You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.
You may feel inclined to dispute the assertion. You may even consider yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to you. "It could never have happened to me," you may argue. But it could.
You had no control over the selection of your parents or the date and place of your birth. The advantages which saved you from having it happen to you were the merest accidents; they did not arise from your own inherent merit. It was your good luck to be born in America. No protest of yours could have prevented your being born in Central Europe. So, had it not been for the fortune of your birth, it might have happened to you.
But perhaps you think that though you had been born in Central Europe, the horrors of injustice and famine, described in these pages, would not have been shared by you. You would have risen above them; you would have been too astute, too far-sighted, too resourceful to be entrapped by them. Whoever else had gone under, you by your superior capacity for industry would have dug yourself out on top.
You wouldn't. Industry, astuteness, farsightedness, resourcefulness-none of these admirable qualities would have saved you. You must disabuse your mind of the prejudice that the starving peoples of the stricken countries are shiftless, unemployable, uncivilised, or in any way inferior to yourself. To tell the truth you are probably exactly the sort of person who, had you been born in Central Europe, would have gone to the bottom first. You belong to the middle or upper class. You are highly intelligent and specialised. You gain your living with your brains and not with your hands. If society were disrupted and temporarily bankrupt, so that the delicate mechanism of modern business ceased to function, your way of earning your living would no longer find a market. You would have to turn from working with your brains to working with your hands. Everyone in your class would be doing the same; there would not be enough manual labour to go round. You might have made investments in the days of your prosperity; but in the face of national insolvency your former thrift would not avail you. Your investments would be so much worthless paper, totally unnegotiable. You might have hoarded actual cash, the way the peasants do in their stockings. Even this reserve would soon be exhausted since, by reason of the depreciation in the currency, it would take a hundred times more money to purchase any service or commodity than it used. In starving Central Europe it is the doctors, professors, engineers, artists, musicians, business men, lawyers-the intellectual wealth of the nations, who have been the first to perish. The further they had dug themselves out of the pit of crude manual labour, where all labour starts, the more precipitous was their descent.
But perhaps you think that though these things might have happened to you, you would not have deserved them-not in the sense that Central Europe deserves them. Had you been an Austrian your moral fineness would have revolted against your countrymen's war of opportunism and aggression. Perhaps! But men act in crowds and the probabilities are against you. All the enemy peoples with whom I have conversed, have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed-liberty, justice, righteousness. Had their Governments not convinced them that their inheritance of freedom was in danger, they would not have risked their happiness in carnage. This at least is certain, whatever else is in doubt: the ordinary, home-loving citizen, whatever his nationality, only becomes a soldier and makes himself a target for shell-fire under the compulsion of a lofty motive. It was the bad fortune of the citizens of the Central Powers that their lofty motives were the offspring of lies-lies retailed to them as truth by the criminals and casuists who were their leaders. Had we been of their citizenship, should we have been more alert to discern the falsehood?
That I should write in this spirit, pleading for our late enemies, may cause a slight amazement in a public who have read my war-books. My reason-I will not say my excuse:-is that I have visited our late enemies' need and in the presence of human agony animosity dies. One ceases to question how far their suffering is the outcome of their folly; his sole desperation is to bind up their wounds-especially the wounds of their children. When witnessing death and starvation on the wholesale scale now prevailing in Europe, he forgets his austere self-righteousness and substitutes mercy for justice. "It might have happened to me," he says; "these women might have been my wife, my mother, my sisters, and these children, save for the grace of God, might have been my children."
One never believes that his own calamities are possible until they have happened. He thinks of himself proudly, as an individual immune from the contagion of adversity. It was so that the Russian aristocrats thought of themselves. If in the summer of 1914 the stranger of The Third Floor Back had mysteriously appeared at the Imperial Court in Petrograd and had announced, "Unless you have compassion and share with the outcast, the day will come when there will not be a peasant in Russia as forlorn as you," he would have been laughed ta scorn and sent into exile. Yet that day has come. In Warsaw you may see the princesses, the generals, the fops, the plutocrats, the law-givers of that resplendent Court, clothed in rags, their feet in sodden boots, waiting their turn in the breadline. After such a sight, no reversal of fortunes, however far-fetched, seems impossible. It might happen to anybody. It might happen to me or you. There is even a likelihood that it will happen unless we learn to have compassion. Central Europe will not die patiently of starvation indefinitely. Nations which civilisation has condemned to starve to death have nothing to lose by giving way to violence; they may have something to gain by it The more desperate their need becomes, the more likely they are to risk the gamble. They would at least get the satisfaction before they perished of making other nations, which had been heedless of their misery, as outcast as themselves. There lies the danger.
