As Mary Chinery points out in the final essay of this volume, some of the American troops who landed at Normandy on June 6, 1944, carried with them the compact, but unabridged, Armed Services edition of a particularly rich and powerful American novel—Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. We do not know how much welcome distraction, to say nothing of solace, Cather's text provided these soldiers, how much her words meant, or failed to mean, when read in the midst of Operation Overlord. One would like to think, however, that at least a few of the GIs who carried Death Comes for the Archbishop with them during the opening phase of the liberation of Europe took comfort in the spiritual austerity of Cather's narrative or, at the very least, found a momentary refuge from war's horrors in a faraway landscape of mesas, piñons, and adobe. Hopefully, some of these servicemen responded to the text in the same manner as the wounded veteran of the Battle for the Philippines described at the opening of Chinery's essay: this soldier decided to keep reading even after discovering (contrary to the book's title) that Death Comes for the Archbishop was not a murder mystery. To his surprise, he "liked it anyway."

That Cather was there, albeit vicariously, at the D-Day landings and in the midst of the Pacific island campaigns should not surprise us. Indeed, as far as her connections to twentieth-century history are concerned, we might as well, as the saying goes, expect the unexpected. Now fading is the once widely held view of Cather as a writer who separated herself from the historical present (to the degree to which this was possible) and who remained aloof from the ideological pressures and preoccupations of her day. Over the past two decades, scholars equipped with the methodologies of New Historicism and cultural studies have turned this conception on its head, replacing the solitary, politically indifferent artist with a cultural participant whose works embrace, reject, or redefine, by turns, the dominant values and beliefs located in her contemporary milieu. If this ideologically alert body of scholarship has at times placed too much emphasis on measuring Cather's alignment with current political orthodoxies (as Joan Acocella charges), it has also vastly expanded the ways in which her fiction can be enjoyed, understood, and taught. No longer sealed away from politics, ideology, and material culture, Cather's texts now say much more than they once did. As read by New Historicists and culture critics, they speak of themes central to the so-called American century and to our own historical moment—themes such as empire, migration, multiculturalism, changing gender roles, sexual orientation, ecological awareness, and war.

The latter subject, whose importance in Cather's life and writings has only recently attracted scholarly notice, serves as the focus for this collection. Cather was not, of course, what we think of as a war writer (i.e., an eyewitness to military violence or to its immediate aftermath for whom armed conflict is subsequently a central artistic concern). She did not hear a shot fired in anger even once during her seventy-four years, and direct depictions of combat appear in only two of her narratives—in the Civil War story "The Namesake" (1907) and, more notoriously, in One of Ours (1922), long regarded as one of her weakest novels. On the surface, Cather's acquaintanceship with Mars was slight and, if anything, detrimental to her art. However, as the fourteen essays assembled here demonstrate, an author does not have to be a "war writer" in order to produce work that registers the cultural and personal impact of mass violence, particularly during the first half of an especially war-torn century. Though Cather turned her artistic gaze directly to the battlefield just twice during her career as a fiction writer, war forms an important component in virtually everything she wrote.

The sheer number of armed conflicts evoked in her fiction is perhaps unprecedented in American literature. In My Ántonia (1918), a work whose sudden moments of violence and grotesquery arguably reflect the world war that raged during its composition, Jim Burden inhabits a landscape that has been crisscrossed by conquistadors both old and new—by Coronado, whose memory is tellingly connected to a rusty weapon, and, more recently, by the U.S. Army, which has killed or displaced the Native Americans whose ghostly horse ring Jim sees outlined in the snow. Wars of imperialist aggression also form part of the backdrop for other Cather novels, including Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), where the Mexican-American conflict of 1848 is essential to the plot (as the event that brings Latour's future archdiocese under American political control) and where the U.S. military's genocidal campaign against the Navajos receives a disturbingly impartial portrayal; A Lost Lady (1923), where, in a scene loaded with historical resonance, Cather depicts a railroad tycoon nonchalantly entering Indian territory and planting a stake to mark the location of his future home (more than anything, it was the railroad that led to the near eradication of the Plains Indians in the 1860s and 1870s); and Shadows on the Rock (1931), where Cather recreates a seventeenth-century New World city that is also an imperial fortress. The American Civil War, the central historical event for the generation that included Cather's parents, figures prominently not only in "The Namesake," which offers a gory picture of battle, but also in Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), which records the conflict's repercussions within the deeply divided community of Back Creek Valley, Virginia, the writer's home until age nine. In addition, veterans of the Blue and the Gray, invariably portrayed as dignified and kindly old men, are scattered throughout Cather's Nebraska fiction, along with references to their monuments and meeting halls.

Even more significant are the many moments when World War I, the conflict that had the greatest personal impact on Cather, enters into her fictional world. The events of 1914 to 1918 are, of course, central to One of Ours, which focuses on a Nebraska farmer turned doughboy, and to The Professor's House (1925), which in describing a professional historian's response to four years of unprecedented slaughter memorably sums up the War to End All Wars as "the great catastrophe." Yet World War I appears in other works as well, often in passages that seem incidental initially but grow in significance upon rereading. For example, in Lucy Gayheart (1935), Harry Gordon momentarily escapes thoughts of his lost opportunity for happiness with Lucy by plunging into the "war work" offered by the Red Cross and by Herbert Hoover's Food Conservation Program (177). Ultimately Gordon serves overseas with a volunteer ambulance unit (à la Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos). And then there are the multiple references to the war in short stories such as "The Old Beauty" (1948), a late (and underappreciated) work whose full meaning only becomes clear when, as Janis P. Stout demonstrates in her contribution to this collection, we read it as an account of a world broken in two by unthinkable violence—a world that went on breaking for Cather until the very end of her life.

The ubiquity of armed conflict whether as a main theme or as a background feature in Cather's writings reflects her historical context, reading, and artistic preoccupations. Indeed, it would be surprising, given the historical events that transpired shortly before and during her lifetime, if Cather's fiction did not touch upon military matters frequently. Born three years before the Battle of Little Bighorn, the last large-scale clash between the U.S. Army and Plains Indians, and just eight years after Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Cather lived to see warfare move onto a terrifying global scale. Judging from her letters—which contain, as Stout has demonstrated in her calendar of Cather's correspondence, with references to conflicts past, present, and future—she seems to have thought of war on a regular basis (particularly after 1914), and few American conflicts from 1861 to 1945 failed to intersect with her life in some significant fashion. As a child and then as an adolescent, Cather witnessed the rituals and pageantry through which Civil War veterans, both Southern and Northern, commemorated the war of their youth, and she soaked up family stories of her lost uncle, William Seibert Boak, a Confederate mortally wounded at Manassas. While in her early teens in the 1880s, Cather created a visual testimony to her fascination with the Civil War by donning a soldier's kepi, perhaps her uncle's, for a Red Cloud photographer (see the frontispiece). Further evidence of her deep-seated interest in the War between the States surfaced during her career as a journalist: in 1900 she offered a highly fictionalized account of her meeting with Stephen Crane in 1895 and recollected a detailed discussion of The Red Badge of Courage. (Her familiarity with Crane's war writing shows up elsewhere as well: in 1898 she wrote a scathing review of his poetry volume War is Kind, and in 1926 she provided an introduction for his Spanish-American War dispatches collected under the title Wounds in the Rain and Other Impressions of War.)

More than three decades after Cather donned the headdress of a Civil War soldier, a very different conflict captured her attention and prompted the most intensive research she ever conducted as a fiction writer. While composing the story of Claude Wheeler, a character partially inspired by the writer's first cousin Grosvenor P. Cather (killed on the Western Front in 1918), she interviewed dozens of soldiers, absorbed most of the major works of World War I literature available by the early 1920s, and even traveled to the battlefields of France, where she saw firsthand the vast cemeteries and swaths of shell-pounded countryside left in the war's wake. However, exorcizing the personal trauma of World War I proved difficult for Cather, and one novel alone could not contain her thoughts on such a shattering historical event. She continued to reflect on "the great catastrophe" throughout the 1920s and 1930s, both in her fiction and in her correspondence, and she contemplated the approach of World War II with weariness and dread (even as she hoped the United States would shake off its isolationism). As James Woodress has observed, Cather's grim thematic concerns in her final novel—paralysis, lust, and betrayal—perhaps have much to do with the violent historical background against which she wrote (483). Three wars arguably inform Sapphira and the Slave Girl—the American Civil War, which Cather weaves directly into her narrative; World War I, a central source for her darkening vision during the final third of her life; and World War II, whose opening stages, dominated by fascist victories, were contemporaneous with the novel's composition.

Arranged chronologically, beginning with the American Civil War and ending with World War II, the fourteen essays in this collection examine the presence of armed conflict in Cather's life and art from several theoretical perspectives—ranging from New Historical to formalist—and vary widely in terms of scope and methodology. The essays are, however, grouped together by common themes and interpretive concerns. Central to the first four is the issue of memory, both personal and cultural, an issue made all the more fascinating by Cather's complex liminality. As a southerner and northerner, Nebraskan and New Yorker, regionalist and Europhile, realist and modernist, Cather provides a particularly rich case study in how a literary artist negotiates often conflicting cultural traditions and ideologies. Among the many questions that Cather Studies 6 explores are the following: How did Cather remember the various conflicts that intersected with her life? And how did her individual memory interact with cultural memory?

Ann Romines starts us down the beckoning path that leads out from such questions with her essay "Willa Cather's Civil War: A Very Long Engagement." Noting that Cather was "the particular target" of Southern Lost Cause mythology, Romines traces Cather's ambivalent attitudes toward her Civil War inheritance all the way from her Virginia childhood to Sapphira and the Slave Girl, written almost a lifetime later. As Romines convincingly demonstrates, Cather's final novel turns upside down many of the conventions of Southern Civil War commemoration and nostalgic Southern fiction such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (published in1936, the year that Cather began work on her own depiction of the Old South). A book "without battle scenes or youthful male heroism," Sapphira "contains none of the saleable staples of Civil War art." And, even more important, the narrative violates a central Lost Cause taboo by openly confronting the ideological issue at the heart of the war—slavery. At the same time, however, Romines notes instances when the novel resurrects pro-Southern Reconstruction-era stereotypes, as when, for example, the former slave Tap falls prey to an evil carpetbagger and an ignorant Yankee jury. With its many contradictions, Sapphira ultimately demonstrates "how difficult and freighted a process the telling of Civil War stories (still) is."

The issue of memory also stands at the heart of Michael Gorman's "Jim Burden and the White Man's Burden: My Ántonia and Empire." Just where and how, this essay provocatively asks, are Native Americans remembered in Cather's novel of triumphant European settlement on the Great Plains? Do the wars of imperialist aggression that cleared the way for communities such as Black Hawk receive any recognition in the text? Gorman persuasively argues that the relative absence of references to Native Americans in Jim Burden's narration is, in itself, revealing; indeed, it invites an ironic reading of Cather's often blind and deluded protagonist. Seldom conscious of Nebraska's original inhabitants (his contemplation of the fading horse circle is a rare exception), Jim prefers to define the Plains as virgin territory, as land without human history, as a nothingness waiting to be made into something. The historical realities of violence and displacement that Jim conveniently ignores enter the novel only symbolically—through his slaying of the rattlesnake, an indigenous creature that stands for both the Sioux Indians (whose tribal name was understood in 1918 to mean "venomous snake") and the nation of Spain, an imperial competitor defeated by the United States in 1898.

Margaret Anne O'Connor's essay, "The Not-So-Great War: Cather Family Letters and the Spanish-American War," focuses on memory in a different way. Utilizing materials only recently made available, as part of the George Cather Ray Collection at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, O'Connor examines the letters that G.P. Cather (later the model for Claude Wheeler) received from several Webster County soldiers who served in the Spanish-American conflict. Ironically, the martial enthusiasm that G.P. later displayed, as he rushed into the ranks of the first American division to reach the Western Front (he would meet his fate in the first American battle of the war), perhaps reflects his failed memory: his turn-of-the-century correspondents described a military experience made up primarily of boredom, discomfort, sickness, and fear. By 1917 G.P. had forgotten the lessons contained in their testimony. Willa Cather, on the other hand, did not forget the ugly side of war as she came to know it during the writing of One of Ours, and her novel of the First World War ends, appropriately enough, with a soldier's letters in the hands of a grieving mother who sees through her son's illusions.

Titled "Between Two Wars in a Breaking World: Willa Cather and the Persistence of War Consciousness," Janis P. Stout's essay deals with the burden of memory. Drawing upon Cather's correspondence and published writings (particularly neglected short stories and essays) from the interwar decades, Stout argues that Cather never fully recovered from the "shock" of World War I, with its ten million casualties and host of industrialized horrors, and that her sense of living in a world forever broken by war colored virtually everything she wrote after 1918. In particular, Stout locates evidence of Cather's war consciousness in the stories "Uncle Valentine" (1925), "Double Birthday" (1929), and "The Old Beauty" (1948), as well as the essay "148 Charles Street" (1936). From this bold, exploratory analysis, a new version of Cather emerges. In his landmark study The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell focuses on the way in which British literary artists responded to the historical and cultural ruptures produced my mass slaughters like the 1916 Battle of the Somme. According to Fussell, the grotesque realities of the Western Front fostered a volatile mode of interpretation that he terms "modern memory," a mode characterized in part by stark, ironic dichotomies (e.g., cavalry versus machine guns, bloodthirsty generals versus Christlike troops, optimistic strategy versus stalemate and disaster). Stout posits a similar dynamic at work within Cather's creative imagination, which abounds in its own extreme dichotomies and incessant breakages. No one who reads this exciting analysis will see Cather's post-World War I fiction the same way again.

The next five essays in this volume all focus on One of Ours, a controversial book that has finally come into its own as a sophisticated, if ambivalent, statement on war and its construction within early-twentieth-century American culture. One signal of the novel's belated recognition as a major work came in 2002, when the University of Nebraska-Lincoln hosted a daylong conference titled "Great Passions, Great Aspirations: Willa Cather and World War I." Most of the papers and panels featured at that memorable event focused on One of Ours, and they revealed a text that is remarkably multi-layered—even by Cather standards. Originally presented at the Great Passions, Great Aspirations conference, Pearl James's essay, "The 'Enid Problem': Dangerous Modernity in One of Ours," plunges us straight into the novel's formidable complexity by focusing on a character who has become something of a critical lightning rod—Claude Wheeler's wife, Enid Royce. Arguing that "One of Ours conflates a nostalgia for 'natural' pre-industrial frontier life with a nostalgia for traditional femininity," James presents Enid as a "dangerous New Woman," whose defiance of traditional gender roles brings her inevitably into conflict with her husband. Other critics have made similar observations. However, what sets James's analysis apart is the depth and specificity with which she links Enid's threatening modernity, in all its many facets, to the turbulent background of wartime America. Enid's "scientific domestic economy," for example, "reflects the discourse used to mobilize women on the home front, in their kitchens, parlors, and gardens." Likewise, Enid's accomplished handling of an automobile (Claude, one notes, relinquishes that masculine holy of holies, the driver's seat) evokes the entry of American women into the Motor Corps, one of many wartime expediencies that destabilized conventional notions of gender. By establishing such connections, James offers the most thorough analysis to date of a character whose disappearance halfway though the narrative belies her many connections to the war that ultimately destroys Claude.

Bayliss Wheeler, one of Cather's most unpleasant creations, receives a similarly thorough and detail-rich analysis from Celia M. Kingsbury. Titled "'Squeezed into an Unnatural Shape': Bayliss Wheeler and the Element of Control in One of Ours," Kingsbury's essay establishes Claude's neo-materialistic, pleasure-killing older brother as a small-town version of Henry Ford and John Harvey Kellogg, American moguls driven by a socially sanctioned "desire to acquire and control." Likening Frankfort to a Foucaultian panopticon, with Bayliss as its "enforcer and executioner," Kingsbury notes the many nuances that go into this repellent character's portraiture—his connection, for example, with German Kultur as it was constructed by American propagandists and his ironic kinship with Enid, his near Doppelganger.

The other three essays on One of Ours all focus on the novel's most problematic section—Books IV and V, where Cather depicts her protagonist's service in the American Expeditionary Forces. Dismissing this portion of the text, combined with some expression of regret that Cather did keep her story in Nebraska, became standard in the negative reviews that the novel received in 1922, and scholars today remain divided when it comes to determining the success or failure of Cather's rendering of military life. However, anyone who doubts the intricacy of Cather's artistry in the second half of her most controversial novel would do well to study Mary R. Ryder's essay, "'As Green as Their Money': The Doughboy Naïfs in One of Ours," an exceptionally close reading that locates unexpected significance in what seems, at first sight, to be entirely clichéd language. Zeroing in on Cather's back-and-forth references to American soldiers as "men" and as "boys," Ryder demonstrates that Claude and his companions "must . . . play a double role in the national imagination." Citing numerous World War I propaganda posters, Ryder concludes that men, as defined within wartime discourse, were robustly masculine—trained killers who endured and inflicted violence. Boys, on the other hand, were innocent, clumsy, and soft—the perfect signifiers for propaganda that played up the moral purity and disinterestedness of American intervention. Tested in the manly arena of combat but still a child in his understanding of French culture (as well as the geopolitical realities of World War I), Claude moves uneasily between these two discursive roles and becomes in the process "the prototype" of the American soldier.

Mark A. Robison and Debra Rae Cohen shed additional light on the war chapters in One of Ours by considering the related themes of recreation and tourism. Robison's essay, "Recreation in World War I and the Practice of Play in One of Ours," situates Cather's novel within a unique cultural context—"the curious intersection between war efforts and the ideas emerging in the new field of recreation." After offering a detailed account of the early twentieth-century recreation movement, which worked to provide American adults with opportunities for healthy outdoor play, and the U.S. War Department's emphasis on morale building amusements and diversions, Robison demonstrates that Claude's sense of joy in Books V and VI has little to do with combat (thus, he is not, contrary to Stanley Cooperman's influential interpretation, a true war lover). Instead, Robison ties Claude's contentment to the recreational opportunities offered by the American Expeditionary Forces—to the musical performances, culturally enriching travel, games, and quiet walks that Claude enjoys as a soldier. Meticulously researched, Robison's contribution to this volume represents New Historicism at its best and breaks entirely new scholarly ground. In "Culture and the 'Cathedral': Tourism as Potlatch in One of Ours," Debra Rae Cohen offers a theoretically sophisticated discussion of the tourist/traveler trope, both as it operates in Cather's novel and in the World War I writings of other American women authors. As Cohen demonstrates, Claude Wheeler's shifting qualifications as a tourist one moment and a traveler the next ultimately destabilize the distinction that Cather employs. Moreover, Claude's journey through wartime France, as part of an overfed, oversupplied army, illustrates "the mechanism of potlatch, the deceptive mechanism of competitive 'wastage' of capital central to the theories of George Bataille." A dense reading anchored in both deconstruction and cultural theory, Cohen's essay provides a new interpretive framework for Claude's overseas experiences.

Three years after drawing the fire of indignant male critics, who were incensed to see a noncombatant, a woman no less, venture into the territory of war literature, Cather returned to the subject of World War I in a major novel but this time in a manner that leaves the conflict's thematic importance more implied than explicit. Cather's decision to make the "great catastrophe" practically invisible in The Professor's House has prompted questions ever since. Just how central to the narrative is World War I? Does the war function chiefly as a plot device, a means to separate Tom Outland from his mentor and, ultimately, to kill him off? Or is the war connected in subtle but essential ways to the novel's treatment of the St. Peter family and its concern with technology and science? Four contributors to this volume—Susan Meyer, Jennifer Haytock, Wendy K. Perriman, and Steven Trout—provide answers to these questions, and taken together, their essays forcefully suggest that without the presence of World War I, however shadowy or "unnamed," The Professor's House would be a very different novel indeed.

In "On the Front and at Home: Wharton, Cather, the Jews, and the First World War," Susan Meyer focuses on the Professor's Jewish son-in-law, Louie Marsellus, and, in response to critics who have accused Cather of anti-Semitism, sets this character alongside representations of Jews in American wartime and postwar discourse. In particular, she contrasts Marsellus with the repellently drawn Jews featured in Edith Wharton's World War I novel A Son at the Front (1923) and concludes that Cather's character ultimately reflects an "ambivalence about what constitutes the most appropriate human response to [the] 'great catastrophe.'"

Jennifer Haytock's "Looking at Agony: World War I in The Professor's House" focuses on Tom Outland's decision to join the French Foreign Legion, the impact of his death on Godfrey St. Peter, and the disturbing conception of "civilization" that Cather's novel offers. Arguing that Outland is less callow at the time of his enlistment than most critics have acknowledged, Haytock attributes his departure not to propaganda-inspired idealism but to his realization (achieved as he studies the mesa dwellers' extinction) that cultures unwilling to wage war face certain annihilation. Haytock then shifts the discussion to Outland's mentor and convincingly establishes that St. Peter "fails to find a way to mourn Tom specifically. . . . Instead of grieving, the Professor simply cuts himself off from his past." St. Peter's inability to confront the loss of Outland reflects the emotional numbness that slowly envelops him during Book I of the novel and that leaves him, in the end, tied to his family, not by love but by a sense of duty. Thus, The Professor's House offers "difficult, even heretical, truths: that war, though pointless, is unavoidable and that family love may wear out and die. Both of these points seem to be contrary to 'civilization,'but Cather suggests instead that 'civilization' is created by an impersonal feeling of responsibility rather than by individual and unreliable loyalties."

