U.S. At War: Spring Is Coming

It was the first day of spring. Sunshine, which had never left the land in Florida and California, now poked timidly into the Midwest; but in the Rocky Mountains snow and heavy skies still weighed on lonely cabins. Spring was coming; it was almost here.

Down South, Atlanta was decked with the soft pink bloom of magnolia, the white tracery of “breath-of-spring” shrubs, the yellow islands of jonquils in deep green grass. Hopeful fishermen ringed Atlanta’s Piedmont Park Lake; but they never caught anything. On farms, fresh-turned furrows lay brick-red in the sun; farmers planting corn, cotton and peanuts shouted at their mules.

> On Gettysburg battlefield the dogwood and redbud trees were tipped with green; robins and bluebirds sang in their branches. In the Gettysburg Soldiers’ National Cemetery, buds were close to bursting on giant azaleas and big tulip trees.

In Washington, President Roosevelt could see spring right outside his office. Near his window a white jasmine shrub was beginning to blossom; pansies popped their bright faces around the brooding State Department rookery. The cherry trees budded around the Tidal Basin—except for the four sawed down in December by overzealous patriots. At noon and night, Washington’s parks, where the iris grew almost fast enough to be watched, were filled with lonesome boys & girls from small towns, who wondered how the spring looked back home.

> In Texas, gawky young lambs bounded stiff-legged up green hillsides; farmers put out their tomatoes; the first corn and cotton shoots pierced the fertile land of the Rio Grande Valley. In bottom pastures cows were bloated from eating too much fresh clover. Blue-bonnets carpeted the fields; red birds flashed in the forests; wasps began a lazy buzzing at barn rafters, building their nests. In San Antonio the first kites jerked high in the gusty winds; tennis courts were crowded; Mexican chicos waded in the shallows of San Antonio River.

Flowers of the desert stretched across Arizona; Picacho Pass, where the only far western encounter of the Civil War was fought, was splotched with pale yellow poppies, blue lupins, red Indian paint brush.

Farmers watched for the first leaves of the mesquite trees, then began their spring planting, sure now that there would be no more frost.

> To Kansas farmers, spring begins when the great blue herons return from the South to their ancient nesting places in the sycamore trees along the headwaters of Verdigris River. The birds had come; they flopped their ungainly wings, carrying new twigs to the slovenly nests where they have lived for generations. In river-bottom gumbo fields, farm boys trotted behind the plows, picking up angle worms from the fresh furrows. Old William Allen White waxed poetic in his Emporia Gazette over the first yellow crocuses on the Y.W.C.A. lawn. Emporia farmers noted with satisfaction that the first pig litters averaged three more than last year.

In Springfield, Ill. the trees around Abe Lincoln’s house were beginning to bud; but the grass was still brown around his white marble tomb in Oakridge Cemetery. In Chicago the north wind had stopped groaning among the skyscrapers, and the waters of Lake Michigan quieted to a rippling turquoise under the pale sun. In Chicago’s back streets, baseball and jacks games slowed motorists to a cautious crawl.

> Spring meant mostly mud to Detroit; at Willow Run and the other great new war plants, construction workers slid and slogged through the goo; trucks churned, coughed and sometimes gave up. In Pittsburgh spotless song sparrows from the South mingled in Frick Park with the grimy sparrows that had stuck out the winter. In Philadelphia green crept across the turf around Independence Hall. In the Hall’s rotunda, around the walls enclosing the Liberty Bell, stood evidences of a new kind of spring: shovels, sand buckets, pumps.

In Vermont snow still blanketed the land as farmers plugged in the maples for syrup. Along country highways New England children sold sprays of the first silver-grey pussy willow. At lunchtime on Boston’s wharves Irish stevedores chucked rocks at empty beer bottles floating in the harbor; warehouse workers played catch in cobble-stoned alleys. When the twilight was warm, Harvard students threw open their windows and shouted their old yard cry—”Oh, Rinehart!”—to show how good they felt.

> In the Rocky Mountains spring was late, after a long and bitter winter. At Steamboat Springs, Colo, the snow lay three feet deep, and skiing was still good in the passes. But anemones appeared among the yucca on the prairies, and under the spruce and pinon pine in the rocky foothills around Pikes Peak. Straggling flocks of sheep stumbled and bobbed along the canyons toward shearing corrals. In a region that lives on irrigation, the reservoirs were near overflowing, before thaws turned the mountain streams to torrents.

In the Northwest, land of rivers and great dams, spring was also late; cold winds still ripped down the Columbia River gorge; the white-petaled trillium, the spring flower of the fir woods, had not yet blossomed. But sunny days were warm at noon; and along Sandy River, where it pours into the Columbia, amateur fishermen, armed with bird cages, wastebaskets or old wooden boxes, scooped out thousands of wriggling little fish in the annual smelt run.

Spring was the season of high winds: in one leaden-skied day, tornadoes in the South and Midwest killed 136 people. Spring was the season of rain and flood: on the swollen Ohio River a towboat was whirled against a bridge; six men drowned. Spring was the season of fateful freaks of weather: four Army flyers in pursuit ships were blinded by a sudden Ohio snowstorm, crashed to their deaths. It was the season of basketball tournaments, spring football practice, the new stirrings of baseball. Soldiers far from home drank spring’s traditional bock beer—brands they had never heard of before.

Spring was coming, with its never-failing promise: the world might die, but it would be born again.