So, however fanciful it may seem to say in writing of Central Europe, "It might have happened to you," there is a grim possibility about the final statement, "It may happen yet."
Out To Win: The Story of America in France by Coningsby Dawson
The excessively thin man glanced up from the puddle of lime that he was stirring and regarded the excessively fat man with a smile of meek interrogation.
It happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.
Lucia Balstone thought she had chosen the right man to spend the rest of her life with, but he was the one who ended her life. Their ten-year marriage seemed like a joke when her husband stabbed her with a dagger. Fortunately, God is never blind to people's tears. Lucia got a second chance. She was reborn at the age of 22, before all the terrible things had happened. This time, she was determined to avenge herself and let those who hurt her pay! She made an elaborate list of her goals, and the first thing on her list was to marry her ex-husband's enemy, Alonso Callen!
"I heard you're going to marry Marcelo. Is this perhaps your revenge against me? It's very laughable, Renee. That man can barely function." Her foster family, her cheating ex, everyone thought Renee was going to live in pure hell after getting married to a disabled and cruel man. She didn't know if anything good would ever come out of it after all, she had always thought it would be hard for anyone to love her but this cruel man with dark secrets is never going to grant her a divorce because she makes him forget how to breathe.
Two years ago, Ricky found himself coerced into marrying Emma to protect the woman he cherished. From Ricky's perspective, Emma was despicable, resorting to underhanded schemes to ensure their marriage. He maintained a distant and cold attitude toward her, reserving his warmth for another. Yet, Emma remained wholeheartedly dedicated to Ricky for more than ten years. As she grew weary and considered relinquishing her efforts, Ricky was seized by a sudden fear. Only when Emma's life teetered on the edge, pregnant with Ricky's child, did he recognize-the love of his life had always been Emma.
Allison fell in love with Ethan Iversen, the soon-to-be Alpha of the Moonlight Crown pack. She always wanted him to notice her. Meanwhile, Ethan was an arrogant Alpha who thought a weak Omega could not be his companion. Ethan's cousin, Ryan Iversen, who came back from abroad and was the actual heir of the pack, never tried to get the position nor did he show any interest in it. He was a popular playboy Alpha but when he came back to the pack, one thing captured his eyes and that was Allison.
Marriage was a bed of thorns for Stella. She lived like an overworked and unhappy slave for six years in her matrimonial home. One day, her uncaring husband, Waylon said to her, "Ayla will be back soon. You have to move out tomorrow." "I want a divorce," responded Stella. She left without shedding a tear or trying to change Waylon's stone-cold heart. Days after their divorce, they met again. Stella was in the arms of another man. Waylon's blood boiled at the sight of her looking so happy. "So, you couldn't even wait a while before jumping into another man's arms?" he queried distastefully. "And who are you to question my decision? It's my life, so I call the shots. Stay out of my business!" Stella fired at him before turning to look at her new man with shiny eyes. Waylon immediately lost it.
"Never let anyone treat you like shit!" I learned that the hard way. For three years, I lived with my in-laws. They didn't treat me as their son-in-law but as a slave. I put up with everything because of my wife, Yolanda Lambert. She was the light of my life. Unfortunately, my whole world came crashing down the day I caught my wife cheating on me. I have never been so heartbroken. To have my revenge, I revealed my true identity. I was none other than Liam Hoffman—the heir of a family with trillions of dollars in assets! The Lamberts were utterly shocked after the big reveal. They realized what fools they had been for treating me like trash. My wife even knelt down and begged for my forgiveness. What do you think I did? Did I take her back or made her suffer? Find out!