Cather's treatment of war-related science, technology, and commerce receives attention in Wendy K. Perriman's "Cather's Literary Choreography: The 'Glittering Idea' of Scientific Warfare in The Professor's House" and Steven Trout's "Rebuilding the Outland Engine: A New Source for The Professor's House." Both essays stress the spongelike nature of Cather's artistic imagination, which absorbed and recycled details drawn from every imaginable cultural venue—from ballet performances to daily newspapers. Perriman focuses on Cather's love of ballet and the likely influence of dance-based "plots, themes, twists, reversals, and techniques" on her fiction. In the case of The Professor's House, Perriman casts the sinister link between Outland's scientific study and World War I aviation as an ironic reversal of the positivistic message contained in the ballet Excelsior (1881), a widely performed work that Cather almost certainly encountered between 1908 and 1914. An allegory depicting the triumph of scientific enlightenment over the dark forces of ignorance and violence, Excelsior personified pre-World War I optimism. The Professor's House, on the other hand, shows that science and destruction are linked. The ballets Jeux (1913) and Faust (1848), Perriman goes on to demonstrate, probably influenced Cather as well. These two works supplied motifs that ultimately find their way into Cather's depiction of the St. Peter family, as well as the homoeroticism that runs throughout her narrative. Likewise focused on scientific development and on the issue of Cather's artistic sources, Trout's essay posits a connection between the Outland engine, credited in The Professor's House with "revolutionizing aviation," and the Liberty engine, one of the United States' most publicized technological contributions to the Allied war effort. Although the two machines are dissimilar in many respects, Trout contends that the production history of the Liberty engine, as extensively covered in the New York Times, may have offered Cather a positive image of the "pep and can-do spirit" of American manufactures and, at the same time, "turned her thoughts to the fuzzy morality of wartime contract procurement." Thus, "even the most seemingly fanciful of Cather's fictions—an implausibly revolutionary aircraft engine—has a complex basis in her material culture."

Mary Chinery's "Wartime Fictions: Willa Cather, the Armed Services Editions, and the Unspeakable Second World War" forms an appropriate coda to this collection by showing how Cather helped provide much-needed diversion for American soldiers during World War II. After agreeing in 1943 to contribute a section of Death Comes for the Archbishop to a servicemen's anthology edited by New York theater critic Alexander Woollcott, Cather went on to authorize the reprinting of several of her best-known novels in cheaply made, ultra-compact Armed Services editions. As Chinery observes, Cather's willingness in this instance to see her work distributed in paperback form was unprecedented. Utterly dictatorial when it came to the physical presentation of her writing (right down to the type style, width of margins, and weight of paper), Cather hated the notion of cheap soft-cover printings, denied requests from analogy editors as a matter of course, and blocked radio readings of her fiction that might well have expanded her audience. Thus, her participation in the Armed Services editions program reflected her deeply felt desire to serve the Allied war effort in the best way that she could. And, as it turns out, her generosity brought unforeseen rewards. Though she may not have known so at the time, the distribution of her novels among thousands of book-ravenous soldiers greatly expanded her visibility as an author and arguably helped elevate her name within the American literary canon.

More work on the braided themes of history, memory, and war in Cather's writing remains to be done, and it is hoped that the essays provided here, many of them by authors who have only recently fallen under Cather's spell, will suggest further avenues of inquiry and thereby attract still more newcomers to Cather scholarship. With this desire, the late Susan J. Rosowski would be in accord. The series editor of Cather Studies from its inception until her death in 2004, Susan worked tirelessly to bring fresh faces and ideas into an always vibrant and ever-expanding community of scholars and friends. Without her encouragement, this volume would not have been possible. Without her leadership, Cather's reputation would not be what it is today.

Willa Cather's story "The Namesake" was published in 1907, soon after her move to New York City as an editor of the influential McClure's Magazine. With a volume of poems and one of stories published and a career at the center of American literary and publishing culture opening up in front of her, Cather appears in this story to be thinking about what makes an artist "American," about what an American artist's resources are. In the story a group of young, male American artists gather in Paris around a successful sculptor, Lyon Hartwell, who seems to epitomize what it means to be an American artist: "to mean all of it, from ocean to ocean" (137). To these young men, who have come from various U.S. locales (but not from the South, where Cather was born), a Paris studio is the place where they imagine that they can become players in the exhilarating game of American art in which Hartwell is so brilliantly succeeding. "Never had the game seemed so enchanting, the chance to play it such a piece of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune" (138). Hartwell's success has been built on a series of iconic images of male heroism drawn from the continuum of U.S. history; he has "thrown up in bronze all the restless, teeming force of that adventurous wave still climbing westward in our own land across the waters . . . his Scout, his Pioneer, his Gold Seekers, and those monuments in which he had invested one and another of the heroes of the Civil War with such convincing dignity and power." The height of Hartwell's achievement is his latest work, The Color Sergeant, which will be "cast in bronze, intended as a monument for some American battlefield. . . . It was the figure of a young [Union] soldier running, clutching the folds of a flag, the staff of which had been shot away." The figure is full of "splendid action and feeling" (139). The description of Hartwell's work emphasizes that he has achieved both artistic and marketplace success, tapping into postbellum America's appetite to memorialize its own legendary (and recent) history, particularly through the monumental sculpture that commemorated the Civil War.

For the aspiring acolytes who cluster around Hartwell in his Paris studio, expatriation seems one of the rules of the game, and a summons "home" to America, such as one of their number has received, is a disaster that threatens their status as artists. Hartwell responds to his young friend's departure with a story about his discovery of his own U.S. "citizenship" as a source of his deepest feelings and his art, as expressed in The Color Sergeant. He was born in Italy, son of an expatriate father and a mother who died early and had no acknowledged influence on her son. His father was an unsuccessful sculptor ("I dare say you've not heard of him") who remained in Rome until his death, "chipping away at his Indian maidens and marble goddesses, still gloomily seeking the thing for which he had made himself the most unhappy of exiles." When the Civil War broke out, he did not return home to Pennsylvania to enlist in the Union army, and was thus considered a "renegade" by his family (140). For Hartwell, his father seems to embody the dark side of expatriation, and his conventional female subjects cut him off from the sanctioned narrative of U.S. male heroism. He is the problematic noncombatant ancestor—and yet Hartwell is clearly the beneficiary of his father's ambitions and profession and of the Roman education that his father decreed for him.

As a young man whose career as a sculptor was just beginning to flourish, Hartwell was also summoned back to the United States by family duty: his father's sister, nearly helpless from a "cerebral disease," needed his care. At the lonely family house the only connection he feels is to a portrait of a dead uncle for whom he was named but never met. This namesake enlisted in the Union army at fifteen and died as a color sergeant bearing the flag a year later. Since the aunt can summon up few memories of her soldier brother, who is buried in the orchard, Hartwell pieces together the story of his brief career and heroic death from "an old soldier in the village" and a comrade's newspaper account of the boy's death. Hartwell also begins to read Civil War history in books collected by his grandfather. To Hartwell, this uncle—whose name he shares and whose identity thus seems to be entwined with his own—"seemed to have possessed all the charm and brilliance allotted to his family and to have lived up its vitality in one splendid hour" (143-44). Then, in response to the stimulus of a powerful national impulse—Decoration Day on May 30, an observance that began in 1865 and grew to an important national ritual of Civil War remembrance by the late nineteenth century—the aunt rouses herself to commemoration: she instructs Hartwell to run up the "big flag" on the uncle's grave and goes with him to decorate the grave with "garden flowers" (see fig. 1). That day, Hartwell at last discovers the trunk—marked with the name they share—in which the dead boy's mother packed away her son's belongings: clothing, toys, war letters, and a textbook embellished with his childish drawings of military paraphernalia, a "Federal flag" and lines from the national anthem. Clutching this book, which suddenly gives him the sense that he "knows" his uncle, Hartwell spends the night sitting at the soldier's grave, as the flag tosses above him in the dark. It is a rending, overwhelming experience: It was the same feeling that artists know when we, rarely, achieve truth in our work; the feeling of union with some great force, of purpose and security, of being glad that we have lived. For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground. (146) Hartwell has found his "citizenship," the other half of his inheritance, the meaning of his name, and his nationality. For the first time in his life he feels rooted, tied by kinship and by passion to a national and familial tradition that is not purely personal: "things that had not begun with me." The earth, which contains his uncle, asserts its claim on him, "pouring its essence" into Hartwell,

Federal language emphasized that the Civil War was fought to "preserve the Union." A typical bit of ephemera from the Civil War years, a decorated envelope printed in New York, is emblazoned with a red, white, and blue star with "UNION" at its center, superimposed on a map of the entire United States, including the seceded states. Above is this legend: "The Stars and Stripes must cover the whole" (see fig. 2). The language that describes Hartwell suggests these same Union priorities: as an artist, he means "all of it," the whole nation "from ocean to ocean" and the "adventurous wave" of its settlement and defense. When his work succeeds in achieving "truth," Hartwell says, he has a "feeling of union." As an artist, then, he can memorialize both his uncle and the cause for which the young color sergeant died, "with the flag settling about him" (176). On many levels, Hartwell has found a way, through his art, to preserve the Union. And yet he does so as an expatriate American artist, living out the legacies of both the soldier uncle and the noncombatant father.

In her sympathetic portrait of Lyon Hartwell, Cather invented an American artist born in 1854 who was able to draw sustenance from both a native and an expatriate heritage and whose art responds powerfully to the national priorities of his time, of which a central event was the Civil War. As David W. Blight writes, "The most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it" (64). This legacy of loss and memory created Hartwell's market—all those battlefield monuments—and his private/public epiphany is occasioned by a national observance, Decoration Day. According to Blight, "Decoration Day, and the ways in which it was observed, shaped Civil War memory as much as any other cultural ritual" (65). In addition, as he sought his namesake's story, Hartwell participated in other memorial rituals that Americans observed in the years after the war: he heard and read stories by veterans; he studied Civil War histories; he examined the relics of the dead soldier preserved (as was customary) by his female relatives. Participating in such rituals, and producing art that will become a part of them, Hartwell—even though he is in France—can achieve a powerful (and lucrative) union with his culture.

As we read the narrative of Cather's career, "The Namesake" might first seem to reveal a thirty-some-year-old writer examining a model for her own career as American artist, and in particular claiming the Civil War and its remembrance as a subject. In fact, few American writers of her generation so fully owned that subject, by inheritance, as Cather. Her father, Charles Cather, and her paternal uncle, George Cather, had been noncombatants in the war. The Cather family, living in Frederick County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a region that saw heavy and constant combat, supported the Union cause. The two sons briefly moved into West Virginia near the war's end, to avoid the Confederate draft, but neither joined the Union army. (Cather's father was only seventeen when the war ended.) However, Cather's three maternal uncles all joined the Confederate army, and one of them died in 1862, at nineteen, of wounds received at Second Manassas. Cather's mother, Mary Virginia Boak Cather, and her maternal grandmother, Rachel Seibert Boak, told stories of this family war hero, and his sword, uniform, and a Confederate flag were preserved as family relics. Civil War stories from both sides of the family—the Union Cathers and the Confederate Boaks—were a staple component of Cather's childhood and adolescence, both in her Virginia birthplace and later in Nebraska, and a famous photograph of adolescent Cather in a Confederate cap suggests that she may have used the family relics to enact such stories herself. In some ways, Cather's own inheritance replicates Hartwell's, with combatant and noncombatant ancestors, relics of a dead hero preserved by loving women, and a repertoire of war stories in fact far more extensive than the expatriate Hartwell's.

A few years before the story "The Namesake," Cather had published a poem of the same title, which was closer than Hartwell's story to her own family legacy. In it, a somewhat androgynous young speaker stands at the grave of a young uncle, a Confederate war casualty, whose name he bears. The speaker resembles the dead soldier ("with hair like mine") and, in ringing couplets, he expresses his eagerness to share the hero's military life ("help you hold your gun") and death, leaving his "girl" behind to share the soldier's "bed of glory," a grave. However, this young speaker is no self-abnegating mourner, caught up in a death wish—instead he looks toward his own future, aiming to "be winner at the game / Enough for two who bore the name." He intends to be a player, and he is drawn to "the game" as powerfully as are the young artists who cluster around Hartwell in Paris.

Cather's poem, when originally published in 1902, had this dedication: "To W.L.B., of the Thirty-Fifth Virginia." As Bernice Slote observes, "W.L.B. could refer only to Cather's maternal grandfather, William Lee Boak [who had died well before the war, in 1854], and, like the 'Thirty-Fifth' was clearly an error that was corrected in 1903," with publication in April Twilights, to "To W.S.B. of the Thirty-Third Virginia" (55). Cather's biographers have assumed that this corrected dedication refers to her dead Confederate uncle, William Seibert Boak, who was indeed a member of "the Thirty-Third Virginia." However, that uncle's name was actually James William Boak, as his military records and tombstone confirm. (Another Confederate uncle was Jacob Seibert Boak, but he survived the war.) Apparently young Cather was confused about some of the details of her family's Civil War history and her own Confederate genealogy when she made this slight but telling alteration in her uncle's name. Also, by this time she had adopted "Sibert" (an alternate spelling used by some family members) as her own middle name. She would continue to be Willa Sibert Cather professionally until mid-career and personally until the end of her life. So she needed a namesake with the Seibert name. In addition, Cather had been called "Willie" by family and close friends since babyhood. One source for the nickname was her female namesake, paternal aunt Wilella Cather, who died of diphtheria in 1869 at the age of four; Wilella too had been called "Willie" by the Cather family. (Cather herself had changed her given name from "Wilella" to "Willa" when, as a child, she altered the inscription in the family Bible.) But "Willie" may have honored her mother's dead brother, James William, who was also called by that nickname, as well as her father's dead sister. The fact that Cather, early in her career, produced two works titled "The Namesake" suggests that an identification with a namesake was a special issue for her, and one that linked her to the Civil War.

Of the two works, the 1907 story is the more rich and complex; it foreshadows Cather's great fiction to come. But it also implies—if one reads autobiographical elements in both poem and story, as most critics have—that Cather is revising away some of the complications of her actual genealogy as it was reflected in her name. "Wilella/Willa/Willie" suggests a name both inherited and chosen, with androgynous possibilities. "Cather" ties her to her paternal tradition of noncombatant support of the Union cause. And by adding "Sibert" to her name, she evoked her slave-owning Virginia Seibert ancestors and her ties to her beloved Confederate Grandmother Boak (who was born a Seibert), as well as the Confederate soldier. To make the Civil War ancestor a Union soldier eliminates most of these conflicting loyalties and makes possible Hartwell's personal and artistic act of union with the dead soldier, a union that advances his career—as the publication of the story in a major national magazine, McClure's, may well have advanced Cather's career. As Lisa Marcus has suggested, "Perhaps Cather, more cosmopolitan and worldly in 1907, recognized that her dedication to her dead Confederate relative was problematic" (108). In her story, Cather proposed a model for Civil War art that seemed to promise success in the early-twentieth-century market where she was positioning herself and to offer options for writing some of the Civil War stories that were part of her own rich legacy.

However, as we know, those stories did not follow. Instead, the Civil War is remarkably absent from Cather's oeuvre until her last novel, published in 1940. Sapphira and the Slave Girl spans the years between 1856 and 1881, and it is set in Cather's ancestral Virginia (one of the most heavily contested areas of the war), where she spent her first years, 1873-83. Here, at last, was Cather's Civil War novel, following closely upon such notable Civil War fictions as Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind, both published in 1936, the year that Cather began to write Sapphira. But this Civil War novel is one without battle scenes or youthful male heroism of the sort celebrated in The Color Sergeant. Nor does it feature exhausted women such as Hartwell's aunt, wasted in body and in memory, for whom Decoration Day—devoted to Civil War memories—is the most important day of the year, or elderly male veterans full of war stories, such as the one who tells Hartwell about his uncle. In Cather's novel, all these saleable staples of Civil War art are notably absent. In fact, the war itself is absent; Sapphira comprises 269 pages set on a slaveholding Virginia plantation/farm in 1856, followed by a 20-page epilogue set twenty-five years later. The war years are a powerful absence at the center of the book.

Cather had been a child of Reconstruction, born eight years after the war's end. According to Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "When the Civil War came to its bloody end, the white people of the Confederacy felt the shame of defeat, a sense of profound hopelessness, and a fear of the future" (230). Reconstruction measures established Union martial law in the South; these measures required the rewriting of state constitutions to accommodate the changed legal status of African Americans, attempted to broaden the bases of public education, and encouraged economic recovery. But, as Joseph M. Flora has written, in the South this "Reconstruction history was readily subsumed under the myth of Reconstruction that portrayed Reconstruction efforts as totally wrong and resulting in state governments . . . composed of Negroes ill-prepared for office, 'carpetbaggers,' . . . and 'scalawags'" (727). Southern historians William J. Cooper and Thomas E. Terrill add that white "Southerners came to view Reconstruction as a Tragic Era" and "salved wounds of defeat and feelings of massive wrong with this and other legends: the Lost Cause . . . the Old South" (383, 389). As a child in a postwar white Southern family, Cather was the particular target of this mythology; if it was to survive (as it did), children of her generation would need to absorb and perpetuate it. Many Southerners—particularly women—organized to combat the "intrusions" of Reconstruction with educational projects aimed specifically at white children (Clinton 182-84). And, as a female relative of men who had fought for the Confederacy, Cather inherited the obligation to memorialize them (as she did in her poem "The Namesake") and the cause for which they fought—another postwar women's project that was especially prominent in Virginia, where there are 223 Confederate memorials, more than in any other state.

Frederick County had suffered severely in the war. It was considered "mandatory for the Confederacy to hold this region that . . . was bountifully productive of . . . wheat, beef, leather, horses, cloth—but also was strategically placed and shielded by the Blue Ridge so that a Confederate Army in Winchester and the northern [Shenandoah] Valley would always threaten not only Washington but also Maryland and Pennsylvania" (Colt 8). Thus the county's major town, Winchester (only eleven miles west of the Cathers' home in Back Creek Valley), "from the summer of 1861 through the fall of 1864 . . . knew the occupation or threatening proximity of one army or the other." No other town of this size saw so much action during those four years (Colt 8-9). Although many Frederick Countians had been Union sympathizers at the war's beginning, by its end, "the majority of citizens were firmly aligned with the South, primarily because of the harsh treatment they had received from Union troops" (Kalbian 73). After Appomattox, Frederick County's Confederate soldiers "came home to a wasteland—no trees, no fences, no barns, no mills. . . . A great many people had invested their all—what was not in the ravaged land—in Confederate money and bonds. There was no remaining capital to fuel new enterprises" (Colt 19).

In this climate the noncombatant, Unionist Cathers fared better than many of their neighbors. Their home, Willow Shade, was not significantly damaged, and they had not lost sons or property or suffered severe financial reverses during the war, as many of their neighbors had. After the war, Cather's grandfather, William Cather, was appointed sheriff by the occupying Union troops; he hired his own sons and nephew as deputies, and the family remained financially stable. There are persistent rumors that this good luck was resented in Back Creek Valley. In 1872 members of the William Cather family began to emigrate to Nebraska, seeking better crops, financial opportunity, and a healthier climate for daughters who suffered from tuberculosis. Cather's young parents, Charles and Mary Virginia, along with Grandma Boak, remained in Frederick County and ran the profitable family sheep farm at Willow Shade—until 1883, when their sheep barn burned (there were rumors of arson). Within a few weeks, the family moved to Nebraska; Cather was nine years old. As recently as 1952 a Frederick County woman claimed that the Charles Cather family "left this country and moved to Red Cloud because of some mean low down gossip" (Hannum)—possibly suggesting that Reconstruction tensions spurred their removal.

During Cather's childhood in Frederick County, so recently embattled, among persons who had experienced the conditions of war at close hand, stories of the war and the circumstances that preceded it were a cultural staple. And in the Cather household, most of the storytellers appear to have been women. Mary Virginia Boak told stories of her Confederate brothers, particularly the dead one. Marjorie Anderson, the family servant in both Virginia and Nebraska, had several brothers in the Confederate army; she is evoked as Mahailey, a teller of Virginia war tales, in One of Ours (Lewis 11-12). A favorite great-aunt, Sidney Cather Gore, prototype for the abolitionist Mrs. Bywaters in Sapphira, hid soldiers from both armies in her "rambling garrets" (Sapphira 274); Cather surely heard such stories from her, as well as from both her grandmothers. In a 1969 interview, Cather's Red Cloud friend Carrie Miner Sherwood—then almost one hundred years old—recalled the stories told by Rachel Boak, who died in 1893:

We were just as fond of Grandmother Boak, Willie's maternal grandmother, as the Cathers were. She was a little Southern lady who had lived through the war. She held us spellbound with first-hand accounts of the Civil War. As I remember it [incorrectly], she had sons in both armies.

