Split Hill by Maggie Schlundt

Split Hill: an essay set in a dream discussing how Cornell College students felt/feel about War.

I fell asleep thinking about war. My greasy head rested on an article describing pacifist movements, my legs crumpled quickly copied essays about protests, my chest rose and fell against a fading black-and-white photograph of stoic naval cadets, my hip smashed the printed words of former Cornellians, a small drop of drool pooled around the fragile phrase: this must be the last.

Cornell knows war. Union soldiers strolled gruffly across its campus in 1863, WWI flight training interrupted classes in 1917, the navy filled the Bowman Hall cafeteria in 1943, in 1968 the school newspaper published radical articles questioning: ‘Why Vietnam?’, now, our country fights two unnecessary wars at once, and we sit still on our isolated hilltop.

I dreamt two men in 1940s wool suits and ties, short pants, hair slicked back, walked by me as I sat on a bench. They stopped and looked at me with round, disappointed eyes. “Why are you sitting ignorantly by?” the one on the left asked. “What’s going on?!” I panicked. “Exactly”. His name was Gordon Meredith, a passionate and aggressive student who wrote a piece for the Cornell ‘War Years’ booklet published in 1942. The pages have since yellowed and curled but his words made my stomach bubble with guilt, made me question my lack of action: “Midwest Isolationism”, he wrote, “has boundless opportunities to creep into our lives here in Mt. Vernon…No bombs will ever hit near this little burg where nothing more transpires than the harvesting of corn and the raising of pigs…why yes, we know there is a war going on. But that reluctance to do more than bare requirements and sometimes not even that, is reflected in our attitudes. This is no time for fence straddling or turning back!” The other suited man placed a calming hand on Gordon’s heaving shoulders and extended his other hand out towards me. He introduced himself as Charles Higbie, a writer for the Cornellian. After World War II broke out in 1939, he penned an article that predicted disillusioned and “cynically isolationist” attitudes towards the war but rationally urged against them: “Life in a Midwestern college will seem very prosaic so far from where the fate of civilization is being determined…there will be a tendency to minimize ourselves, to assume that we can in no way affect the struggle on which all our thoughts, hopes, and fears will be attached. That…will be the biggest mistake we may fall into.”

I looked at their expectant faces, highlighted by an invisible light source, and I had to move, I had to act. I got off the bench and ran until I smelled flowers and body odor. “Why is there a war?” a quiet, airy voice asked me. “Did a legitimate government ask for our aid or was it a puppet government?” standing before me, hair longer than mine, stroking his prickly golden beard, was David Nunan, organizer of a 1967 student protest demonstration that he boasted “made all who participated in them, or watched or heard about them do a wonderful thing – think about something bigger than our own private lives, think about something important to all mankind”. David turned in his draft card at a 1968 rally in Iowa City. He asked why I didn’t. He kept mumbling about the ‘immoral war’ and ‘a world coming apart’. A younger kid, Thomas Shives, nodded behind him and finally spoke up. He addressed me with the same speech he gave to the student body in May 1920: “We are frustrated and angry because we have been waiting too long. We have been waiting too long for a governmental realization that neglect at home and misdirected involvement abroad can only lead to unnecessary division, violence and hatred within our own country.” Though Cornell is admittedly small, notably isolated, it could not, cannot, escape said division. It is split.

I’m confused. Dreams can be exhausting. I walked past the hippie activists and returned to my bench, to where I started, hesitant to support the war, not wanting to do nothing, too timid to protest. But the bench isn’t empty as I left it. A dark figure, a man in a crumpled Marines uniform sits, spine straight, face unable to mask his terror. “I get sick at times”, he breathes. “I don’t want to learn to kill.” I recognize his words from an article he wrote in ‘the War Years’. Bill Slothower, about to enter the Marines, to fight in World War II. “This thing has transcended my own little scheme, my own desires, my own little self complacency.” He wants to be ready. I don’t know how to comfort him. I hold his hand. It’s cold. I’m cold. I leave the bench. I grab for a blanket. My eyes crank open, awake, but I’m still haunted. I turn on the TV. War.

Specked with saliva- evidence of my deep slumber, 1943 Cornell Grad and WWII veteran Bob Reideler cries desperately from a copied paper: “build a foundation for permanent peace or this will happen all over again and again, each time becoming progressively worse.” We are deaf and blind. It’s all downhill from here. And the hill is cracked.