What Days in Which to Live!

By Mrs. A.J. Wilder

The world is growing smaller each day. It has been shrinking for centuries, but during these later years it is diminishing in size with an ever increasing swiftness, yet so gradual is the change that we do not realize what is taking place unless we compare life present with the past.

It is only a few years ago that out neighbors were only those who lived within a few miles of us. Now we make an afternoon with our neighbors 20 miles away with no greater effort.

The King and Queen of Belgium called on the English sovereigns not long ago. Their conveyance was an airplane and it took them only a short time to make the trip from Belgium to their destination in England.

Students of the future tell us that flying machines will come into general use after the war and perhaps we shall then drop in on our friends in England and France for afternoon tea just as casually as we used to happen in at our next door neighbor’s. We shall have friends in France and England by that time and those countries will never again seem far away. Even now, it is just ‘over there’ and with so many passing back and forth with millions of our common, every-day folks becoming intimately familiar with all the countries at war, the world will be much, much smaller when peace comes again.

It seems to me such a wonderful thing that the people of all the different nations of the earth are becoming so well acquainted. When people have fought and struggled and worked, gone hungry and eaten together they can never again be indifferent and distant toward one another. There people whom we have always carelessly bunched together in our minds as foreigners will be our friends and neighbors from this time on. Already we have shared our food with them; we have gone to their air in danger and sickness, in misfortune and misery, as is and always has been the privilege of good neighbors the world over, and in doing this we are only rerunning the neighborly kindness of France shown to the United States in the war of Independence and that of England in protecting us from Germany during the war with Spain.

As nations we have been neighbors for many years and now we are beginning to realize it as individuals. The people of the allied nations have learned that our sympathy is quick and our purse open to the needy and now they are finding out that our boys are good to fight beside.

As we who stay at home follow the operations on the various battle fronts, we have come to feel a personal interest in the heroic Belgian soldiers, holding the small corner of the country in spite of the worst the enemy could do; in the gallant French soldiers who set the bounds and said, “They shall not pass!” In the Italian soldiers who accomplished almost unbelievable feats fighting above the clouds on snowclad mountain peaks, thousands of them having left security in the United States to take part in the terrific combat,; and in the Russian soldiers, surely as brave as any who went out against armed Germans and artillery with their bare hands when there were no arms and ammunition and yet who were so simple souled and gentle minded as to be overcome with fair words and false promises.

Our admiration and sympathy has drawn us near to the soldiers of these different armies and to the people of their countries. We have been proud of their bravery and fortitude; we have rejoiced with them in their successes and sorrowed with them in their sufferings. This is what makes of people friends and neighbors. Never again can we be strangers.

If we can but broaden our vision to see world happenings as a whole, we cannot fail to be in accord with that young and eager person who exclaimed, “Glory! What days in which to live!”

Mrs. A.J. Wilder. "What Days in Which to Live!" Missouri Ruralist (September 20, 1918): 15.

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