We loved to have her tell and retell about the time the soldiers took possession of their home near Shenandoah [sic], Virginia. And how, at night, she would go with supplies for the boys to the Confederate camp, and the following night take supplies to the Union camp. (Hoover 150)

In a letter to a friend at the time of Sapphira's publication, Cather also said that the stories told by her Grandmother Boak and by "Aunt Till," a former slave who had belonged to Rachel Boak's parents, provided her understanding of antebellum Back Creek Valley (Cather to Dorothy Canfield Fisher).

So it seems apparent that much of the material for Cather's Civil War novel was a product of the Reconstruction years and those that immediately followed and the patterns of storytelling—both private and published—that those years produced. One of the earliest and most successful of Southern writers from those years was a Shenandoah Valley veteran and novelist, John Esten Cooke, whom Cather's parents presumably admired: his books were in their library, and they named one of their sons John Esten Cather. Cooke wrote from a romantic Confederate perspective, celebrating such Shenandoah Valley heroes as Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby, and he developed a national audience. According to Blight, "Combining literary ambition with a genteel Lost Cause outlook, Cooke demonstrated that some soldiers were ready early to refashion war memories into cultural and political dividends" (157)—dividends such as Cather celebrated in Hartwell's Civil War sculpture. By the 1880s, Blight argues, "reconciliation" was the desired theme of Civil War literature for both Southern and Northern readers. "The war was drained of evil, and to a great extent, of cause or political meaning." For the most part, "the ideological character of the war, especially the reality of emancipation, had faded from American literature." Such a literature denied "that the war and its aftermath were all about race" (215, 217, 221). Even such a masterly psychological study of the war as Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) shared this ideological emptiness—as did Hartwell's The Color Sergeant.

Coming of age in the late nineteenth century as an artist, and as an artist who might write about the Civil War, Cather must have been bombarded with conflicting precedents. From Rachel Boak and "Aunt Till," she heard of the "slave girl" Nancy's cruel harassment and difficult escape—as well as Till's hagiographic tales (very much in the romantic "faithful slave" mode) of the "Master" and "Mistress" who owned Nancy and Till herself. Were the postwar years—when Nancy memorably returned to Back Creek Valley for a reconciliatory visit—a period of calm and reunion, or of angry tensions that may have helped to precipitated the Cathers' departure for Nebraska? "Lost Cause" ideology would have pushed Cather to memorialize Southern heroics, as epitomized in the soldier-uncle of her poem, while the national market for benign "reconciliation" would have enjoined her to drain ideology—and particularly issues of race—from Civil War art. No wonder that, after the publication of her two versions of "The Namesake," Cather eschewed the Civil War for thirty years!

When Cather began to write Sapphira, she was sixty-three and an established major "player" in the game of American letters. At that point she was more than ready to set her own priorities. Perhaps the most striking feature of her 1940 Civil War novel is that it contradicts most of the precedents that might have constrained her in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The major portion of the novel, set in 1856, foreshadows the coming war in Sapphira and Henry Colbert's slaveholding household. As Henry agonizes over whether slavery is morally (and religiously) justifiable and whether his marriage vows obligate him to keep his wife's human property enslaved, the invalid Sapphira becomes jealous of her husband's obvious attachment to the innocent "slave girl" Nancy and invites a sexually predatory nephew, Martin, for a long visit, with the apparent hope that he will rape Nancy. Meanwhile, Sapphira and Henry's adult daughter, Rachel, who has opposed slaveholding since her childhood, decides (with the help of local Quaker connections to the Underground Railroad) to help the terrified Nancy escape to Canada. Nancy leaves without saying a word about her intentions to her own mother, Till (Sapphira's most trusted slave), or to anyone else in the slave community, and proud Till is reduced to surreptitiously asking Rachel about her own daughter's welfare. Surmising Rachel's aid to Nancy, Sapphira cuts off relations with her daughter. They are partially, formally reconciled only when Rachel loses one of her young daughters to diphtheria and Sapphira is so ill that she needs her daughter's constant attendance. The minute Sapphira dies, Henry frees all her slaves (he had offered to free his capable assistant, Sampson, earlier, and Sampson refused the offer, preferring the security of his life as a slave).

In this trenchant plot, Cather shows how the institution of slavery blights white and black family and marital relations, invoking the sexual anger of white women who observed or suspected white men's sexual relations with slave women and resultant mulatto children, like Nancy, as well as the family splits that were exacerbated by the war, especially in border regions like the northern Virginia county where Cather's family lived, and economic conflict between slaves and poor white laborers. As Tomas Pollard has shown, the political events of the 1850s that culminated in war in 1861 are very much a presence in this novel (38-45). The text invokes the "severe Fugitive Slave Law" of 1850; "Its very injustice had created new sympathizers for fugitives, and opened new avenues of escape," facilitating Nancy's departure (222). In addition, Horace Greeley's abolitionist New York Tribune, which Mrs. Bywaters subscribes to and shares with her friend Rachel, is an important presence in the book. However, slavery is never openly debated in Sapphira; instead, it is a silencing, isolating force, muffling the rapport between Rachel and her father and preventing a loving understanding between Nancy and Till, to mention only two examples. When the novel was published, Cather wrote to her old (and Southern) friend Viola Roseboro' that she had wanted to explore something "Terrible" in her book, an estranging force beneath the surfaces (often pleasant) of domestic life. Sapphira makes it very clear that a rending conflict is coming and that the issue of slavery, grounded in race, will be at its center. The war is not "drained of evil"; instead, the "Terrible" presence of evils grounded in slavery blights, at least partially, almost every relationship in the book.

Cather's actual picture of the Civil War years is folded into the novel's epilogue. This picture does not emphasize local and family military heroes, such as the "Namesake" uncles. Nancy's nemesis, Martin Colbert, was a Confederate casualty. Rachel Blake reports of her cousin, "He'd got to be a captain in the cavalry, and the Colberts made a great to-do about him after he was dead, and put up a monument. But I reckon the neighbourhood was relieved" (290). Heroic trappings—rank and monument—do not obliterate Martin's local reputation as a lazy, predatory rake, and Martin is not mourned by his Southern neighbors.

The story of another Confederate casualty, a Back Creek Valley boy, emphasizes his pitiful suffering, not heroism: When Willie Gordon, a Rebel boy from Hayfield, was wounded in the Battle of Bull Run, it was [antislavery] Mr. Cartmell, Mrs. Bywaters's father, who went after him in his hay-wagon, got through the Federal lines, and brought him home. While the boy lay dying from gangrene in a shattered leg, . . . the Hayfield people, regardless of political differences, came in relays, night and day, and did the only thing that relieved his pain a little: they carried cold water from the springhouse and with a tin cup poured it steadily over his leg for hours at a time. (274) The character of Mr. Cartmell, who brings the wounded soldier home, is based on Cather's great-grandfather James Cather, and the story of his neighborly act of kindness was probably a family tale. In addition, some of Frederick County's local Civil War historians believe that Willie Gordon was probably based on the Boak family war casualty, James William ("Willie") Boak. The name "Willie," with its strong personal and family ties, would have been a significant choice for Cather, and possibly a private signal of kinship to this character, who died a few days after Second Manassas, as her uncle had. In One of Ours, Mahailey (whose prototype was Marjorie Anderson) tells a similar story of one her Confederate brothers, whom she says her mother brought home from Bull Run in a wagon to die "by inches" of gangrene in just the same way (1107-08). Cather seldom repeated incidents so closely in her fiction; the two publications of this sad little tale of a Civil War casualty suggest that it had made a powerful impression on her, perhaps because she heard it frequently as a child.

Sapphira's one gesture toward full-scale glorification of (Confederate) war heroism also occurs in the epilogue. It is the account of "young Turner Ashby of [neighboring] Fauquier County, who held the Confederate line from Berkeley Springs to Harpers Ferry,—so near home that word of his brilliant cavalry exploits came out to Back Creek with the stage-driver" (275). Brigadier General Ashby was admired, Cather writes, by both Union and Confederate supporters, and he became Frederick County's most-venerated war hero; the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy is named for him. Addressing her 1940 readers, Cather adds that Ashby died leading a "victorious charge," on June 6, 1862, and that "Even today, if you should be motoring through Winchester on the sixth of June, and should stop to see the Confederate cemetery, you would probably find fresh flowers on Ashby's grave [an elaborate monument erected by 'The ladies of Winchester' in 1881]. He was all that the old-time Virginians admired: Like Paris handsome and like Hector brave. And he died young. 'Shortlived and glorious,' the old Virginians used to say" (275). In this passage, Cather subtly acknowledges her close knowledge of Frederick County's Civil War mythology. In Winchester, Confederate Memorial Day is celebrated on the anniversary of Turner Ashby's death—to this day, Ashby's grave is indeed decorated with flowers on this date, and all the cemetery's surrounding graves, including the nearby grave of J.W. Boak, are marked with Confederate flags (see fig. 3). Addressing her present-day (1940) readers who may be indulging in the new pastime of Civil War automobile tourism, Cather repeats the florid language that glorified Ashby's war exploits, but she discreetly distances herself from that language, attributing it to "the old-time Virginians." She acknowledges Americans' continued interest in the mythology of Civil War heroism (as had recently been amply demonstrated by public enthusiasm for the book and film version of Gone with the Wind), and, in the mode of much post-Reconstruction Civil War fiction, she makes

Female heroism, however, is more explicitly celebrated—or at least noted—in the novel. What we know of the Virginia stories of the war years that were told in the Cather/Boak family suggests that they provided some precedents and models for daring female behavior. Carrie Miner Sherwood's memories of Grandmother Boak's tales to her grandchildren emphasize Rachel Boak's audacious nighttime forays into the camps of both armies to nurture hungry soldiers. And Sidney Cather Gore kept voluminous journals during the war years that chronicle her tireless efforts to provide food, spiritual guidance, and medical care for both Union and Confederate troops, at her home and at the hospitals in Winchester and nearby, as well as her anguished efforts to reconcile her Union political principles with her warm sympathy for the suffering of Confederate neighbors. In 1923 Sidney Gore's youngest son, James Howard Gore, edited and published his mother's journals, and since Cather regularly visited and corresponded with this cousin, it seems likely that she would have read his edition of Sidney Gore's journals, as well as hearing stories from her aunt (with whom she stayed on her first return visit to Virginia in 1896). In Sapphira, both Rachel Boak and Sidney Gore, as Rachel Blake and Mrs. Bywaters, act on their antislavery principles in ways that are audacious and dangerous, as Rachel engineers her mother's slave's escape from slavery and Mrs. Bywaters openly subscribes to an abolitionist newspaper and then hides fugitive Confederate soldiers in her house. They are models of active heroism that is not "drained of ideology." And, as I'll argue later in this essay, there are heroic elements in Nancy's story as well: her return was a "thrilling" story of personal achievement that Cather remembered throughout her life. These women characters in Sapphira offer alternative conceptions of what a "war hero" might be. Beyond the generic monument and "great to-do" that memorialized Martin Colbert, they suggest a heroism of principled activism that addresses the core issues of the Civil War instead of ignoring them.

The writing of Sapphira had a double purpose for Cather. First, it allowed her to plumb the Terrible as it was grounded in her own family's Virginia history and in the domestic and local life that she experienced at Willow Shade in her own early years. Thus, as I've said, the book does confront, in many ways, the central issues for which the war was fought, particularly slavery. In fact, as several critics have observed, Sapphira is the most politically confrontational of Cather's novels. But Cather also wrote this novel for solace and escape. The late 1930s were the worst period of her life, she told friends. Her favorite brother, Douglass, died in June 1938—her first loss of a sibling. A few months later, the great romance of her life, Isabelle McClung Hambourg, also died. In addition, Cather was distraught over the news of the developing war in Europe, where she had many friends.Work on Sapphira was a solace, she said, and she wrote much more material than she could use, simply for the relief of writing about her nineteenth-century Virginia home. Thus Sapphira is, in many ways, a novel of war and loss written to escape war and loss.

This is evident in the sometimes contradictory picture of war and Reconstruction that emerges from the epilogue. Cather acknowledges little antagonism among Frederick Countians: "The war made few enmities in the country neighbourhoods," she writes (274), an assertion that seems at least partially to contradict her own family history. The pervasive postwar "shame of defeat" and "profound hopelessness" described by a later historian, Wyatt-Brown, are absent from Cather's account of the returning Frederick County "Rebel" soldiers; they "were tired, discouraged, but not humiliated or embittered by failure. The country people accepted the defeat of the Confederacy with dignity, as they accepted death when it came to their families. Defeat was not new to these men"—they were farmers, and accustomed to crop failures (276). The "lost cause" is subsumed in the ongoing (and perhaps comforting) rhythms of nature and agriculture. In the novel, unlike Southern mythology of Reconstruction horrors, there are almost no appearances by carpetbaggers, scalawags, or other demonized figures—"Mrs. Bywaters was still the postmistress. She had not been removed in the 'carpetbag' period, when so many questionable Government appointments were made" (274). The postwar changes seem mostly positive, and Old South traditions don't appear to hamper young adults of Cather's parents' generation: "This new generation was gayer and more carefree than their forebears, perhaps because they had fewer traditions to live up to" (277).One of those abandoned traditions would have been slavery, of course; anxiety about slaveholding was a major reason why Rachel Blake and Henry Colbert ("forebears" of Cather's mother) were seldom gay and carefree before the war.

The centerpiece of the epilogue, of course, is "Nancy's Return," seen through the eyes of Cather as a child of five. Nancy left Frederick County in secret defiance of Virginia and U.S. law, as an abused and terrified slave girl. Cather's text suggests an almost causal relation between Nancy's escape and the Civil War, "which came on so soon after Nancy ran away" (273). Nancy returns, around 1881, as a self-possessed, prosperous Canadian woman, a legendary hero in young Cather's household. "Well, Nancy child, you've made us right proud of you," Cather's grandmother Rachel says (283). Openly visiting her mother, Till, and the descendants of her former owner, Nancy is evidence of all that the Civil War has made possible. In fact, she is a triumph of personal reconstruction. Having remade herself as a Northern woman with fashionable clothes, British-accented speech, a secure job, and a mixed-race marriage and family, she can now return to claim the best resources of her Southern childhood. For young Cather, Nancy is an important first acquaintance with a successful urban woman who can move from region to region and still retain her selfhood. Indeed, Nancy may be seen in this autobiographical narrative as one of young Cather's first models for her own peripatetic, multi-regional life in the post-Reconstruction United States. Yet, at the same time, little Willa betrays the marks of her postbellum conditioning as an heir of the Confederacy: she is suspicious of Nancy's precise Northern speech and prefers the "shade of deference" in Nancy's voice "when she addressed my mother"—the granddaughter of Nancy's owner (284). The child entirely approves of her family's hospitality to Nancy and Till: after the white Cathers have eaten, the black visitors are served at a segregated second table. Intentionally or not, Cather's picture of "Nancy's Return" shows us both the changed possibilities that had opened up for African Americans after the war and the constraints that still existed, especially in the South—and that were taking legal shape in Jim Crow laws.

The epilogue's picture of other African Americans after the war contrasts even more vividly with the rather calm and placid view of the Reconstruction years that Cather constructs. Some work for the families that formerly owned them; Cather's father employs some of Sapphira's former slaves. One mill worker, Sampson ("Master's steadiest man" [288]), has made a successful life for himself and his family in Pennsylvania, but he is homesick for the grist mill where he was a slave and for Virginia cooking. He tells Till, "I ain't had no real bread since I went away." Where he works, "the machines runs so fast an' gits so hot, an' burns all the taste out-a the flour" (289). Sampson's story suggests that even the ablest of former slaves may be displaced and unhappy outside the Old South, where they must contend with the facts of industrialization.

Even worse is the tale of another freed slave, "Tap, the jolly mill boy . . . whom everybody liked." People said he hadn't been able to stand his freedom. He went to town . . . and picked up various jobs. . . . Early in the Reconstruction time a low German from Pennsylvania opened a saloon and pool hall in Winchester, a dive where negroes were allowed to play, and gambling went on. One night after Tap had been drinking too much, he struck another darky on the head with a billiard cue and killed him. (290) Tap was hanged for this crime, despite local white farmers' testimony to his "good character." "Mrs. Blake and Till always said it was a Yankee jury that hanged him; a Southern jury would have known there was no real bad in Tap" (290).

The implications of this story, corroborated by the two old women, white and black, who were young Cather's major early teachers, are the most appalling of Southern Reconstruction-era dogma: a "low" outsider—a carpetbagger Northerner and immigrant— has created a dangerous public space where the races mix, and when Tap impulsively kills "another darky" there, "no real bad" has been done, according to the native white men of the neighborhood. Tap's story expresses the postwar Southern ideology summarized by Eric J. Sundquist: "Emancipation, it was argued, had ushered in an age of childlike loss of direction, mental and physical decline, and a propensity for violence on the part of blacks" (336).

The most complex portrayal of an African American in Cather's epilogue is Till. Matilda Jefferson, the prototype for Till, had been a slave in the household of Jacob and Ruhamah Seibert and remained there, after emancipation, until Ruhamah's death in 1873. Thereafter, from the evidence of Cather's letters and the epilogue, she lived on in the cabin that had been her slave dwelling and often visited or worked in Cather's parents' household. In the 1856 portion of Sapphira, Till is Sapphira's housekeeper and personal slave. She is an austere and taciturn figure who appears estranged from the slave community. Her strongest attachments are to white women: the English housekeeper who trained her and her mistress, Sapphira. She never tells stories, not even to her daughter, Nancy.

But the Till of the epilogue is in many ways transformed into a typical figure from postbellum literature. As an erect, "spare, neat little old darky" (280), Till is a physical refusal of the buxom, maternal "mammy" stereotype so popular in postwar fictions of the Old South. But in other ways, she replicates that type: as a lovingly remembered member of Cather's Virginia household, she is a benign presence, tenderly solicitous of the white child's every desire—such as little Willa's wish to witness the reunion of Nancy and Till—even when it inconveniences herself and her own child, Nancy.

Such solicitude is tellingly reminiscent of one of the best-known post-Reconstruction Southern storytellers, Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus. Blight says that Harris's first Uncle Remus book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (the best-selling American book of 1880), "may have set the literary tone for the reconciliationist eighties" (228). Cather's family apparently shared in the national enthusiasm for Uncle Remus; in "Old Mrs. Harris," Mr. Templeton, a character based on Cather's father, tells an Uncle Remus tale to his receptive children. Uncle Remus's rapt and indulged listener is, like the young Willa of the epilogue, a white child, the descendant of Remus's former owners. Remus also puts himself at the child's disposal, and, just as Till invokes her mistress "Miss Sapphy," Remus's ultimate authority is the antebellum "ole Miss." The little boy's family encourages his visits to Uncle Remus's cabin; Willa's parents leave her at Till's former slave cabin to "hear the old stories." According to Robert Hemenway, "The Uncle Remus stories create a racial utopia. . . . Uncle Remus's cabin constitutes one of the most secure and serene environments in American literature, . . . and Uncle Remus reassured Southern whites . . . [that]free black people would love, not demand retribution" (19-20). Till's cabin is a similarly protected space, and Till's stories about her master and mistress are full of lovingly remembered detail and respect for her owners; she never speaks a word to young Willa that might be interpreted as criticism of the institution of slavery as she experienced it.

Cather makes Till's evaluation of Sapphira the ending of her epilogue. Till recounts Sapphira's brave, solitary death from heart disease, in her parlor, as a triumph of whiteness and of class: the "fine folks" of Sapphira's privileged girlhood on a Loudoun County plantation came for her, "and she went away with them" (294). Till concludes that Sapphira should have never left her original antebellum home for the more volatile border territory of Frederick County, where there was no settled social and economic hierarchy and "nobody was anybody much" (295). In other words, Till defends (at least for her mistress) the seemingly fixed world of a prosperous antebellum plantation, a world that is (unlike the 1856 Back Creek of the novel's major action) untouched by the tensions that will erupt in the Civil War.

According to Blight, in the Uncle Remus stories, "Harris's achievement was to create a world where on the one hand the Civil War never really needed to have happened, but on the other, all the deception, cunning, and bare-bones competition the underdogs of life could muster was necessary for their very survival" (228-29). In Uncle Remus's tales, of course, the wily trickster Brer Rabbit epitomizes the survival strategies employed by economic "underdogs," particularly slaves. In Sapphira, Till's stories to little Willa also evoke an antebellum world where therewas no necessity for a Civil War, and Till conspires with Willa's grandmother to ensure that the child remains ignorant of "deception, cunning" and desperate survival strategies. For example, when the name of Martin Colbert comes up in the child's hearing, Rachel Blake gives Nancy and Till a glance "that meant it was a forbidden subject" (290), and the little girl hears nothing of Sapphira's animosity to her slave girl, Martin's relentless pursuit, and Nancy's desperate strategies to evade him. The doubleness of the Uncle Remus stories, Blight says, epitomizes the reconciliationist agenda of the 1880s. Perhaps it is not surprising that Sapphira shows a similar duplicity, since it is grounded in the stories Cather first heard in Reconstruction Virginia.

