion to carry them 
through life without a bruise or bump. 
And these rough men, whose life had been 
all bruise and turmoil, knew that this 
soft little American was here talking plati¬ 
tudes when he should have been over in 
France. Perhaps you have never seen 
the angry murmur of a sullen crowd grow 
into a roar of rage, until the crowd be¬ 
comes like a wild beast. The sheriff had 
seen this, and he was frankly frightened. 
He started a messenger back into the 
court house to notify the soldiers, but old 
John Zabriski stopped him. . 
“Wait.” he said: “do not that. You 
October 30, 1020 
was in France 
within an hour 
coming out to 
fought all day 
North Carolina. 
me have my old regiment and that North 
Carolina regiment alongside and I’ll guar¬ 
antee that we will break right through 
that Hindenburg line, march right across 
the Rhine, hog-tie the Kaiser and bring 
him back with us." 
“But. father,” said his daughter gently, 
“don’t you remember what Harry writes? 
They don’t fight that way now. The can¬ 
non must open a way first. Harry says 
they fire shells so large and powerful that 
When they strike the ground they make a 
hole so large you could put the barn into 
it. Suppose one of these big shells struck 
in the middle of your regiment?” 
lose those men by fighting. We gain 
them.” 
Ther, before anyone could stop him. 
old John stepped up in front and barked 
out strange words which seemed like a 
command. Then a curious thing hap¬ 
pened. The angry murmur stilled. The 
crowd stopped its movement, and nearly 
every man stood at attention ! Almost 
every man there had in former years been 
in one of the European armies, and what 
old John had barked at them was the old 
army command which had been drilled 
into them years before. And through 
force of habit which had become instinct, 
that order, for the moment, changed that 
mob into an army of attentive soldiers. 
The bandmaster was a man of imagina¬ 
tion. and as quickly as his men could 
catch up their instruments they began 
playing “The Star Spangled Banner.” 
Boor old Uncle Isaac heard nothing of 
this. He could only guess what it was 
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