I
Hasty generalisations are always tempting to travellers, and now and
then they strike out vivid truths that the observer loses sight of after
closer scrutiny. But nine times out of ten they hit wild.
Some years before the war, a French journalist produced a "thoughtful
book" on the United States. Of course he laid great stress on our
universal hustle for the dollar. To do that is to follow the line of
least resistance in writing about America: you have only to copy what
all the other travellers have said.
This particular author had the French gift of consecutive reasoning, and
had been trained in the school of Taine, which requires the historian to
illustrate each of his general conclusions by an impressive array of
specific instances. Therefore, when he had laid down the principle that
every American's ruling passion is money-making, he cast about for an
instance, and found a striking one.
"So dominant," he suggested, "is this passion, that in cultivated and
intellectual Boston--the Athens of America--which possesses a beautiful
cemetery in its peaceful parklike suburbs, the millionaire money-makers,
unwilling to abandon the quarter in which their most active hours have
been spent, have created for themselves a burying-ground in the centre
of the business district, on which they can look down from their lofty
office windows till they are laid there to rest in the familiar noise
and bustle that they love."
This literal example of the ruling passion strong in death seems to
establish once for all the good old truth that the American cares only
for money-making; and it was clever of the critic to find his instance
in Boston instead of Pittsburg or Chicago. But unfortunately the
cemetery for which the Boston millionaire is supposed to have abandoned
the green glades of Mount Auburn is the old pre-revolutionary grave-yard
of King's Chapel, in which no one has been buried since modern Boston
began to exist, and about which a new business district has grown up as
it has about similar carefully-guarded relics in all our expanding
cities, and in many European ones as well.
It is probable that not a day passes in which the observant American new
to France does not reach conclusions as tempting, but as wide of the
mark. Even in peace times it was inevitable that such easy inferences
should be drawn; and now that every branch of civilian life in France is
more or less topsy-turvy, the temptation to generalise wrongly is one
that no intelligent observer can resist.
It is indeed unfortunate that, at the very moment when it is most
needful for France and America to understand each other (on small
points, that is--we know they agree as to the big ones)--it is
unfortunate that at this moment France should be, in so many
superficial ways, unlike the normal peace-time France, and that those
who are seeing her for the first time in the hour of her trial and her
great glory are seeing her also in an hour of inevitable material
weakness and disorganisation.
Even four years of victorious warfare would dislocate the machinery of
any great nation's life; and four years of desperate resistance to a foe
in possession of almost a tenth of the national territory, and that
tenth industrially the richest in the country, four such years represent
a strain so severe that one wonders to see the fields of France tilled,
the markets provided, and life in general going on as before.
The fact that France is able to resist such a strain, and keep up such a
measure of normal activity, is one of the many reasons for admiring her;
but it must not make newcomers forget that even this brave appearance of
"business as usual" does not represent anything resembling the
peace-time France, with her magnificent faculties applied to the whole
varied business of living, instead of being centred on the job of
holding the long line from the Yser to Switzerland.
In 1913 it would have been almost impossible to ask Americans to picture
our situation if Germany had invaded the United States, and had held a
tenth part of our most important territory for four years. In 1918 such
a suggestion seems thinkable enough, and one may even venture to point
out that an unmilitary nation like America, after four years under the
invader, might perhaps present a less prosperous appearance than France.
It is always a good thing to look at foreign affairs from the home
angle; and in such a case we certainly should not want the allied
peoples who might come to our aid to judge us by what they saw if
Germany held our Atlantic sea-board, with all its great cities, together
with, say, Pittsburg and Buffalo, and all our best manhood were in a
fighting line centred along the Ohio River.
One of the cruellest things about a "people's war" is that it needs,
and takes, the best men from every trade, even those remotest from
fighting, because to do anything well brains are necessary, and a good
poet and a good plumber may conceivably make better fighters than
inferior representatives of arts less remote from war. Therefore, to
judge France fairly to-day, the newcomer must perpetually remind himself
that almost all that is best in France is in the trenches, and not in
the hotels, cafés and "movie-shows" he is likely to frequent. I have no
fear of what the American will think of the Frenchman after the two have
fraternized at the front.