Of those stories, Cather says in her epilogue, "I soon learned that it was best never to interrupt with questions,—it seemed to break the spell. Nancy [during her visit] wanted to know what had happened during the war, and what had become of everybody,—and so did I" (288). Sapphira does not fully tell us the story of "what happened during the war" in Cather's ancestral Virginia. But it does give us a powerful sense of why the war happened and of "what had become of everybody"—how lives of white and black Virginians were forever changed. To piece together that story from the censored memories of white and black elders, like Till and Rachel Blake, demanded intense and strategic listening on the part of young Cather (as well as the research and reflection of the mature novelist). Till's stories also required close attention to nuances of tone and to "hints that she dropped unconsciously" (292). Looking and listening to all that was said and not said, the child must have received her first lessons in the telling of stories about the Civil War and the years before and after and all of the rigors and restrictions that accompanied such stories.

Cather was sixty-seven—the approximate age of her Grandmother Boak and "Aunt Till" in the epilogue—when Sapphira was published. Clearly, the popular priorities of youthful male heroism and nationalist art that she had explored in the two versions of "The Namesake," her first efforts to write out of her own Civil War history, no longer engaged her. But the priorities of "race and blood and kindred" still did. In her last novel she takes her place among the family women, telling the stories of the "what had happened during the war, and what had become of everybody." And, although Till appears to have the (evasive) last word, in the novel's famous final note, printed on the last page after "the end", and signed by the present-day novelist, WILLA CATHER, (in capitals slightly larger than "the end"), Cather foregrounds her own memories, through her use of "Frederick County surnames," which she heard from her parents in early childhood. "The names of those unknown persons sometimes had a lively fascination for me," she says (295)—and some of them have been incorporated into the novel. I read this idiosyncratic note as Cather's reminder to us that this is her material, and she is the surviving storyteller now. Sapphira and the Slave Girl is, among many other things, Cather's Civil War story. In it, she acknowledges her personal history and that of her community and nation and reminds us of how difficult and freighted a process the telling of Civil War stories (still) is.

Recent harvests in American history and letters have yielded an almost universal acknowledgement: the pioneer myth of the American West has been cultivated in a soil broken and furrowed by the colonizing impulse of empire. Each narrative of western settlement is rooted in a "legacy of conquest" (Limerick) informing the text, and exposing this legacy demands recovering lost texts and rereading familiar works within their ideological contexts. Nowhere is this challenge more complex—or more rewarding—than in reading Willa Cather, a writer simultaneously celebrated for her depiction of pioneers and respected for her historical authenticity. The bounty from this garden has been sampled often in the last decade and a half. Mike Fischer has unearthed the "burden of imperialism" in Cather's pioneer texts; Joseph Urgo has considered Cather's acceptance of America's imperial stance; and Deborah Karush has discussed the "nostalgic vision" with which Cather viewed the frontier. These studies demonstrate the veracity and continuing vitality of Guy Reynolds's assertion that "Cather's novels fictionalize the transfer of European empires to America and the subsequent growth of American empire" (46). My trespass into this field attempts to reveal how Cather's most enduring pioneer text—My Ántonia—reconciles the insular conception of the nineteenth-century United States with the post-Spanish-American War reality, reflecting America's transition from continental to global power. I argue in particular that with the Great War as its immediate subtext, this novel reaches back to the closing years of the American frontier and the influx of European immigrants to the Plains states, projecting an image of the nation and legitimizing its status as "European" power.

The original introduction (1918) to My Ántonia is an intricate frame for what some critics regard as a simple country novel. Like the openings to Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, it operates as a narrative of transmission establishing a fictionalized origin for the text. The most obvious effect of the introduction is the distance it establishes between Cather and her story. In the opening pages, an unnamed female narrator credits Jim Burden, a childhood acquaintance, for writing the tale. By making Jim "legal counsel for one of the great Western railways" (x), Cather complicates his perspective through its association to the controversial role the railroad played in Indian-white relations, western settlement patterns, and resource exploitation.

The introduction situates the production of Jim's manuscript in the immediate present (1916-18), synchronous to the novel's actual composition. As the dates of its composition suggest, My Ántonia is a highly charged exercise of political memory. Written as the First World War ravaged Europe and cast as the reminiscence of middle-aged Jim Burden, it is a "prehistory" reconstructing the 1880s and early 1890s from the verge of America's entrance into the Great War. Cather further complicates the account by making its teller a rural Nebraskan turned successful New York attorney and infusing the memory of his prairie childhood with a wholehearted acceptance of progress (the Yankee credo) and a fair share of romantic yearning: As for Jim, no disappointments have been severe enough to chill his naturally romantic and ardent disposition. This disposition, though it often made him seem very funny when he was a boy, has been one of the strongest elements in his success. He loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches. His faith in it and his knowledge of it have played an important part in its development. He is always able to raise capital for new enterprises in Wyoming or Montana, and has helped young men out there to do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil. If a young man with an idea can once get Jim Burden's attention, can manage to accompany him when he goes off into the wilds hunting for lost parks or exploring new canyons, then the money which means action is usually forthcoming. Jim is still able to lose himself in those big Western dreams. (xi)

The speaker in the introduction claims that Jim "loves with a personal passion the great country through which his railway runs and branches," yet his infatuation for this territory is clearly an obsession to exploit its resources for material gain like the despicable Wick Cutter of My Ántonia and other characters appearing in Cather's oeuvre (e.g., Bayliss Wheeler in One of Ours and Ivy Peters in A Lost Lady). While described as one who loves exploring "lost parks" or "new canyons," Jim appreciates these marvels with a mercenary eye like the Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1510-54), who figures so prominently in his adolescent figuration of Nebraska. Notwithstanding the "naturally romantic" character attributed to James Quayle Burden, the "big Western dreams" in which he loses himself equal not innocent adventure but economic conquest: raising capital for ventures that "do remarkable things in mines and timber and oil." Like Coronado's famed 1540-41 expedition from New Spain to present-day Kansas in search of the legendary Seven Cities of Gold, Jim's frequent travels to the West are speculative in nature and rooted in colonialism.

Cather plants U.S. expansionism squarely in Jim's retrospective, which allegorizes America's displacement of the Plains Indians and the Spanish Empire. Although they do not figure explicitly in the novel, the history and culture of the Plains Indians form a palimpsest occasionally—and tellingly—exposed in the text, especially when considering the impact federal policies like the 1862 Homestead and Pacific Railroad acts and the 1887 Dawes Act had upon the original inhabitants of Nebraska. Equally significant are suggestive allusions in the novel to Spain's presence in North America. Such rhetoric and imagery hints to America's wresting the mantle of empire from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War and suggest that, in addition to absorbing Spain's colonial holdings in the Caribbean and Pacific, the United States has inherited Spanish obligations in Europe. In other words, within the pastoral and nostalgic account ascribed to Jim, Cather traces the United States' cultural heritage and its rise to global power—a genealogy suggesting that America has a duty, as de facto European state, to participate in the Great War.

"The splendid little war" is the phrase Secretary of State John Hay used to refer to the altercation with Spain occurring during his term of office. Since then the name and the war have both undergone reappraisal. In 1996 historian Thomas G. Paterson writes of "the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War" and another more recent revisionist historian, Louis A. Perez Jr., prefers to discuss the just as inclusive but less cumbersome appellation of "War of 1898." For U.S. combatants and the nation that sent them, this conflict was known simply—and perhaps imperialistically— as the Spanish-American War. From a perspective of a century later, the war appears to be a brief rehearsal for conflicts to come. In the Spanish-American War, four thousand U.S. military personnel lost their lives: four hundred in combat and thirty-six hundred to infections, disease, food contamination, and unsafe, unsanitary health conditions. Another four thousand American troops died during the Philippine insurrection that began as a direct result of the official Treaty of Paris signed December 10, 1898. In the Philippines Americans really fought two separate wars. After the treaty in which Spain ceded the Philippine Islands to the United States, U.S. forces found themselves fighting the Filipino forces of their previous ally—rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo—who had been so instrumental in defeating Spain only months earlier.

The Spanish-American War was in many ways a modern war, with several innovations that changed the battlefield forever. A hot air balloon was used for reconnaissance before the battles of San Juan Heights and San Juan Hill; for the first time film footage recorded action on ships and in land battles; Gatling guns peppered approaching forces. Yet it was also the last of the old battle styles as well. Cavalry was central to combat, but horses were more decorative than strategic in the great wars to come in the twentieth century (Lynch interview).

War came to Webster County, Nebraska, in the spring of 1898, and young men left farms to scatter as far away as Cuba and the Philippines in answer to the call for volunteers. Grosvenor (G. P.) Cather was a fifteen-year-old farm boy when the Spanish-American War broke out. He and his twelve-year-old twin brothers, Frank and Oscar, kept up a correspondence with three young men from their community who joined the Nebraska Volunteer Infantry. Two of the men were sent to Florida and Cuba and one to the Philippines; the letters they wrote back home to the teenaged sons of George P. Cather helped shape the boys' expectations of battle scenes on land and sea.

In terms of military history, the small cache of letters is unremarkable. The three men writing are enlisted men, not the decision makers that military historians traditionally chronicle. The men rarely hold a vantage point on the battlefield; instead they write of everyday life at stateside camps, on troopships, or in foreign camps. As for news of the war, they rarely have more than rumors to pass on. The anonymity of the source of news about the war efforts, however, brings home universal complaints of any enlisted man in any war. He is a player on a game board—at best moved by some shrewd officers into strategic locations and put into a position of affecting the outcome of the wargame, at worst a forgotten game piece stacked beside the board, to be held in abeyance until some turn of events forces his participation. Perhaps he will not have a significant part to play at all, he fears.

Willa Cather was only twenty-five and writing with the Pittsburgh Leader for the few months of the war in 1898. Among her other responsibilities, she handled war dispatches from Cuba (Stout 53). Her job kept war news before her, and she was probably speaking from personal experience when she wrote her friend Frances Gere that newspapers were puffing up the war news to create reader interest (qtd. in Woodress 94). As was her cousins' in Nebraska, Cather's role was vicarious, but it offered her—and them—"war experience" before the Lost Generation writers of the next war sailed for their European conflict. Twenty years later Cather's oldest cousin, G. P., would be Webster County's first casualty in the Great War. As reported in the Blue Hill (NE) Leader and reprinted in the Red Cloud (NE) Argus, "Lieutenant Cather was the first Webster County man to enter overseas service, the first one from the county to give up his life in the war against Prussianism and the first officer from Nebraska to fall on the western front in France" (Ray Collection, June 20, 1918). Cather's 1922 novel One of Ours would be a tribute to him and to all those who lost their lives. In a real sense, it would be a tribute to all who fought in the war and all who fought for what her hero fought for—personal freedom. Claude Wheeler has some of Cather's own longings in his persona—great hopes for the future, a desire to escape reminiscent of the Revolt from the Village school of the era, a love of France, and a sense of the stifling effects of family and home country on personal dreams.

Janis P. Stout discusses the parallels between Claude and Willa Cather in her biography of Cather (169-71). Even in the choice of a name for her protagonist, Cather aligns herself with Claude Wheeler by reversing her own initials. Claude is a self-conscious young man on the threshold of adulthood. He tries hard to be a face in the crowd, to be the son his parents want him to be, to marry the girl from a neighboring farm, and to live a life similar to those of family and friends around him. His hopes for such a world fall apart before the coming of World War I offers him a way out. Like a deus ex machina, war in Europe lifts him from the Nebraska plains, leaving home problems unresolved.

The prototype for Claude Wheeler, Cather's cousin G. P., greeted departure for the war with the same sense of release as did Claude. Fifteen years older than his fictional counterpart, however, G.P. knew more about war and the military. Meant to typify the thousands of young soldiers innocently leaving the farms for the excitement of military adventure, Claude is more like the youthful G.P. who received letters from soldiers in 1898 than he is to the thirty-five-year-old man who went off to war in 1917.

None of the letters written to the three soldiers by G.P. or his brothers survives; only the responses to questions asked or to information provided and advice offered in the soldiers' letters give us the images of three young men at home learning about the war and the manly activity of war. The three soldiers were all from Bladen, Nebraska, and the surrounding farmlands. Though they knew one another, the three were not close friends and kept track of one another in their travels more through information in letters from home than from crossing paths with one another.

Two of the three young men writing to the Cathers were farmhands who regularly worked for the boys' father. Unused to the niceties of letterwriting, their concerns are elemental: food, health, weather, news from home and about each other. Oley Iverson first writes from Camp Omaha, only a few hours by buggy from the farm where he grew up. Iverson's experiences in camp altered his views. For one, he had assumed that the big and brawny recruits are the most likely to pass the physical examinations for entrance into the regiment; instead, he writes, "It seems as if the largest and the stoutest men have more trouble passing than the little fellers have. There's lots of big stout looking [men] . . . rejected everyday. All the men that we thought was sure to pass in our company was rejected" (Ray Collection, July 11, 1898).

There was no rationing at stateside camps, according to Iverson's catalog: "Each man is allowed one pound of beef a day and bread, beans, potatoes, coffee and sugar and sometime we get tomatoes" (Ray Collection, July 18, 1898). After moving on to Jacksonville, Florida, he writes, "We have dried fruit three times a day—fresh meat once, plenty of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, rice and lots of good bread. It is true that it is not cooked as good as it might be, but we have no fancy cook stoves to cook on or it would be better. But when everything has to be cooked outdoor, it makes lots of difference" (Ray Collection, October 14, 1898).

The next exotic clime on Iverson's tour of duty is Savannah, Georgia. Writing October 29, 1898, he says Company I, Third Regiment of the Nebraska Volunteer Infantry are bivouacked "two miles southeast of town. The streetcars run out to the camp so it makes it quite handy when we want to go to town. I was down one day this week and took in the city. It's a nice place. It beats Grand Island [Nebraska] all to pieces. We are camped where the rebels were camped at the time when Sherman captured the city. There is still a lot of old breastwork left to mark the place. I like Georgia ever so much better than I did Florida" (Ray Collection).

A staunch Republican, as were the Cathers, Iverson mentions the most illustrious member of the regiment, Nebraska's favorite son, Col. William Jennings Bryan, who was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate against William McKinley for president in 1896. "I must tell you that I like Col. Bryan very much," he writes. "I think he is a mighty fine fellow. He is just as common as any of the boys" (Ray Collection, July 11, 1898). A week later he suggests facetiously that even Bryan might be changed by his war experiences: "Bryan is all right but his politics need fixing and we will have that fixed when we get back from war. I think he will be a Republican then" (Ray Collection, July 18, 1898).

H. C. Gress sticks with the unvarnished truth as he sees it in his first letter after arriving at Camp Cuba Libra, near Panama Park, Florida: "We left Omaha last Monday a week ago for Jacksonville, Florida, which we reached Friday morning at 8:00 o'clock. We had a long ride and a good time. We all like it pretty well here now, but we didn't like it at first. I like it fine. The Army is all right. I have good health. I feel better than I have felt in the last two years. It is awful hot down here though" (Ray Collection, July 27, 1898).

Gress spent the rest of his four months of service in Florida. In October he wrote to G.P. that he hadn't written because he was sick: "I am in the hospital now and I have been here two weeks today." No doubt largely because of his unspecified malady, Gress's view of the state of Florida had changed: "I don't like it in Florida very well. I would rather be in old Nebraska where I was raised. The climate agrees with my health better. Florida doesn't agree with my health at all but I guess I will have to stand it till they see fit to send me home. I hope it will be soon for I know if I get back to Nebraska I will be all right. I will get my health again" (Ray Collection, October 2, 1898).

Furloughed and discharged less than a month later, Gress was back in Bladen, Nebraska, in early November and wrote about his return to G. P., who had gone off to a junior college: "Everybody is husking corn and I hafto sit around and watch them. I am not able to work this fall. I don't expect I will be able to work any all fall. I get awful tired of sitting around doing nothing. I only wish I could get out and work." He ends with a sad lament of the world weary soldier: "Oh yes I received a letter from my old chum [Oley]. He said they was getting along fine now they are practicing shooting. I suppose they have a hot time alright—they can have all the fun they want to, but I have had my fun down there—all I care about anyhow" (Ray Collection, November 4, 1898).

The third correspondent, Bruce Payne, was a student from the university in Lincoln and a distant family member. He wrote G. P. from San Francisco telling him of the wonders to be experienced even in the far reaches of the United States: "My tentmates and I were over to the sea chasing waves and picking up shells," wonders indeed to a landlocked Nebraskan (Ray Collection, June 4, 1898). The troop transport crossing from Oakland to San Francisco (the Bay Bridge hadn't been built in 1898) is the Merino, which Payne describes as "the largest transport in the world." A hint of danger haunted the exotic, unfamiliar world, particularly since in a declared war, "the enemy" is identified: "There are many Spanish people living here in Frisco," Payne goes on. "We are careful about eating things that people give us. The people give us oranges, throw them at us, great large ones big as your two fists. They cost only 5 cts a dozen here." Golden Gate Park becomes an exotic wild animal preserve—"lions, buffalo, deer, elk, birds and many beautiful tropical flowers" as well as "a grizzly bear there that weighed over 1000 pounds." Such exotic sights could only make the young man receiving the letters envious. Seasickness, missed promotions, boredom, and waiting come up in subsequent letters, but the bright promise of exotic locales overwhelms such dull and vaguely prosaic topics.

Since he was the most educated of the three correspondents, Payne's letters are the most literate; they connect the exotic world with the known world of G.P. and his brothers: on the voyage to the Philippines, for instance, he saw a whale "as long as your barn is wide." Flying fish have wings that "look just like locust's wings." Miraculously, the Pacific Ocean is rendered in the images familiar to the Nebraska farm boys. In his second letter Payne takes G.P. on a tour of his troop ship, the USS Senator. Again, he emphasizes the gigantic proportions of the ship, with room for one thousand troops. "The bunks in the lower deck are not very pleasant places," he finally admits. "It is a pretty hard place to 'Remember the Maine' as one fellow put it" (June 21, 1898). The ironic reference to the most famous battle cry of the war takes on a double irony in terms of the stationery Payne uses (see fig. 1). The stars and stripes wave in color in the top left corner on both the envelope and page. Superimposed on the flag is the outline of a calling card printed by D Company, First Nebraska Infantry, United States Volunteers. The card reads, "Remember the Maine," a triumph of advertising and jingoism since the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor occurred February 15, 1898, less than four months before Payne's first letter.

Responding to questions from G.P. and his brothers, the correspondents describe their rifles: "You wanted to know what size my rifle was," writes Gress. "It is a 45 single shot Springfield. It is just a dandy" (Ray Collection, July 27, 1898). The Springfield was standard issue among state militia and was the oldest and least effective weapon in widespread use (Lynch interview). The young boys clearly want to hear more about guns and rifles, because Gress adds in a later letter: "No, we haven't done any shooting with our guns yet. We don't shoot with them when we drill." Not wanting to disappoint G.P. and his brothers, however, Gress adds all the excitement he can muster as he goes on: "The noncommissioned officers had a sham battle this morning. They had a hot time for a little while. One of our men got one of his teeth knocked out but didn't hurt him[self] very bad" (Ray Collection, August 13, 1898). R. B. Payne seems aware of the advantages and disadvantages of the rifles in use on both sides when he writes magisterially from Camp Dewey "near Manila": "The Spanish have the Mauser rifles. They repeat five times, and [are] not a deadly weapon as they fire small steel bullets. The Krag-Jogensen rifle which the regulars have shoots the same kind of a ball. They say that these balls will wound a man but [are] not likely to kill him, so it will take two men to carry off the wounded man whereas if he had been killed, no one would drop out to care for him. In this lies the advantage of the steel ball" (Ray Collection, August 8, 1898).

Payne does not go so far as to question the firepower of the rifles he and his fellow Nebraska volunteers have been issued, however:

In May 1899 in the Philippines—three months after the identity of "the enemy" had changed from the Spanish imperialists to the homegrown Philippine insurgents—Payne writes of an armed encounter with the enemy: "A tree back of our lines had 11 bullet holes in it up as high as a man and in all there were 26 bullet holes in the tree. It seemed a miracle that so few of us were killed. This pencil that I am writing with was taken from one of the dead enemy. I was the first man in the trenches so I got a Mauser there, could have got another but could not carry it. In this fight my best friend in the army was wounded. The colonel was killed" (Ray Collection, May 2, 1899).

Now the possessor of a Mauser, Payne brags: "A friend and I were up to the 1st Brigade firing line. We had some nice shooting there. I proved to him that a Mauser was better than a Krag- Jorgensen" (Ray Collection, May 2, 1898). The Mauser and the pencil are both war trophies.

The few skirmishes with "the enemy," the images of rifle fire, and the tales of battle make exciting reading back home. A closer look reveals the boredom, the loneliness, an awareness of lost opportunities— friends marrying, farms flourishing, holdings growing larger. No doubt the Cather boys were more interested in Philippine battle stories and the antics of the pet monkeys in camp than in R. B. Payne's decision to study Spanish to fill his time or the illnesses that plagued him and the bugs that attacked him in his bed. What would the three Cather boys have gleaned from Oley Iverson's adventure in Havana after the treaty?

On Thursday I and another feller went to Havana and we took a boat and went over to Mossy and Cabanas Castles and went all through them. The soldiers are not allowed to go there on account of the yellow fever. There are guards all around them but we got in anyway. . . . the small pox did not get started in the Third but a good [many] of the boys in the 161st Indiana Regiment have died with it. The Third Nebraska has been healthier since we arrived in Cuba than we were before. We have only lost two men: one of them was the man that I told you of that got drunk and the other one died from vaccination. (Ray Collection, February 28, 1899)

Iverson reports that even Col. Bryan "is sick a good share of the time." Iverson's loyalties to the Republican Party do not prevent him from defending the "Great Commoner" from a question assuming partisanship: "And you also wanted to know if he did any speaking to the boys about parties. He has not got a word to say about that on either side" (Ray Collection, October 21, 1898).

