Howells

This was another sad story. I couldn’t imagine tell a man that if he didn’t go to war I couldn’t be with him. Those would have to some very strong patriotic feeling that she had to have to put her country in front of her fiancé. Though he did make his decision on his own before she ended things with him the letter that she wrote very well could have pushed him into doing something rash and could have been what got him killed.

 I believe that Mrs. Gearson had the right ideas about war but that comes from living through a war. We don’t understand how bad war can be because there has been a war in the US since the Civil War. We have never had to live in constant fear that the enemy could come crashing through our door at any moment. That is the memory of war that Mrs. Gearson didn’t want his son to see and didn’t want her son to be involved with. War in those days was a very personal thing, you had to be close enough to the enemy to see their faces and that could be a very hard thing to live with knowing the face of every person that you killed in war. That is not something a mother wants for their child.

I completely agree with how the mother acted when Editha come to see her. Editha had urged her son to join an army on its way to war, against everything that she had taught him. Then she gave him a letter that very well could have pushed her son to do something that could have gotten him killed just so Editha would be proud of him and wouldn’t end their engagement because he wasn’t patriotic enough. If I had been in Mrs. Gearson’s shoes I would have done the same thing when Editha had come to my house. War is war and there will always be young women and men that see it as a romantic and patriotic thing to support it and there has to be someone to fight the battles and protect the innocent but as a mother there is not harder loss as losing your child. Then to have the woman that was pushing your son to go off to war and get killed that would have been one of the hardest meetings ever.