The three soldiers and their young correspondents back in Nebraska are all learning from the experience of war and that experience is valued highly. After the announcement of Willa Cather's Pulitzer Prize in 1923, Ernest Hemingway chastised the woman novelist for the audacity of writing a war novel without having firsthand experience of war: "Look at One of Ours. Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously. You were in the war weren't you? Wasn't that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation [Griffith 1915]. I identified episode after episode. Catherized. Poor woman she had to get her war experience somewhere" (letter to Edmund Wilson, November 23, 1923, qtd. in Baker 105).

Willa Cather used the letters her cousin G.P. sent home from France for a major source of the soldier's life sections of One of Ours (Ray Collection, G.P. Cather letters to wife, Myrtle, and parents, George P. and Frances Smith Cather, January 1916 to May 1918). She even used a senior officer's description of G. P.'s death— which was sent to his parents—in describing the death of her protagonist Claude Wheeler (Ray Collection, letter from M. Morris Andrews, July 5, 1918).

Indeed "she had to get her war experience somewhere," but her sources have more validity than Hemingway gives her credit for. She transcribed war dispatches in Pittsburgh while her cousins studied war in the letters of three Nebraskan volunteers. Such knowledge did not protect G.P. in "the Great War," but then protection is not what he sought. Many reviewers agree with Hemingway and accuse Willa Cather of glorifying war in her picture of Claude's heroic death. Such a reading ignores the final pages of the novel, in which Claude's mother "reads Claude's letters over again and reassures herself; for him the call was clear, the cause was glorious. Never a doubt stained his bright faith. She divines so much that he did not write. She knows what to read into those short flashes of enthusiasm; how fully he must have found his life before he could let himself go so far—he, who was so afraid of being fooled! He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with" (389-90).

If Claude is under the spell of the glamour of war, his mother is not. She has learned much from his letters. There was just as much information about the nature of any war to be gleaned by youthful G.P. and his brothers in their letters from the war zones. H. C. Gress, the first of this group to be mustered out said it best: "[T]hey can have all the fun they want to, but I have had my fun down there—all I care about anyhow" (Ray Collection, October 15, 1898).

In 1947 Willa Cather's fellow modernist Katherine Anne Porter—a writer of whom Cather left no signs of awareness but who was keenly aware of Cather—wrote an aggressively humorous essay about Gertrude Stein in which she characterized the "literary young" who gathered around Stein in Paris in the 1920s as children stranded "between two wars in a falling world." Porter's metaphoric adjective for the interwar period—"falling"—is evocative, if ambiguous, summoning echoes both of the "fallen" on the battlefield and of the "fall" from innocence in Eden, as well as the common phrase about the bottom dropping out from under one. Cather's metaphor for the postwar period (it could not yet be called interwar at the time she was writing) was, of course, a different one—a metaphor of brokenness. In the preface to Not Under Forty (1936) she famously declared that the world "broke in two" in 1922 "or thereabouts" (812).

Cather was scarcely alone in feeling this sense of rupture. The very year she alluded to (in so strangely evasive a way), 1922, was indeed the year of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with its insistent images of brokenness. Michael North and others have pointed out that brokenness was a metaphor invoked not only by Eliot but by many writers struggling, during the postwar years, to convey their sense of how thoroughly their lives and life in general had been disrupted. Europeans and Americans alike, perhaps people all around the world, were haunted by a feeling of having been severed from any intelligible past. They were haunted, that is, by the Great War —by a sense that, as Cather put it, the literary as well as geopolitical world had been so thoroughly sundered at the Marne or at Versailles that the present could no longer connect to the past. Many of them were troubled too by the sense that another war was impending. In that respect, Porter's metaphor, though unusual and elusive, is perhaps a richer and more satisfying one than Cather's. In using the progressive form "falling," rather than "fallen," she captured the sense of an ongoing process—as it most assuredly was. Cather's phrase "broke in two" implies, instead, a one-time event, an action already complete.

Writing in 1947, more than a decade after Cather affixed her preface to Not Under Forty, Porter (and everyone else) could easily see in retrospect that the years 1918 to 1939 were a time "between two wars." It was by then a self-evident historical fact. But she had already been foreseeing the second war and thus implicitly defining the 1920s and 1930s as a period between two wars as early as 1931. Several of Porter's letters written in that year, as well as on through the rest of the decade, show that she was seized by a troubled apprehension of what was ahead. Not that her sense of foreboding was terribly unusual. She herself said that "everyone" was talking about the likelihood of war—a characteristically hyberbolic statement but one verified, to some extent, when we note that John Dos Passos (to cite just one example) was equally prescient in his view of the international situation by 1931. Various characters in his momentous 1932 novel 1919 characterize the Treaty of Versailles as a false peace and expect a renewal of war. Such fears were well founded. Though neither Porter nor Dos Passos nor the many others apprehensive about a return of war could have known it, the Nazi leaders who were seizing power in Germany in 1931 and 1932 (Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933) fervently believed "the war did not end in 1918." To think it did, declared one, was "a laugh."

Cather made no such pronouncements on the Versailles Treaty (though she did indicate, during the Conference, that she wondered what Europeans thought of Woodrow Wilson). Nor, to my knowledge, did she make any such predictions of renewed war— except one, far in advance. In a letter of December 21, 1914, to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin and a correspondent who would regularly tie his own letters to the events of both the Great War and the next, she made a statement that is significant not so much as an indicator of some kind of uncanny prescience (though it is that and perhaps even more so than Porter's statements in the 1930s) but as a demonstration of her emotional involvement in the great calamity of the time. Here, of course, I must paraphrase, and thereby lose the emotional overtones of her language. At this early point in the war she wrote that not only was there no possibility of pleasantness in the world as long as the war went on, but she supposed that after some sort of cobbled together peace treaty at some point "they" would repeat the process in another twenty-five years. Twenty-five years from 1914 would be 1939. Hitler's armies invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and France and England declared war two days later. An uncanny prescience indeed, based as it was not on information and observation, as Porter's was in 1931, but solely on a disheartened emotional apperception of how the world seemed to be going.

It is that emotional apperception that is my subject here. We can see the keenness of Cather's awareness not only of news of the war but of what Wilfred Owen called "the pity of war" (his phrase for what he hoped his war poems would put before the faces of his readers) in her many letters written during the World War I years. She speaks of the war as a disturbing and engrossing worry, an intrusion on her mental vision that would not go away. As early as September 28, 1914—less than two months after the outbreak of hostilities—she was reporting that the news of the terrible battles going on had interrupted her enjoyment of the summer's visit to northern New Mexico, and in November of that year she lamented to her Aunt Franc (who was to be a centrally important figure in Cather's war consciousness by 1918, leading to the writing of One of Ours) that she could think of little else but the war and the suffering of the Belgians (Calendar #287 and #289). Her distress arose, then, with the fall 1914 battles on the Marne (later referred to in her pained question about the disruption of civilization, "Was it at the Marne?"), and it would stay with her well beyond the November 1918 armistice and Versailles. According to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, when Cather was first conceiving My Ántonia, in 1916, she could not "forget that, in these war days, the youth of Europe, its finest flower, was dying," and shared Sergeant's own fear that "American youth" was also doomed to make that sacrifice (Sergeant 148). It was in the following spring, of course, that American youth would in fact be summoned into the conflict, with the U.S. declaration of war on April 15, 1917.

My purpose here is to demonstrate that all through the next two decades, the 1920s and 1930s, Cather was still not "able to forget" the pity of the Great War. Like many others of her generation, she was haunted by it for years afterward—indeed, in my judgment, for the rest of her life. To be sure, the persistence of that haunting is not so easy to trace as her distress during the war itself. As we would expect from this writer who sought "not to hold the note, not to use an incident for all there is in it—but to touch and pass on" (On Writing 9), the traces of the war in Cather's fiction are, with the exception of One of Ours, fleeting and relatively subtle. Nor did she persist in lamenting the war in her letters (so far as they survive). Nevertheless, and even though she did not, as Porter did, regularly and explicitly express a sense of foreboding about a renewal of war in Europe, it is demonstrable that Cather fully participated in the Janus-faced sensibility of the interwar years—a sensibility of gloomy expectation of another war to come as well as a fixation on the Great War experience. Despite her metaphor of a broken world, she experienced an ongoing process of breaking throughout the interwar years and on through World War II.

As both her letters and her fiction demonstrate, Cather's response to the First World War was an intensely emotional one. She referred to the war at various times as "terrible" and "unjust" and repeatedly asserted that it had unleashed a general misery infecting every aspect of life so that no one could have any true happiness as long as it went on. In part, these feelings sprang from her reading about the sufferings of civilians in the war zone (as we see, for example, in her letter to her aunt about the hardships endured by the Belgians) and from firsthand reports by people who had been there. Toward the end of the war, however, the intensity of her emotional engagement can be attributed more directly to the fact that her first cousin, Grosvenor P. Cather, enlisted in the American Expeditionary Forces and was killed in action on May 28, 1918.

Why the death of a cousin would have affected her so deeply is an important question, though one for which we may not find very clear answers. Yes, she seems to have known him well; according to a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher that was written during the final stages of work on One of Ours, she had helped care for him when he was a baby or small child (March 8, 1922; Calendar #595). But that fact in itself would not seem to account for the strength of emotion she expressed in her various letters touching on Grosvenor's (or as she usually called him, G. P.'s) story. There was also the fact that she was strongly devoted to his mother, her Aunt Franc. She seems to have felt her aunt's grief very keenly and may have wished to magnify his status as hero in the hope of easing that grief. But the emotional dynamic was yet more complex. Grosvenor had been—as Cather shows her hero Claude Wheeler to have been—perpetually dissatisfied with his life before going into the military. In the real life, as opposed to the fictional version, that dissatisfaction had expressed itself in illicit sexual relations that apparently even led to the death of his pregnant lover. Misdeeds of this kind would undoubtedly have been gravely distressing to Franc Cather. When he was killed in action at Cantigny, however, his story could be constructed as one of redemption to a kind of secular sainthood, since, as Cather told her aunt in a letter of June 12, 1918 (Calendar #419), the label "killed in action" set such men apart from others.

It was after his death that Cather came to regard her cousin as having been, in some mysterious or even mystical way, bound up with herself so that, as she claimed, part of her was buried in his grave (Calendar #589). To speculate that she was in some way reading her own life story to that point as being also a story of redemption would not be implausible, though it goes far beyond the purposes of this essay to do so. Yet some such process of self-dramatization through identification with Grosvenor seems to have been at work and would account for the persistence of her fixation on him. Four years after his death she would still insist that he had become so deeply a part of her that she might never be the same and could absolutely not have written anything else until she wrote his story (Calendar #589). She declared that his presence kept returning and seizing her while she was reading proofs of One of Ours (Calendar #590). The intensity of her fixation on Grosvenor hints at an obsessional quality, for instance, when she expresses a sense that she may never be able to shake off the concern that drove One of Ours (Calendar #595).

This intensity of emotion over Grosvenor's death was restoked, of course, as Cather continued to have interactions with her aunt and especially when she went to France in 1920. There, on July 4, she watched a parade of war orphans and shortly afterward located her cousin's grave. One wonders, indeed, if her feelings about his death would not have been revived simply by name association when, from 1928 to 1933, she lived in the Hotel Grosvenor whenever she was in New York.

As we have noted, though, besides the complex emotional dimensions of this personal association, Cather's keen awareness of the unfolding of the war would have been fed by what we know to have been her avid reading of newspapers, especially the New York papers. The evidence that she was an avid newspaper reader is scattered throughout her letters. In addition to the information about the war that we know she devoured, including casualty lists (she first learned of her cousin's death from such a casualty list), the print media would have provided her a keen visual sense of the war. The New York Times, for example, regularly published whole pages of pictures from the Western Front. She may also have seen pictorial images of "dead Boches" as well as Allied casualties on postcards or cards for use in stereoscopic viewers, since, according to Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, these were widely distributed. "The horror of war," Ferguson concludes, "was concealed from the public less than is sometimes thought" (180-81). The effects of such images on a sensitive and imaginative person —as Cather most certainly was—do not have to be conjectured; they are evident in One of Ours. She may have insisted that the story was entirely centered in Claude Wheeler's perceptions and that he didn't see things as pictures (Calendar #589), but she did. Brief as the battlefield sections of the novel are, they offer several pictorial images of devastation, wounding, death, and dismemberment. To be sure, Cather would have gleaned some of the elements of these pictures from her reading and from conversations with the wounded soldiers she visited in hospitals in New York (as she told Canfield Fisher she did during the winter of 1918, in an undated letter written in 1922 [Calendar #588]), but the grimness and the specificity of the verbal pictures she produced may well reflect the fact of her having seen such pictures in newspapers or other media.

I would argue, then, that visual shock played a significant part in the persistence of Cather's wartime awareness of suffering, destruction, and battlefield horrors well after the time she encountered such reports—a persistence demonstrated by One of Ours. But One of Ours is a notoriously ambiguous piece of evidence of war consciousness. Not only is the novel's account of combat lacking in realism, in some ways—though, it seems to me, not so lacking as contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway would have us believe—but its publication came so soon after the end of the war that, after all, it can scarcely in itself demonstrate a very lengthy persistence. Published in 1922, it preceded by several years such postwar cultural products as the 1926 movies What Price Glory?, The Big Parade, and Wings and the 1926 hit song "My Dream of the Big Parade," in which a patriotic celebration turns into a parade of wounds, dismemberments, and grieving mothers, not to mention the 1929-30 "boom" of books about the war that came in the wake of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Indeed, One of Ours might have been a considerably different book and might have had a considerably different reception if Cather had let her wartime concerns, exacerbated as they were by her awareness of her cousin Grosvenor's experiences and his letters home to his mother, ripen for a few years. Instead, she went directly into planning and work on "Claude," as she first titled the manuscript, as soon as she finished My Ántonia—which itself can well be seen, indirectly, as a war novel. As a result, One of Ours has been judged by standards of sensibility that for the most part developed after its conception and tone were firmly set in Cather's mind—that is, by standards reflecting postwar disillusionment, whereas the novel itself reflects the more immediate impressions and emotions of wartime, particularly Cather's wish to present her cousin in a heroic light. A tone of glorification appears in letters Cather wrote to Aunt Franc on June 6 and June 12 following Grosvenor's death on May 28, 1918 (Calendar #418 and #419), and she called the report of his death to the attention of her editor at Houghton Mifflin on July 2 (Calendar #421). All of these letters were written months before the end of the war, let alone the unfolding of the Versailles Treaty and the widespread erosion of a sense that there had been any real purpose to the carnage.

It is to texts other than One of Ours, then, that we must turn in seeking evidence that the trauma of the First World War persisted, for Cather, long after 1918 and that all during the interwar period her world kept breaking, despite her insistence that it had broken once and for all in or about 1922. The very fact that it was in 1936 that she wrote that statement about the world's brokenness indicates—assuming one accepts the view that it refers at least in part to the war and its effects—a persistence of war consciousness. Her letters during the later 1920s and the 1930s do not provide support for the idea of such persistence, however; except for perfunctory references, the war is not even mentioned after 1922 until the beginning of the Second World War. Instead, it is from traces in her fiction that we can see that the concern with the war that impelled her writing of One of Ours did not disappear after that work was completed.

The Professor's House provides, of course, abundant demonstration that Cather's distress over the war persisted at least until 1925, the year of its publication. Indeed, it is this novel, rather than One of Ours, that most clearly bears the stamp of postwar disillusionment, in its generally wearied and disheartened tone and specifically in its account of what seems to be the pointlessness of Tom Outland's death in the war. Professor St. Peter, it seems, has lived (as Cather told Canfield Fisher, in her 1922 letter already cited, they both were living) in a different world than the one he knew before, a world with less hope, less glamour, and certainly less love. Steven Trout appropriately places The Professor's House in the company of such novels as Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (also 1925) and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) in "the category of fiction devoted to the after effects of the Great War" (Trout 161). If The Professor's House is Cather's greater war novel, however—a point I will not pursue because it has been capably argued elsewhere—we must concede that its concern with the war is far more subtle, far less foregrounded, than that of One of Ours.

I would propose, however, that another work of that same year, 1925, is equally, if even more subtly, a work about the war: the short story "Uncle Valentine." A story that turns toward the turn-of-the-century past so determinedly that it all but ignores the existence of the war at all, despite its postwar perspective, "Uncle Valentine" would appear to be concerned with issues of the tension between art, or beauty of any kind, and commerce, intertwined with issues of youth and innocence doomed to sad awareness by time and its corruptions. In both respects, it is a lament for a lost world. That lost world is represented in the story by Bonnie Brae, the estate on which the composer Valentine Ramsay lives, as did his family before him. The estate is located in an enclave of such estates near a village called Greenacre that is seemingly set off from the rush of the twentieth century as represented by the nearby city of Pittsburgh and its industries. At the end of the story, Bonnie Brae has been demolished—having been "pulled down," significantly enough, "during the war" (249).

Is that simple phrase identifying when it was that Bonnie Brae was "pulled down" only an insignificant marker? Hardly. If we turn back to the beginning of the story within a story that makes up the central text of "Uncle Valentine," we see the narrator's summary of her acquaintance with the musician, whom she called by the honorific "uncle" though he was in fact no relative at all: "Yes, I had known Valentine Ramsay. I knew him in a lovely place, at a lovely time, in a bygone period of American life; just at the incoming of this century which has made all the world so different" (210). With this reference to history's having "made all the world so different," the story is marked as expression of mourning for all that was lost when "the world broke in two." Cather had lamented to Canfield Fisher in 1922 that they seemed to be living in a different world than the one they used to know (as I have inadequately paraphrased the statement in her letter probably written on June 17, 1922, in Calendar #601). Not quite three years later, in this 1925 story, Cather again laments the loss of that familiar world destroyed (or perhaps "pulled down") by the war. In the context of the story's strategically placed reference to the changes wrought by twentieth-century history, the reference to Valentine Ramsay's song "I know a wall where red roses grow" (Cather writes it this way, without capitalization, in the story) takes on a larger resonance. Apparently written as a reference to the red roses that grew on his beloved neighbor's wall, the song becomes an emblem of the beauties of a civilization now "pulled down": "The roses of song and the roses of memory, they are the only ones that last" (249). Such roses are remembered from the other side of the break. Moreover, the association of roses and song with the war's devastation was already well established and lay ready to hand when Cather wrote "Uncle Valentine," through the tremendous popularity of the World War I song "Roses of Picardy" (1916, words by British officer Frederick Weatherley, music by Haydn Wood). Often sung by ordinary song lovers and professionals alike, "Roses of Picardy" was recorded in 1919 by the celebrated John McCormack. We know that Cather knew the song since, as John March notes (639), it is whistled by a character in One of Ours.

Four years later, in 1929, Cather returned to a similar thematic structure, again with the Pittsburgh setting and an emblematic rose, in "Double Birthday." Here, the oppositions of beauty and commerce, innocence and corruption are not so clearly drawn as in "Uncle Valentine." Beauty survives alongside getting and spending, the character emblematic of commerce is not altogether unbeautiful, and corruption is never a very threatening presence. Sentimental hopes exist only to be disappointed, however, and an undercurrent of concern about the war and the break separating past from present is much in evidence.

The title "Double Birthday" refers to the common birthday of the two central characters, who also share a name. Albert Engelhardt, the son of a wealthy industrialist, has been reduced to a small-salaried civil service job and residence in a shabby part of town as a result of his own and his brothers' squandering (so his father's old friend Judge Hammersley believes) of their inheritance, but he is quite content with his lot and doesn't regret a minute of his joyous youth. On the night of the birthday celebration narrated in the story, Albert is turning fifty-five. His uncle, Dr. Albert Engelhardt, long retired from a medical practice that brought him more prestige than money, is an amusingly vain old man who still enjoys good food, good wine (when someone gives it to him), and the company of beautiful women—one of whom, the judge's daughter, joins the birthday dinner. He also enjoys music of the nineteenth century and before, though emphatically not that of the twentieth. Uncle Albert is turning eighty. If we assume that the story was written in 1928, the year prior to its publication, and take its time-present to be that year, Albert the younger was born in Cather's own birth year, 1873, and his uncle in the year of her father's birth, 1848. As we will see, this is not the only trace of a personal presence in the story.

The war motif enters the story inconspicuously enough when Judge Hammersley mentions to his daughter that he has seen Albert the younger. She hasn't seen him "for years," she says, "not since the war" (253). Soon, as a result of her father's offer to provide wine for the birthday dinner, she does see Albert, and the two reflect on their days in Italy some years ago. When he recalls that they were "always going to run away to Russia together, and now there is no Russia," it becomes clear that their time in Italy was before the war. "Everything has changed," he adds (267). Both parts of Albert's remark are characteristically Catherian in the brevity of their allusions—first to the Russian Revolution, then to her own conviction (not yet formulated in the familiar prefatory statement) that the world had "broken in two." As if fearful we will miss it, though, Cather repeats the message in a second reference to the fall of the dynasties during the Great War. Remembering how Pittsburgh used to seem to him when he was young, Albert thinks that "a lot of water had run under this bridge since then, and kingdoms and empires had fallen" (269). When the judge's daughter joins the birthday dinner, she reflects that the two Alberts' house is "the only spot I know in the world that is before-the-war." The war, she adds, "destroyed" all the charm young people used to enjoy (273). As in "Uncle Valentine," a rose symbolizes the beauty that is lost—or in this story, significantly, is being lost, because it is not a rose of the past but a rose surviving beyond its time. A young girl who comes to bid Uncle Doctor Engelhardt happy birthday is, he says, "the rose in winter," the rose that cannot last.

Once again, as in "Uncle Valentine," Cather reaches back to the sense of the world's breaking—the idea she had expressed to Canfield Fisher in 1922 and would formulate in her 1936 preface. Here, though, she adds another element: notice of a new danger rising in Europe. In response to his nephew's reminiscing about Italy, the old uncle asks, "What is Mussolini's flower, Albert? Advise your friends in Rome that a Supreme Dictator should always have a flower" (270). The story announces itself, then, as inhabiting a time "between two wars, in a falling world." Though Cather may not yet have foreseen the "fall" into the Second World War, it is clear that present events in Europe, as well as the war of the previous decade, were troubling her. We can see that there were two wars bracketing the melancholy birthday party; she could not yet see the second, only the rise of a dictator; but she could quite clearly see two worlds, with a break between. Both Alberts prefer the former, the world from which they have been separated by the war: Albert the elder drinks to "the lost Lenore," a lost ideal of female beauty, and Albert the younger drinks to his—and Cather's —"beautiful youth" (274-75).

In February 1933, four years after "Double Birthday," Cather published (in the Atlantic Monthly) an essay called "A Chance Meeting," in which she describes her brief acquaintance with the niece of Gustave Flaubert. Here, there is only the slightest manifestation of her persistent war consciousness; she touches the note and does not hold it but passes on. Still, it is often from such lightly touched notes in Cather's writing that we catch the theme. She did not carelessly throw in extraneous details; we know that. We take notice, then, when she mentions that this woman whose perseverance in living out her life to the fullest had been in Italy "a great deal . . . during the late war of 1914" (Not Under Forty 825). And indeed when Cather returned to "A Chance Meeting," using it as the basis for her story "The Old Beauty," she greatly expanded this seemingly incidental reference.

In the same year in which she rewrote "A Chance Meeting" into "The Old Beauty," 1936, she also revisited two other earlier pieces —"The House on Charles Street," from 1922, and "Katherine Mansfield," from 1925 (the year of The Professor's House and "Uncle Valentine"). Both were revised for inclusion in Not Under Forty. In all three of these revisitings she either expanded or added, and greatly emphasized, references to the war. Clearly, the Great War was weighing heavily on her mind.

In revising the essay on Katherine Mansfield, Cather chose to add a quasi-fictional introductory frame and a final section about the personal difficulties with which Mansfield had to cope. As a part of this material, she pointedly added that Mansfield's brother was killed in action in the war and that for the rest of her life (seven years) "her brother seems to have been almost constantly in her mind" (881). This lost brother was indeed "the person who had freed her from the self-consciousness and affectations of the experimenting young writer, and had brought her to her realest self" —as perhaps Cather felt that Grosvenor Cather had for her.

In rewriting "A Chance Meeting" as a story rather than an essay, Cather not only greatly increased the emphasis on World War I but relocated the time frame to 1922, the year when she told Canfield Fisher that they seemed to be living in a different world than the one they used to know (Calendar #601). The year is specified in the story's opening sentence. "The Old Beauty" thus becomes a parable of the broken world, which like "a beautiful woman may become"— and indeed, in the wake of the war did become—"a ruin" (705). We recall that a beautiful woman, "the lost Lenore," represented the beautiful past to the elder Albert in "Double Birthday" and to the song-writing Valentine in "Uncle Valentine."

Pointers to the centrality of the war in "The Old Beauty," a story of quiet retreat to aristocratic hotels and old ways beset by the new, are peppered throughout, from the note that Gabriella Longstreet had remarried "during the war" and that her husband "was killed,—in '17" (700) to a recollection that the narrator's friend Hardwick "was killed in the war" (706). In the story's section VIII alone (712-14), a great cluster of references to the war includes the following: Gabriella Longstreet (now Madame de Coucy) and her companion are "the queerest partnership that war and desolation have made" (712); again, Madame de Coucy's French second husband "was killed in action" (713); her younger friends "were killed or disabled" in the war (713); an "old French officer, blinded in the war" comes to visit her (713); she had sold her place in England "before the war" (713); Mrs. Allison, her companion, served on a committee with her "during the war" (713); and "after the war broke out and everybody was all mixed up" (714). It could scarcely be more clear that in 1936, eighteen years after the Armistice, Cather was still thinking about the event that Seabury, the narrator of "The Old Beauty," calls "a storm to which the French Revolution, which used to be our standard of horrors, was merely a breeze" (715).

The theme of the world's breaking accompanies these reminders of the war throughout the story. Seabury's remark that "long ago" he had liked the grand hotel where they are staying (707) expresses his wish for continuity, for the survival rather than the destruction of the past. But the story will not allow that continuity. Mrs. Allison explicitly states that Madame de Coucy "thought, once the war was over, the world would be just as it used to be" but that "of course it isn't . . . it's all very different . . . everything" (714, 720). The signs of difference are scattered throughout, and all—or almost all—are differences of deterioration if not ruin. Seabury himself has noticed that Madame de Coucy seems "a little antagonistic to the present order" (711). That antagonism, as well as his own, is evident over and over. When they seek to visit a very old monastery that represents "the world of the past," it is guarded by "a one-armed guard in uniform" (723)—presumably a war veteran. The impossibility of a return to the world represented by the monastery is made clear when, on their return drive, they have a near-collision with a newfangled sports car driven by brash American women of uncertain gender. The point is clear that the Old Beauty, Seabury, and apparently the author herself belong on the far side of the break guarded by the veteran.

Still, two small details in the story give reason to think that perhaps the postwar world is not altogether bad: Young people at a dance in Seabury's hotel are not rude or irritable when he interrupts the playing of modern music to request a waltz, which leaves the floor empty for himself and Gabrielle; they respectfully applaud. And Mrs. Allison, recalling how one Nurse Ames arranged her introduction to Madame de Coucy, comments that the war "made a lot of wise nurses" (713). There may be some survivals of courtesy, then, and some small benefits of the disaster—fragments to shore up against ruin.

The third essay that Cather revised and expanded in 1936, "The House on Charles Street," became "148 Charles Street" in Not Under Forty. The original essay (or review) was an "appreciation" of a volume of collected extracts from the diaries of Annie Adams Fields, widow of the publisher whose name was half of Tichnor and Fields and herself a celebrated hostess to the literary world for, as Cather says, sixty years. It was at Annie Fields's house on Charles Street in Boston that Cather first met Sarah Orne Jewett. The house represented, then, a beautiful and highly cultured past now lost; and its representation of that past was charged, for her, with strong emotion. Just as she grieved the deaths of Jewett and later of Mrs. Fields, she now, in revising the essay, seems to have grieved afresh the loss of the house and all it meant. Its loss takes a place in her vision of the brokenness of the world, with beauty such as that centered in 148 Charles Street stranded on the other side of the break.

On March 9, 1936, while she was preparing Not Under Forty, Cather wrote to Ferris Greenslet (whose office was, of course, in Boston) asking if it was true that a garage had been built on the site of the Fields house (Calendar #1301). Greenslet's confirmation of the fact two days later allowed her to begin the closing section that she was now adding to her essay with this passage that so compactly sums up her theme of the break "in 1922 or thereabouts" and all that it meant: "Today, in 1936, a garage stands on the site of 148 Charles Street. Only in memory exists the long, green-carpeted, softly lighted drawing-room, and the dining-table where Learning and Talent met, enjoying good food and good wit and rare vintages, looking confidently forward to the growth of their country in the finer amenities of life. Perhaps the garage and all it stands for represent the only real development, and have altogether taken the place of things formerly cherished on that spot" (Not Under Forty 847). Two paragraphs later she makes the link with World War I that I have used as an epigraph. Here is the passage quoted more fully: "Just how did this change come about, one wonders. When and where were the Arnolds overthrown and the Brownings devaluated? Was it at the Marne? At Versailles, when a new geography was being made on paper? Certainly the literary world which emerged from the war used a new coinage" (848). How powerfully this passage demonstrates the persistence of Cather's war memories! She is writing about literary history and the depredations of a modernism of which she herself was, of course, a part, and she expresses her sense of that subject in terms of the war. We can see here how her consciousness of the Great War lay always ready, just below the surface of her mind, available to be drawn on whatever the topic.

Cather's association of a sense of loss (here, of the Fields house and all it meant) with the losses of the war was characteristic. In much the same way, she had earlier, in 1927, manifested her continuing war consciousness by speaking of the past—again, a lost past—in terms of the war even though the war was unrelated to the subject at hand. In a public letter to the editor of The Commonwealth giving an account of how she came to write Death Comes for the Archbishop, she recalled a Belgian missionary priest named Father Haltermann whom she had known in or around 1912, whose driving from mission to far-flung mission had entered into her depiction of Father Vaillant. In the course of this brief reference, she added a point totally unrelated to the novel except insofar as it may be reflected in the sense of loss evident toward the book's end: "He went home during the war to serve as a chaplain in the French army, and when I last heard of him he was an invalid" (On Writing 4).

Cather's return to such a keenness of war consciousness in 1936, as she prepared Not Under Forty—the poignant addition to "148 Charles Street," her prefatory statement about the world's having broken in two, her revision of "Katherine Mansfield" by adding a paragraph about the brother who died in the war, her revision of "A Chance Meeting" into a story laden with markers of the war—is tantalizing. Why then? What made 1936 such a watershed of remembrance? Her correspondence gives no clue. Her letters do, throughout the 1930s, show clear evidence of her dismay over the widespread sufferings brought by the Great Depression—itself an aftermath of the Great War. Whether she saw the Depression in that way or not (and I know of no evidence that she did), it was a continuation of the spectacle of breakage that she had been witnessing and feeling for years. Her personalization of the economic news she read in the newspapers in terms of people she had known in Nebraska and the letters she received from farm people there telling her their hardships and often their fear of losing their farms—to which she responded more than once by sending money to prevent foreclosure—must have continually borne in on her the sense of how different life had been for these same people when she first knew them. It was another aspect of the sense of loss after the break, another kind of breaking. What the letters she wrote during those hard times do not do, so far as I have been able to find, is talk explicitly about the war or about current international politics and tensions. The Japanese invasion of China is not mentioned. Hitler's rise to power in Germany is not mentioned. The Spanish Civil War is mentioned only a single time, and quite indirectly— though, to be sure, in a very significant way, because it demonstrates her fear of the coming war. In an unclearly dated letter to Yaltah Menuhin, probably written on September 3, 1938, Cather expresses her gratification that Yehudi was able to see Spain before it went crazy and urges Yaltah to go to Venice before it too is bombed.

Despite the near-total absence in her 1930s letters of evidence of a sense of foreboding about the impending return of war, one wonders if the resurgence in 1936 of evidence of Cather's long ago feeling of devastation over World War I may not have been as much forward-looking as backward-looking. That is, one wonders if it was a result of increasing unrest in Europe, the now unmistakable signs of a next war looming on the horizon. It was in 1936 that the Spanish Civil War broke out, and, in the United States, debates over isolationism made it clear that a new war in Europe was so firmly expected that Americans were trying to think through what their posture toward it should be. The fact that it was also in 1936 that Cather met the eccentric British nobleman Stephen Tennant may not be coincidental; their conversations may well have included the ominous events of the day. At any rate, this cluster of expressions in 1936 of ongoing distress over the First World War seems to indicate indirectly Cather's Januslike awareness of war both behind and ahead. Only a year later, in 1937, she began work on Sapphira and the Slave Girl, a novel of the prewar (pre- Civil War) South that briefly looks forward to a postwar period in which positive, rather than entirely negative, changes can be seen. Perhaps this note in Sapphira is an indication of hope that something good might come out of what was now looking inevitable, as it had from the war that preceded Cather's birth by only a few years. After a storm of family sorrows, she took the novel back up in 1939 and completed it, so she told Canfield Fisher, as an escape from the distress of the new war (letter October 14, 1940, Calendar #1497).

If the parallel with the Civil War and its having made possible a better life for people like Nancy and Till does indicate, by parallel, a slim hope for some good result of the coming renewal of world war, that hope seems to have been very hard for Cather to maintain. Her correspondence during these years bears the marks of renewed war worry and grief. In October 1940, slightly over a year after the German invasion of Poland, when things were looking dark for the people of England and France, she called the war unspeakable (as she had once referred to World War I as terrible and unjust). On that same October day in 1940 she wrote to Van Wyck Brooks, telling him that she greatly admired Winston Churchill and agreed with Archibald MacLeish that the United States should enter the war in defense of democracy (Calendar #1496). The seeming tension between considering the war unspeakable and considering it a just cause is scarcely surprising; many people in the United States had conflicting feelings about American entry into the war. It foreshadows the conflicted feelings that would torment her for the next five years.

Cather's surviving correspondence from this late period in her life indicates that the war would seldom be out of her consciousness. Her spirits would sag and sag as she saw the devastation spread, even as she celebrated the staunchness of the British people and the resistance of her friend Sigrid Undset's fellow Danes. She especially grieved over the suffering of American soldiers in the South Pacific and over wartime separations in her own family. Why, she cried out to her old friend Viola Roseboro' in the dark days of 1944, did a single generation have to see civilization destroyed in not one war, but two? (Calendar #1659). Like Porter, Cather had been caught between two wars in a world that had not simply broken but kept breaking.

In his 1987 biography Willa Cather: A Literary Life, James Woodress compares One of Ours to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Thematically and structurally, according to Woodress, the works, conceived on opposite sides of the Atlantic, address the question of social disintegration; in his words, both works open "with a panorama of society's failures, followed by views of personal failure . . . and [end] with a promise of spiritual rebirth" (329). Woodress's assertion that the novel deals with social and personal failure is a virtual given. Claude Wheeler cannot negotiate the spiritual void he finds in the materialistic world of his brothers, Ralph and Bayliss, and therein lies much of the conflict that sends Claude to war. But Woodress's suggestion that the novel demonstrates "a promise of spiritual rebirth" plays down the cynicism, ironically that of the religious Evangeline Wheeler, that closes the novel in a place far from The Waste Land's optimistic cultural and spiritual synthesis. Nothing about Lovely Creek changes as a result of Claude's sacrifice. While the enemy abroad is ultimately defeated, the enemy at home survives with a vengeance.

One of Ours was a difficult novel for Cather to write. She suffered through several periods of illness as well as the psychological trauma of revisiting the life and death of her cousin G.P. Cather, who served as her model for Claude Wheeler. Cather also renewed her friendship with Dorothy Canfield Fisher during the composition of the novel because Cather needed Canfield Fisher's expertise to complete the sections of the novel set in France. Cather and Canfield Fisher had traveled together to France in 1902, and at the time, Cather had been painfully aware of her own provincialism and envied Canfield Fisher's sophistication. When Claude Wheeler arrives in France, he is equally aware of his shortcomings and becomes, in fact, resentful. Janis P. Stout argues that these sections of the novel, and Cather's reliance on Canfield Fisher's help in developing them, reveal Claude's sense of insufficiency as well as Cather's own. According to Stout, Cather's reliance on Canfield Fisher "demonstrates how central, in Cather's conception of the novel, was Claude's sense of cultural deprivation" (49). Like Edith Wharton's A Son at the Front and Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier, One of Ours is a novel of the home front, a largely corrupt home front from which escape is desirable. If the novel seems in places to glorify war, to see war as a noble endeavor that finally gives purpose to Claude Wheeler's life, it does so with a sense of bitterness and betrayal and with a strong sense of irony.

Claude Wheeler never loses sight of the spiritually blighted world that produced him. Frankfort, Nebraska, stands for all that is wrong with American culture—its materialism and its religious fanaticism. Steven Trout calls Frankfort "a place of cultural conformity, big business, and the emergence of everything associated with the appropriately constrictive term 'Bible belt' " ("Iconography" 195). Trout's association of big business with the rural Frankfort rings truer than we might imagine. Cather produces in the figure of Claude's brother Bayliss a far more sinister model of American acquisitiveness and coercion than the image of Frankfort alone can achieve.

In the early decades of the twentieth century as science and technology triumphed, the entrepreneurs who made their fortunes researching and manufacturing the new products to fuel American consumerism became important figures in the public eye. Two in particular, Henry Ford and John Harvey Kellogg, promoted their products with a religious zeal, and in doing so, dramatically changed American culture. Both men were evangelical in their approach to business; like Bayliss Wheeler, both believed they knew what was best for American consumers. Business, religion, science, and technology all were to work together to create utopian worlds where everyone drove a basic black Model-T Ford and "learned to live on nuts and toasted cereals" as Enid Royce and her mother do (103). The worlds Ford and Kellogg sought to create were indeed worlds of frightening conformity and little artistic beauty and little pleasure—the same kind of world Bayliss Wheeler and Enid Royce inhabit and, ironically, the same kind of world Americans and the British believed would result from a German victory in the war. And of course by the mid 1930s, Henry Ford had become an icon in what was rapidly becoming Nazi Germany.

Henry Ford perfected the assembly line, paid an astonishing five dollars a day to his workers, and made the Model-T affordable so all his employees could buy one. Ford also published anti- Semitic articles in the Dearborn (MI) Independent and employed former boxers to discourage union activity in his plants. Because Ford did not trust the decision-making capabilities of his workers, he officially discouraged drinking and smoking on the part of his employees. Reputed to have said, "History is more or less bunk," Ford remains one of history's most controversial figures. In 1915 Ford financed a trip to Europe, his Peace Ship, in an effort to stop the war, an endeavor that clearly did not succeed and, once the United States entered the war, turned popular opinion against him. An article concerning Ford's unsuccessful bid for a Senate seat in Michigan in the July 1918 issue of Leslie's Illustrated Weekly Newspaper endorses Ford's opponent, Truman Newberry, in terms that make Ford out to be manipulative and clownish. Before naming Ford as the subject of his diatribe, Edwin Ralph Estep, author of the piece, raises the rhetorical question whether or not it is "politically practicable to slip an anti-detection suit over a man's past and rush him to the capitol in the guise of a tongue-tied angel with a blue-eyed baby stare" (79). Estep names Ford and goes on to call him, among other things, "the demon propagandist and ship leaser, . . . who put forth a harrowing belch because the United States wanted to loan France and England a few honest dollars that didn't belong to him" (79). Part of Estep's attack involves linking Ford with "an Austrian adventuress," undoubtedly Rosika Schwimmer, who came to the United States on a peace mission and enlisted Ford's help. Schwimmer was one of the "couple of hundred homogomphs" Ford provided with "a free trip to Europe" (79). Ironically, Schwimmer, a feminist and a Jew, was forced to leave Europe years later when Hitler came to power. The year of her death, she was also nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, hardly the accomplishment of an adventuress (Flowers and Lahutsky 366). Two things are notable here. First, by 1918, in spite of his successes in the automotive industry, Ford was despised for his opposition to the war; the veiled reference in the Leslie's article implies that his connection to Austria motivated Ford's desire for peace. While this article is clearly jingoistic, Ford was also undeniably a Nazi sympathizer before the United States entered World War II. Ford was one of Adolf Hitler's idols. According to John Betton and Thomas J. Hench, Hitler had photos of Ford in his office, and Ford's German plant, Ford Werke, employed slave labor during World War II at the same time his American plants manufactured war planes (533-34). Propaganda of all sorts aside, it would appear that Ford's opportunism—he was after all a major entrepreneur— informed his decisions. When his antiwar efforts failed in 1915, Ford returned to the United States and converted his automobile plants to munitions plants, although Frank Wicks's laudatory article in Mechanical Engineering claims he refused to take any profits from the plants. These details are pertinent because they reveal the same kind of amorality reflected in Bayliss Wheeler. Ford ran his plants with the same kind of paternalism, the same kind of interference, and the same kind of spying, as it were, that Bayliss employs against Claude, against Gladys, and even against his mother. Appropriately, Henry Ford becomes a deity in Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel Brave New World, which was written while Ford was still alive. Our Ford, as he is called, encourages his followers to remain childlike and to enjoy the art of consumption, to believe, as one of the clichés of the day dictates, that "ending is better than mending." Consumerism and social control join forces here to create a world Bayliss Wheeler would undoubtedly understand. Bayliss is a small-town version of Ford in all his negative glory.

Like Henry Ford, John Harvey Kellogg changed the face of American culture. More than merely the father of Corn Flakes, Kellogg promoted dietary and lifestyle restrictions at his Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. A Seventh-Day Adventist, Kellogg began his medical career at a religious institution and pursued his career with religious enthusiasm. A short filler article published in the journal Pediatrics describes some of the outlandish treatments prescribed for patients at the Kellogg sanitarium. Underweight patients were subjected to treatments similar to those used by S. Weir Mitchell to cure "hysteria." Patients often consumed over twenty meals a day and had sandbags placed on their abdomens and their teeth brushed by attendants to avoid burning calories (528). Elizabeth Fee and Theodore M. Brown also point out that one of the Kellogg foundations, the Race Betterment Foundation, was devoted to the "science" of eugenics, a parallel to Ford's anti-Semitism and his connection to the Nazis.

World War I propaganda consistently portrays German Kultur as a monster that seeks to control, convert, and destroy. Within this context, Bayliss reflects many of the characteristics of Kultur. Once in France, Claude realizes that Bayliss's world is one to which he does not wish to return. The world Bayliss has created, the world he forces others to inhabit, is no different from the regulated and mechanistic enemy machine. Claude believes, "No battlefield or shattered country he had seen was as ugly as this world would be if men like his brother Bayliss controlled it altogether" (339); that is, Bayliss and the enemy are indistinguishable. In fighting a vague and largely unseen enemy, Claude is fighting the "careful planners" like Bayliss and, by extension his wife, Enid, who are trying to "put [the world] into a straight-jacket" (339). Ironically, while the war frees Claude personally and gives him a sense of purpose, he is helpless against the enemy at home. Bayliss is a force of nature and, like Enid, a force to be reckoned with. The war Claude faces at home is as ugly as the one he faces at the front.

Frankfort is a prison to Claude. Most prominent among his jailers are Bayliss and his father, Nat. Both men keep an eye on Claude, judging and belittling as opportunities arise, but Bayliss instigates much of Claude's torture. Early in the novel when the circus comes to town, Claude thinks about inviting his friend Ernest Havel to eat at the local hotel but does not because he knows Bayliss and his father believe dining out is a form of "putting on airs," a transgression for which he would be criticized. If the two found out—and Claude insists, "Bayliss heard everything"—they would, Claude believes, "get back at him" (11).

This system of surveillance and punishment creates of Frankfort a panopiticonlike model, what Foucault refers to in Discipline and Punish as a "disciplinary society" (209), with Bayliss in place as enforcer and executioner. Before the war, Bayliss as well as Enid focus their attention on their "virulent Prohibition[ism]," both literally and figuratively. Bayliss wants to "regulate everybody's diet by his own feeble constitution" (9), and Enid, who goes on yearly pilgrimages to Battle Creek with her mother, is bent on both dietary and religious conversion and sexual repression. Enid has no roosters among the hens on their farm, what neighbor Leonard Dawson refers to as doing "missionary work among [her] chickens" (168). Bayliss is also acquisitive. He buys the old Trevor place, a mansion and local landmark, with the intention of tearing it down rather than restoring it. And always, Bayliss is controlling. He has most likely given the unconventional Gladys Farmer her fur coat with the intention of marrying and thus controlling her. Gladys herself believes that "her own little life was squeezed into an unnatural shape" because of Bayliss (129).

On the surface at least, Bayliss backs up his evangelical beliefs by declaring himself a pacifist when the war breaks out. But Bayliss's pacifism is only an extension of his desire to acquire and control. As he argues against the war in his hardware store, Bayliss repeats not a peaceful philosophy but a cynical one that wants to control the world. America should remain out of the war and, in his words, "gather up what Europe was wasting," at which time, "she would be in actual possession of the capital of the world" (190). Like a vulture, Bayliss would let the two powers fight it out and then scavenge the battlefield for its spoil, a plan unparalleled in its ability to ignore pain and bloodshed, a plan unparalleled in its amorality.

Bayliss's desire for personal and national acquisition mirrors the Allied perception of Germany's desire for world dominance. Before the outbreak of war, however, Americans admired the qualities of hard work and orderliness attributed to Germans and the German "national character." Based on what he has seen of his German neighbors, Claude believes "the German people were preeminent in the virtues Americans most admire; a month [before the outbreak of war] he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for" (136). Reflected here, of course, is Cather's own admiration for the immigrant vitality celebrated in My Ántonia and elsewhere. But the question of German nationalism is foreign to Claude, and he is surprised at the German invasion of Belgium. In England and the rest of Europe, German militarism was widely distrusted and feared. Rudyard Kipling, for instance, hated Germans with a vengeance and did so long before his son Jack was killed in the war. The poem "For All We Have and Are" makes use of the pejorative term "Hun," as do earlier poems as well. In a letter to Herbert Baillie in January of 1916, after Jack went missing at the battle of the Somme, Kipling declares, "the German is typhoid or plague—Pestis teutonicus, if you like" (355-56). Kipling aside, Germany's preparation for a European war was no secret to many associated with German Emperor Wilhelm II, or Kaiser Bill, as Americans became fond of calling him. James W. Gerard, ambassador to Germany from 1913 to 1917, reports, second hand, a conversation between "a beautiful American woman of [his] acquaintance," (96) and the Crown Prince, son of Wilhelm II, in which the Crown Prince is reported to have said that if his father didn't start a war with the rest of Europe and American, he would. According to Gerard's "acquaintance" the war would be "just for the fun of it" (96). This conversation, which took place during the winter before the war, expresses a prevalent understanding of German military philosophy, albeit an oversimplified one linked to the concept of "Kultur," a word that came to stand for all that was wrong with Germany and German society and that became the focus for the demonization of Germany in both British and American propaganda.

In 1915, two years before American involvement in the war, Funk and Wagnalls published a tiny dictionary of war-words, "A key to the Spelling, Pronunciation and Meaning of many terms brought into public notice by the War." This dictionary defines the word "Kultur" as "Progress, advancement, and achievement in all forms of theory and practice, whether political, economic, scientific, social, or artistic, including the processes involved and the results attained, both mental and material; civilization" (17). This definition, of course, describes all the virtues Claude Wheeler refers to in his assessment of German character, but when the concept is demonized in propaganda, it becomes "That Monstrous Thing Called Kultur" alluded to in an advertisement for Liberty Bonds in the August 1918 issue of The National Geographic Magazine. According to the ad copy, Americans are too clean and upright to understand the consequences of Kultur but must, even so, buy war bonds to defeat it. Since the definition of Kultur includes economic endeavor, propaganda published during the war also points to German manufacturing as a facet of German militarism and the evils represented by Kultur. American propaganda leaflets, many published by the American Defense Society, a patriotic organization that lists Theodore Roosevelt as its honorary president, allude to a so-called deal between German manufacturers and the German government. Struck during a series of meetings beginning as early as 1912, the deal promised money and land to German manufacturers who supported the Kaiser's war efforts. The details of the agreement were supposedly revealed in a pamphlet written by August Thyssen, who was promised mining land in Australia and a loan with which to develop it. One American pamphlet entitled The Most Damning Revelation of Germany's Turpitude Ever Published tells the Thyssen's story and concludes, "Thyssen's revelations show that Germany's business men definitely entered upon this war to loot the world for their own enrichment," (13) an assessment that similarly could be made of Bayliss Wheeler. Another pamphlet urging an American boycott of German products quotes Thyssen and then goes on to declare "In other words, . . . these infernal scoundrels, the leading business men of Germany, on the confession of one of them, agreed to help their Government to destroy Governments, steal lands, rob banks and individuals, murder unoffending people by wholesale, and when the whole nameless job was done to (in thieves parlance) 'divide up the swag'!" (Remember). Minus the murdering, the values attributed to these German manufacturers parallel the policy of acquisition Bayliss Wheeler advocates.

Bayliss's desire to acquire and control is evident from the beginning of the novel. Mary R. Ryder suggests that Bayliss is "insensitive to non-material needs and entertains only the hard facts of interest, debits, and expenditures in running his implement dealership" (156). But his material needs extend to the nonmaterial because they involve so deeply his need to control. When Claude sees Bayliss on the day of the circus, Bayliss has a black eye. Claude does not inquire about it, but later in the day as Leonard Dawson, the Wheelers' neighbor, is driving Claude home, Leonard admits to having hit Bayliss. Leonard explains that he hit Bayliss because Bayliss has made derogatory remarks against Susie Gray, soon to become Susie Dawson. Susie and her friend had cajoled the front man for the circus into buying tickets to the firemen's dinner, and Bayliss doesn't approve of Susie's manner. Bayliss sees himself here as the arbiter of correct behavior and, as such, does not care whose reputation he tarnishes. In a town as small as Frankfort, where gossip is a force, Bayliss and his talk can ruin Susie, but Bayliss does not care as long as he is in control. His presence every day in his farm implement store, where he sees everything, facilitates Bayliss's control; the store becomes the center of the panopticon, and Bayliss, although he remains highly visible, functions as the inspector, the enforcer, the eyes that see all. He makes of Frankfort, in Foucault's words, "a cruel ingenious cage" (205).

Beyond his desire to control, Bayliss has no interest in Susie Gray. But his pursuit of Gladys Farmer reflects both a desire to control and a desire to acquire. Like Claude, Gladys is a free spirit, and in fact, Claude misses an opportunity for happiness when he chooses Enid over Gladys. A talented musician, Gladys loves the finer things in life: clothes, shoes, and trips to Omaha to the opera. While Bayliss acquiesces to some of these desires—Gladys's fur coat, which Enid tells Claude she "suspect[s]" Bayliss of, for example—he does so to establish ownership, a ploy not lost on Claude. The fur also puts Gladys in jeopardy because the coat arouses gossip. Gladys's mother is always behind on her property taxes, and Gladys's clothes garner disapproval. Enid, who is almost a Doppelganger of Bayliss, laughs about the gossip, but for a single woman who must earn her own living teaching school, public disapproval is a real danger. Enid tells Claude, "All the old ladies are so terribly puzzled about [the furs]; they can't find out whether your brother really gave them to her for Christmas or not. If they were sure she bought them for herself, I believe they'd hold a public meeting" (88). This public scrutiny later forces Gladys to abandon her trip to the opera in Omaha because "such an extravagance would have aroused a corrective spirit in all her friends, and in the school-board as well; they would probably have decided not to give her the little increase in salary she counted upon having next year" (129). The desire here on the part of the old ladies and the school board is to squelch any perceived independence on Gladys's part. As long as she is connected to Bayliss, she, perhaps grudgingly, earns Frankfort's approval, but she loses something of herself in the process. Like the destructive force of Kultur, Bayliss makes life bleak, perfunctory, utilitarian.

Even his own mother falls prey to Bayliss's vigilance. At the Wheeler farm for Christmas dinner, Bayliss chides his mother for drinking a second cup of coffee after her meal. In what Cather describes as a "gentle grieved tone," a suggestion of Bayliss's smug self-righteousness, Bayliss tells Evangeline, "I'm sorry to see you taking two [cups], Mother" (76). In response to her assertion that coffee does her no harm, Bayliss replies, "Of course it does; it's a stimulant" (76). To her credit, Mrs. Wheeler ignores Bayliss and has the second cup of coffee. But Gladys understands that her relationship with Bayliss is most likely the source of her doom; she also knows that Claude will "become one of those dead people that moved about the streets of Frankfort" if he marries Enid (128). Correctly assessing the power of the inquisitive eye, Gladys "believe[s] that all things which might make the world beautiful—love and kindness, leisure and art—were shut up in prison, and that successful men like Bayliss Wheeler held the keys" (129). When Gladys finds out that Bayliss has bought the Trevor place, the two couples have embarked on a sleigh ride in newly fallen snow, a moment that should be full of romance. But the moment is far from pleasant for any of the four. Claude is angry because Gladys allows Bayliss to court her, and Gladys is furious with Bayliss for buying a landmark she has for so long wanted. She knows Bayliss will never remodel the house—he resents the whiskey bottles in the cellar—and so she concedes that the house is "spoiled" for her. When Claude angrily asserts that he wants to see the world before he builds a house, Gladys, "in a tone of sudden weariness," asks him to take her with him. Enid, who knows Gladys's true feelings about Bayliss, believes that Bayliss "must have captured Gladys' hand under the buffalo robe" (93). The use of the word capture here underscores Bayliss's goal and Gladys's sense of defeat at his accomplishment of it.

In addition to being Prohibitionists, Bayliss and Enid are both vegetarians; their prescriptive religion and their dietary habits overlap. All of their pursuits take on an evangelical quality. Here again, Bayliss and also Enid reflect an American fixation, not only with materialism and mechanical objects but with food. Just as Henry Ford changed American life with the mass production of the Model-T, John Harvey Kellogg changed American diets with Corn Flakes. The end of the nineteenth century, in fact, saw a number of food fads, among them the revolution in Battle Creek and the evolution of the domestic science movement, a movement designed to apply scientific scrutiny to homemaking, including the art of cooking. Both "movements" appear in One of Ours. Cather herself disapproved of the domestic science movement because it encouraged the use of commercially canned and otherwise prepackaged foods at the expense of quality, and it interfered with the idea of immigrant vitality that Cather valued so highly. In a speech to the Fine Art Society in Omaha, Cather raised the issue of standardization, the subject of her address, and said, among other things, "The Americanization committee worker who persuades an old Bohemian housewife that it is better for her to feed her family out of tin cans instead of cooking them a steaming goose for dinner is committing a crime against art" (qtd. in Woodress, Literary Life 320). According to Woodress, the Omaha ladies, who undoubtedly used canned foods themselves or had their servants use them, laughed at this assertion. But Cather was correct in her notion that cooking was becoming standardized, and the domestic science movement was the culprit.

Domestic science also promoted the use of labor-saving devices, a notion reflected in Ralph Wheeler's desire to see his mother and Mahailey use the separator he has bought for them to separate milk from cream. Of course, the machine is not practical— it takes much longer to disassemble and scald than hand skimming— but Ralph insists they use it because it is "up-to-date" (17). Claude defends his mother's resistance to the machine and offers to scald it on a Sunday morning so she can get to church on time. But the machine becomes part of the materialistic culture Claude's brothers endorse. Bayliss, of course, sells machinery and thus becomes a source of this standardization at the same time his eating habits promote it. We might also note here that the evangelical zeal of the domestic science movement fed into the war effort in U.S. Food Administration propaganda that encouraged food conservation. Susie Dawson alludes to Enid's practice of domestic science when she tells Leonard that Claude's meals are most likely better when Brother Weldon, the hypocritical minister Claude detests, is visiting than when Enid and Claude are alone. Perplexed at Enid's habits, Susie declares, "Preachers won't be fed on calories, or whatever it is Enid calls 'em, . . . Claude's wife keeps a wonderful kitchen; but so could I, if I never cooked any more than she does" (168). Calories had just become part of new information the modern cook must master, and Enid's knowledge of them makes her as up-to-date as the cream separator.

Enid also uses books on raising chickens, an idea that infuriates Leonard, who rightfully connects her chickens and her religion. After hearing Claude's explanation that their only rooster is cooped because Enid believes unfertilized eggs keep better, Leonard goes home virtually speechless. He tells Susie, "in an awful temper," that Enid "ain't content with practicing prohibition on humankind; she's begun now on the hens" (167). In addition to the chickens, what has put Leonard in a dither is walking in on Claude's supper, which Enid has left for him before heading into town on Prohibition business. The meal most definitely reflects both domestic science and the efforts of food conservation that later came into force under the auspices of the U.S. Food Administration. More suitable for a ladies' tea luncheon, the dinner consists of "a dish of canned salmon with a white sauce; hardboiled eggs, peeled and lying in a nest of lettuce leaves; a bowl of ripe tomatoes, a bit of cold rice pudding; cream and butter" (165). To this feast, Claude adds bread and a newspaper for the war news. We might acknowledge that the new prepared foods present an opportunity for women to get out of the kitchen. But here, Cather is examining what Enid is doing with her free time, not the fact that she has it. In a sentiment similar to the one Gladys expresses, Claude admits that he "suffer[s] . . . in his ideals, in his vague sense of what was beautiful. Enid could make his life hideous to him without ever knowing it. At such times he hated himself for accepting at all her grudging hospitality. He was wronging something in himself" (173).

Ironically, Enid and Bayliss are perfect for each other. Like Ford and Kellogg, the two reformers are intent on promoting what is for them a utopian way of life. Bayliss visits often, and Claude observes that "Enid's vegetarian suppers suited him and . . . they always had [Prohibition] business to discuss" (173). Cather juxtaposes religion, Prohibition, and vegetarianism here, as well as the desire to control, to enforce behavior—in this case on humans, not chickens. Like the coffee his mother drinks after Christmas dinner, alcohol becomes for Bayliss a thing to fear. Claude believes that "Bayliss had a social as well as a hygienic prejudice against alcohol, and he hated it less for the harm it did than for the pleasure it gave" (173). Since Bayliss is a destroyer of pleasure in everyone he touches, with the exception of Enid, Claude is correct to fear and reject his world. While Claude fights on foreign soil, he is indeed fighting an enemy closer to home. After thinking how lost the world would be if men like Bayliss controlled it, Claude concludes in a rare moment of optimism that "until the war broke out, he had supposed they did control it; his boyhood had been clouded and enervated by that belief. The Prussians had believed it, too, apparently. But the event had shown that there were a great many people left who cared about something else" (339). Once again, Claude links Bayliss with Kultur but believes he can defeat them both. His optimism allows him to overlook the reality that Enid is in China doing missionary work, and Bayliss is still entrenched in his hardware store as the eyes of Frankfort, still waiting for the end of war when he can scavenge the ruins of civilization.

By 1922, the year she completed One of Ours, Cather had observed four years of postwar cynicism, which color the end of the novel in the response of Claude's sincerely religious mother, who believes Claude is better dead in battle than faced with the disillusionment that caused so many veterans to commit suicide. After she received the news of Claude's death, Evangeline Wheeler continues to receive Claude's letters and the consoling letters of his comrades and commanding officers. This is a time for Mrs. Wheeler when "human nature looked to her uglier than it had ever done before" (369). Cather's narrative suggests that Mrs. Wheeler no longer accepts those "beautiful beliefs" Claude died with, that she "would have dreaded [his] awakening" (370). Describing the despair and suicide of returning veterans, Mrs. Wheeler understands the need for idealism as a motivation for self-sacrifice, but she also understands the illusory nature of that idealism. Soldiers like Claude had "hoped and believed too much" (370), and their return to civilian life had dashed those hopes. Mrs. Wheeler and Mahailey may believe they feel Claude's presence on the farm, but they do not glory in his death as propaganda demanded of the mothers of fallen heroes.

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Cather's friend for many years, was one of the few of her friends who did not speak favorably of One of Ours. Sergeant spent a large part of the war in Paris and was wounded as she toured a battlefield that had not yet been cleared of explosives, an experience she writes of in Shadow-Shapes: The Journal of a Wounded Woman. As might be expected, Sergeant viewed the war as a combatant and resists the cleaned up version of war Cather depicts at the end of the novel. But even Sergeant admits that the novel "suffers no disillusion, till [its] last pages" (Willa Cather 181). To compare One of Ours to Eliot's The Waste Land is to miss the irony of its conclusion. In contrast to all the religious hypocrites in the novel, Evangeline Wheeler's religion is personal and unobtrusive. For her to be the one character who understands the force of postwar despair is telling. The Waste Land concludes with the speaker declaring, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (line 431). One of Ours concludes with Mrs. Wheeler's faith intact, and yet in contrast to the more primitive Mahailey's belief, God is perhaps light years away. The synthesis we might wish for eludes us. Claude has died for an illusion, and the "careful planners" (339) are still conducting business as usual.

In The Music Man, a musical comedy set in the early 1900s, the conman and boys' band salesman Harold Hill, who is aboard a train bound for central Iowa, answers the question "How far are you going, friend?" with the quip "Wherever the people are as green as the money, friend." This answer, though comic, conveys a perception of the people of Middle America that Cather undoubtedly recognized and, to some degree, embraced. The American doughboys she pictures in One of Ours, and not just Claude Wheeler, are representatives of this American type and of what her friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher called "dear, tender-hearted, uncomprehending America" (241). While Claude has rightfully been described and criticized as a romantic quester and idealist whose beautiful beliefs make his character unbelievable in the face of the realities of war, what has gone largely unrecognized is that Claude and his compatriots are cut from the same cloth. They are all, or once were, as green as their money, and if Claude is innocent in the extreme, his fellow doughboys are equally naïfs, bumbling young Adams before the Fall.

That these young soldiers come from the center of the nation —largely Kansas and Nebraska—is more than an indication of Cather's personal roots. They are sons of the not undefiled but less contaminated frontier of the Middle West. Like Ellen Boardman in Canfield Fisher's war story "A Little Kansas Leaven," they empathize greatly, dream largely, and strut innocently. Their simple idealism is America's lost heritage, revived for her salvation. While the last third of One of Ours focuses on Claude and his perceptions of war and of his fellow soldiers, Cather's narrative voice—not to be confused with Claude's—introduces more than one green doughboy whose entrenched values are unassailable and who embraces his mission as "God's errand into the wilderness." To keep clear the distinction between Claude's vision and Cather's is tantamount in understanding this text. As Jean Schwind points out in her article "The 'Beautiful' War in One of Ours," Claude's "romantic vision of war" (56) and "the romantic sensibility" of the novel are "part of Cather's fiction, and not the unintentional by-product of her authorial naïveté" (57). When Schwind asserts that Claude's "beautiful beliefs in One of Ours are exclusively Claude's" (56), she distinguishes between the narrative and authorial viewpoints, but Claude's view is not singular among those offered by other characters of the novel. It belongs to Claude's compatriots as well. Claude is not the only romantic boy who goes off to war.

In the first chapters of "The Voyage of the Anchises," Cather repeatedly refers to the recruits as "boys," using "men" almost exclusively when they act in concert and under command. As boys, they "moan and shout" (267) when their train makes an unexpected stop, they crowd to the windows to discover the cause, and they come running back to leap aboard the train as it, "like an old turkey-hen," recalls its brood (269). The "boys were disappointed," Cather writes (272), when a misty morning obscures the New York skyline and ruins their "vacation" vista. For the "twenty-five hundred boys, as for Claude" (273), their first glimpse of Lady Liberty inspires a fierce patriotism, and they sail forth "like nothing but a crowd of American boys going to a football game somewhere" (272). They wear looks of "fine candour, . . . cheerful expectancy and confident goodwill" (280-81). In Claude's estimation a "modelled" face like that of the marine Albert Usher stands out as more manly. His regrets and reminiscences seem filled with experiential meaning that is lacking in the Swedish "boys" whose rendition of "Long, Long Ago" entertains the troops (283).

The "open, credulous face" of Claude, whom Victor Morse recognizes as a "novice" (288-89), is replicated in the troops who have made homage to their Goddess Liberty. Their naïveté begins to erode, though, as the flu epidemic sweeps the ship. "The boys lay in heaps on the deck, trying to keep warm by hugging each other close," and Cather writes tellingly that "excepting those who were sick, the boys turned out to a man" for the first burial at sea (293, italics added). Even the big German-American Fritz Tannhauser dies "in perfect dignity . . . like a brave boy giving back what was not his to keep." Like the others, he was "one of those farmer boys" who "only wanted to serve" (300). During the height of the epidemic, Claude, as naïve as his companions, sees one of his "men misconducting himself, snivelling and crying like a baby —a fine husky boy of eighteen who had never given any trouble" (294). Claude's success in bringing the boy back to a manly pose is due largely to his identification with the youth. They are both Nebraska boys, whose towns, Claude reminds him, thought they were sending off men and fine soldiers (295).

That Cather chose the term "boy" to characterize these raw recruits is hardly accidental. As Steven Trout notes in his work on Cather and the iconography of the war, "Cather relied in part on the kind of imagery used by organizations such as the American Legion, the Red Cross, and the Society of the First Division" (66) in writing One of Ours as a kind of memorial fiction to her lost cousin, and to those Nebraska boys so like him. Surrounded by the greatest propaganda campaign in history in support of a war, Cather realistically described the naïve enthusiasm of her culture in recruiting its boys for what would be the greatest slaughter of the modern era. In Words That Won the War, James R. Mock and Cedric Larson summarize the power of that campaign on the nation as a whole: "The Committee on Public Information had done its work so well that there was a burning eagerness to believe, to conform, to feel the exaltation of joining in a great and selfless enterprise" (6). The campaign reached into even the remotest areas and targeted specifically those rugged youths of rural America whose strength and stamina would offer the best hope for "bleeding France." So effective was the dissemination of this propaganda that when a "simple, uneducated family, far from urban centers of information and five thousand miles across the sea and land from the battlefields of France, sat down to a threshers' supper in the summer of 1918 they were more conscious of the World War than many more literate people had been of any war since fighting began" (Mock and Larson 6).

That vast appeal to the nation to give up its sons, its boys, was reinforced by a barrage of war posters, which Cather undoubtedly saw. To secure family support for the doughboys, the Victory Boys organization, for example, launched its poster campaign with phrases such as "A million boys behind a million fighters" and "Every American Boy should Enroll in the Victory Boys." For the brothers who were left out of the great adventure because they were too young, here was the opportunity to support the older "boys." One Victory Boys poster showed a little farm boy in overalls with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier who thrusts his bayonet forward. Even if they were too young to serve, boys were not too young to help the war effort. Likewise, the YMCA campaign touted, "Help Us Help Our Boys." In these posters, youth like Claude and his compatriots are pictured as uniformed boys who are little different than they were back home. The YMCA lass pours coffee "For Your Boy"; the Red Cross is "Our Boys' Big Brother," ushering them toward a cozy, lighted home on a hillside in France. Numerous posters call for socks and books for "our boys," and the Salvation Army, picturing an all-American maid with doughnuts and coffee, assures that they "get it to the boys in the trenches over there." Parents are pictured encouraging others to buy liberty bonds for their boys. "You Help My Boy Win the War," pleads one mother whose soldier son's arm encircles her. Even industry is targeted through the U.S. Fuel Administration poster to "Stand by the Boys in the Trenches: Mine More Coal."

Even living in Frankfort, Nebraska, Claude too would have been inundated by such images and influenced by their sophistries. Like his companions, Claude is, to a large degree, "the provincial American midwesterner [who] was not accustomed to dealing with words and abstractions" (Cooperman 52-53). Embracing the war rhetoric that described not only himself but also the bestial Hun, Claude is forced to reconsider his preconceived notions of self-identity and of otherness. The idea of the German Menace, as depicted in war posters, is foreign to his experience. He has only known hard-working German farm neighbors and the well-educated, gracious Erlich brothers, all of whom he admires. Claude muses, "a month ago he would have said they had all the ideals a decent American boy would fight for. . . . He still cherished the hope that there had been some great mistake; that this splendid people would apologize and right itself with the world" (166, italics added). To justify his enlistment, Claude can embrace the war rhetoric, even if never fully convinced of its truth, and he remains, as Stanley Cooperman writes, "a good boy, a pure adolescent," and he will be "a brave soldier, an effective officer" (130).

When he then finds himself part of the AEF, Claude is neither still a boy, though perhaps he longs to be, nor yet fully a man. The iconography of the war confirms that he must, though, play a double role in the national imagination. The posters refer to the men in uniform when the troops are wounded or at a military disadvantage: "Our men need drugs and bandages," proclaims one war bond poster; "Our men need first aid kits," reads another. "Shoot Ships to Germany and help American Win," claims a 1917 poster, for without ships, "our men will not have an equal chance to fight." As Cooperman argues, then, "It was still possible for the young men setting out on their bold journey in 1916 or 1917, backed by rhetoric and traditional ideas of what was involved with fighting, to think of war in terms of traditional heroism and a chance for a free visit to a Europe they knew largely from novels" (46). Anxious to escape the narrow experiences of small-town Middle America, they could envision themselves joining "the men of history books, the brave soldiers of destiny, doing something more vital than putting in a crop and wondering what the prices would be next harvest time" (Cooperman 52, italics added).

Like Claude, the doughboys thus were destined to live "a double life" (303). They are men on the outside but unflagging boys on the inside. Not having yet developed the "wisdom of the serpent" (as has Victor Morse) or the cultural sophistication of David Gerhardt, the doughboys arrive in France starved for homegrown food and for affection. The "boys" fall like wolves upon the cheesemaker's stock (325) and, like Canfield Fisher's characters, throw American greenbacks at everything in a kind of apology for their behaviors. The shopkeeper sees them as "grown men" (327) with "large, well-shaped hands" (325); simultaneously, they are little boys who cannot even count money and care not if they are cheated. They bumble about on ungainly adolescent legs, stubbing their toes and then examining with keen interest the sunken step, the perpetrating cause of their accident (327). Their "good humour" is unabashed by any situation, and they cannot recognize the flimsiness of the "fictitious values" that they believe will protect them from harm (326). They wear their innocence like a shield, convinced that they will make the world safe. They explore churches because in their minds it was an inescapable duty to do so. Like little boys—Cather's word choice—they express astonishment that fields actually host poppies and that alfalfa grows anyplace beyond the American prairies (339). Every doughboy has his plans to visit Paris, each with a different and confused mental picture of what he will find there. They associate with the famous city "only attributes they [have] been taught to admire"—immensity, vastness, hugeness (341).

Convinced that they harbor secret knowledge that could repair and restore "bleeding France," these boys vow to return after the war and to establish an American Eden, themselves acting as young Adams who will install waterworks and teach the French peasant how to farm. This singular self-assuredness of youth is a cultural bluster that disguises an innocence both attractive in its idealism and repulsive in its arrogance. Claude reminds his "boys" about Americans' bad reputation for "butting in on things" (343), but they laugh off the idea as ludicrous. In their naïveté they are confident that they best model all that is great and good in life, and they cling to time-honored beliefs, one even stoutly arguing that cherubim still guard the Garden of Eden.

All in all, the young Americans, who believe themselves progressive and knowing, mimic the Pal Battalions of "fresh-faced school boys" that they encounter (377). Like the British youth battalions, who, as Claude observes, were "a giggly lot," the American doughboys too are "very young" (374), Cather writes. But Claude doesn't believe that "American boys ever seem as young as that" (378). Claude implicitly makes the distinction between his American boys and British lads, a linguistic variant that underscores the kind of relationship Claude would later develop with the troops under his command. Members of the Pal Battalions are the endearing lads of the Victorian aesthetic movement: fair-haired, "especially beautiful, brave, pure, and vulnerable," the "bright boy knights" (Fussell 275). Cather, an admirer of A. E. Housman's work, was surely aware that the Shropshire Lad (1896) had essentially given to the war the image of the "beautiful brave doomed boy" (Fussell 282). In British diction, though, the designation "brave boys" is an homoerotic extension of the term "men" but connotes less sexual attachment than the term "lad" (Fussell 282). Claude, who embraces the American idiom, does not perceive of these "fresh-faced schoolboys" in such terms. Rather than potential lovers, they are pathetic sacrifices to a god of war. He dismisses them as unlike his own doughboys, who were true soldiers, the rightful subjects of patriotic song: "Turn the dark cloud inside out, / Till the boys come home" ("Keep the Home Fires Burning"). Claude would separate the men from the boys, but for Americans back home, the men of the AEF were their boys.

Terribly afraid of "being disliked" and even more afraid of being duped (380), the naïve doughboys are cheered by anything that reminds them of home and the strength of the America that lay behind them—American goods boxes, binders, and even field flowers. Taking to heart the French perception of them as heaven-sent saviors, "men of destiny" (390), these naïve doughboys would, like "new men, just created in a new world" (433), re-create in Beaufort the prairie Edens they have left behind.

That Cather intended Claude as the prototype of the young and naïve American soldiers is without question. Drawing upon the character of her cousin G.P. Cather, who was killed at Cantigny in 1918, Cather made clear that her protagonist was "just a red-headed prairie boy" whom she came to know better than herself. While she found it hard to "cut out all picture making" in this novel because, as she noted, "that boy does not see pictures," she was willing "to pay the price" for conveying an accurate portrait of "this boy" (qtd. in Mahoney 39). Cather allowed to Claude, even on the battlefield, a more culturally enlightened companion, like the Erlich brothers, who could introduce him to "many human and cultural pleasures and realizations" (Sergeant 183), uncolored by the rosy hues of naïve idealism. This "man" appears as David Gerhardt.

Gerhardt's character was, Cather admitted, inspired by her acquaintance with David Hochstein, the young violinist whom she had first met in 1916. In writing to friends about her three brief encounters with Hochstein, Cather notably refers to him as a "man," never a boy, although he was at age twenty-four approximately the age of Claude. He inculcated the "something splendid" that Claude would seek, and Cather uses that very word, first to describe Hochstein's playing and later in recording his attitude toward his comrades in camp: the men were "splendid," "fine fellows," and he was "learning a great deal" from them, he remarked ("Fiction Recalls" 54). On her first encounter with Hochstein, Cather noted his youthfulness—"very young and fresh among the older men"—but she carefully avoids referring to him as boyish. He is, instead, "a very thoughtful young man" who kept his opinions to himself and didn't draw "rash and comforting conclusions" about the war (53). Like Gerhardt, this man did not accept that "any war could end war" or that this war would make the world safe for democracy (53). Later meeting Hochstein after he had been in camp for a few weeks, Cather saw "a much discouraged young man" and writes that "It was soldiers of his kind, who hadn't any simple, joyful faith or any feeling of being out for a lark, who gave up most, certainly" (54). Like G.P. Cather, Hochstein died in France in 1918, and Cather later found herself recalling the violinist when she was searching for a character who could provide for Claude that "splendid friendship" with someone he could admire. Hochstein's figure "walked into my study," she said, and became that friend, David Gerhardt. She writes, "I had not known him very well, but neither would Claude Wheeler know him very well; the farmer boy hadn't the background, the sophistication to get very far with a man like Hochstein" (qtd. in Bohlke 56-57). In this statement alone, Cather confirms her intent to separate the men from the boys and sets the stage for the encounter of naïve idealism with mature realism in her so-called war novel.

Cather introduces Gerhardt to her narrative through Lieutenant Colonel Scott's viewpoint. He tells Captain Maxey, who needs a replacement officer, "I think I've got a man here . . . a New York man . . . who [has] some experience" (346). While Claude finds nothing patronizing in Gerhardt's manner, he is "ill at ease" with the young officer, perhaps because, as Cather writes, "he did not look boyish" (347). Claude's later assessment of "a man like Gerhardt" as belonging over here in the war because he "had always lived in a more or less rose-coloured world" (375) not only smacks of irony but also reveals Claude's limited understanding of the complex man with whom he billets. By contrast, Claude views the dead Victor Morse as heroic, a kind of "debauched baby," a "little fellow from a little town" for whom the war provided a cinematic backdrop to die like a rebel angel (375). Cather believed that it was men like Gerhardt and Hochstein, not the Victor Morses, who would give up the most in a war like this one, but the boyish Claude is incredulous when Gerhardt asserts that he's lost "much more than time" and can "never go back to the violin" (407). Like Hochstein, Gerhardt explains that he sought no exemption from service: "I didn't feel I was a good enough violinist to admit that I wasn't a man" (407). Almost replicating her own comments on Hochstein, Cather has Gerhardt remark that he doesn't know what the war is for, but it is "certainly not to make the world safe for Democracy, or any rhetoric of that sort" (409).

In his subsequent admission that he now believes in immortality, something about which Claude is confused and unsure, Gerhardt separates himself from the boys philosophically, much as he is separated from them socially. Echoing the Biblical passage "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child; . . . when I became a man, I gave up childish ways" (I Corinthians 13:11), Gerhardt comments that such "ideas used to seem childish to me" but recognizes how befuddling these ideas are still to a boy like Claude. "Oh, don't bother about it!" he advises Claude. "If it comes to you, it comes" (410). Claude, now twenty-five, is "having his youth in France" (410-11); David is concluding his manhood. What seems "childish" to Claude is not the troubling ideas of life, death, and immortality but the absurd tensions he had felt as a prairie youth when he thought he was "going to miss everything" (411). Now part of the "big show" (358), as the war was called, he sees as destiny his meeting with "a man like Gerhardt" whom "he could envy, emulate, wish to be" (411).

Like so many of his fellow doughboys, though, Claude, with his romantic idealism, is destined to remain a boy, never to become the man he wishes to be. After hearing David play his violin for Madame Fleury, Claude has a brief epiphany about his own inadequacies. He is "torn between generous admiration and bitter, bitter envy" (418). Cather writes: "He felt that a man might have been made of him, but nobody had taken the trouble to do it" (418). But, like the boys he commands, Claude lapses into a romantic illusion that the beautiful things in life are recoverable. He tells Gerhardt, "It's men like you that get the worst of it. . . . But as for me, I never knew there was anything worth living for, till this war came on" (419). Claude refuses to believe that the war "has killed everything" (418); in fact, he asserts, "I don't believe it has killed anything. It has only scattered things" (419). The distinct gulf between Claude's voice and Cather's is evident here. Her affection for this "inarticulate" youth "butting his way through the world" (Cather qtd. in Merrill 78) is as genuine as is her respect for the man who realizes that no one is ever going back to anything (409). Cather implies that indeed men could "still die for an idea" (419), but boys like Claude would only die for the wrong idea.

In their advance to the front, Claude, who is deeply committed to his "own adventure" and to "the bright face of danger" (420), goes to find a place for his men to sleep (421), and in response to Captain Maxey's directive, "Come along, boys," Claude counters, "The men are pretty well beat out, Captain Maxey" (425-26, italics added). Believing that he now knows about life and war, Claude promotes his troop of weary boys to heroic status as splendid men. They take the road as haggard men (426) but begin "squaring their shoulders and throwing out their chests" (428) in a show of childlike bravado before the residents of Beaufort. Later when treated almost like gods for having driven out the Germans, Claude's company revels in the attention they receive, and "the boys [lose] all their bashfulness" (436). Only after observing the troops' relationships with the village women does Claude feel that he must lecture "his men" (436). But, just as in the incident of discovering the dead German officer's photograph of his male lover, Claude does not admit that his men's philandering is anything more than harmless flirtation that merits scolding. For Claude, his splendid men are wonderful boys too, and adult sexual behavior and its consequences are not something he wishes to acknowledge. Claude's admiration for the boy-men under his command follows what Paul Fussell describes as a "standard experience during the war," that is, an "officer's discovery that his attitude toward his men, beginning in anxiety and formality, [turns] into something close to devotion" (164). He cannot chastise them, for they have become a part of himself; together they form a true comitatus. Together as men they have embarked on the "great adventure," sanctioned by a shared, boyish idealism.

Interestingly, in the penultimate chapter of the novel, as Company B attempts to hold the Boar's Snout and the Moltke Trench, Cather interchangeably refers to the troops as men and boys, Claude's very perception. They are boys when they are wilted with fatigue or frightened and repulsed by the escaping gases from decaying bodies. They are men when they relieve the exhausted Texas contingent, "dying men" when their trenches explode beneath them, and men who "had become like rock" as they hold the position (451-52). Blind to taking any action except by express command, these doughboys become at once the objects of Cather's respect and of her regret.

Biographers of Cather recount with what interest and compassion she talked with returning men of the American Expeditionary Forces, even having groups of them visit at her Bank Street apartment. She visited sick ones at the hospital and was "moved by these encounters" (Woodress 305). Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant records that Cather "wanted to know" about the war, but as Cather wrote in a letter to Sergeant, many of the thousands of returning doughboys were reluctant to tell all, sure that "they did not win the war," and they "hid their decorations . . . under their greatcoats" (155, 154). Still, Cather wrote, they were "so surprisingly endearing, vital!" (qtd. in Sergeant 154). Her simultaneous attraction to these youths and repugnance for the sacrifice they had been asked to make underscore her narrative stance, which appears at times "unstable and shifting," as Sharon O'Brien has pointed out (191). Cather clearly found the "results of this roll call on the prairies" both "terrible" and "wonderful" (qtd. in O'Brien 192). She knew the slim chance such prairie youths had of returning from a war that took eight million lives, but if some vestige of that lost simplicity might endure, she was ready to welcome it.

Cather's vision, however, is not Claude's limited vision. Raymond Wilson correctly asserts that "the person who created the cynical realism of David Gerhardt could not have had Claude's naïveté" (30). Cather is not Claude, but Claude is "meant to be a representative foot soldier" (Skaggs 41). He is one of our boys, in all his innocence, as some early reviewers realized. "Miss Cather intended Claude to be not an exceptional type but a thoroughly representative American soldier," writes Heywood Broun in his New York World review of 1922 (133). "His companions in the regiment were like him, American boys never more American than in foreign surroundings and in circumstances unforeseen, inexplicable and appalling," writes another contemporary reviewer (Lovett 146).

If Cather overidealized the American doughboy and the war, as John H. Randall III claims (170), many of her contemporaries did not see it. Rather, they saw in Cather's doughboys their own boys. But that such naïfs should survive the war was problematic, except for their natural vigor and physical stamina. Cather describes the returning transports' decks covered not with boys but "with brown men" (455, italics added). "They are not the same men who went away"; they are melancholy, indifferent, and thoughtful (455). A "slightly cynical expression" lies on some faces, and their expressions are likely to "puzzle [their] friends when [they] get home" (456, 457). These returning soldiers are no longer naïve boys. They are men who "square their shoulders and smile knowingly at one another" (457). Only the few return, though, for, like Claude, "Most of the boys who fell in [the] war were unknown, even to themselves. They were too young" (394). Mrs. Wheeler realizes this fact and thinks that "the flood of meanness and greed had been held back just long enough for the boys to go over" but that "one by one the heroes of that war, the men of dazzling soldiership, leave prematurely the world they have come back to" (458, italics added). The slow-witted but compassionate Mahailey knows instinctively these facts and offers the final characterization of Claude and what he represents: "You'll see your boy up yonder," she tells Mrs. Wheeler (459).

In 1915 Henry James wrote that the war had "used up words . . . and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression" (qtd. in Buitenhuis 61). Through the experience and propaganda of war, language had changed, had even been devalued. Claude, as a representative of his time and of his peers, struggles to find the words that will suffice. He is the doughboy, and they, he. But, in the final analysis, these boys are expected to perform as men, to shed their naïveté and to make the world safe. Cather's war novel thus offers more than the portrait of a singular, disillusioned youth whose high ideals go unmolested by a convenient death. Claude's comrades in arms are as important to Cather's purpose as is her protagonist. If Claude is proud of his "wonderful men" (453), as he perceives them to be, Cather has great affection for her "American boys who had a right to fight for a civilization they knew" (312). They were as green as their money, but they were "dear, tender-hearted," and fully American.