"No, sir--I'm from Maryland. My father joined the Army of Virginia
two days before Bull Run."
"Are you all Southerners here, then?"
"We're sure _not_," came a chorus of voices. "Nix on Secesh ... John
Brown's Body...." Jackson developed nerves again. He felt as if he had
asked a Nationalist meeting to join him in drinking confusion to the
Pope. The company did not seem disposed to let him off, however.
"Which do you think ought to have won, Lootenant? You were
neutral--let's hear it."
Jackson looked apologetically at the Commander.
"Well, sir, I think the North _had_ to win; and" (he hurried on) "it's
just as well she did, because if she hadn't there wouldn't be any
U.S.A. now--only a lot of small states."
"That's so; but there need not have been any war at all."
"There needn't, sir; but it made the U.S.A. all the same. The big
event of the Franco-Prussian War wasn't the surrender at Sedan; it was
the crowning of the German Emperor at Versailles. And in the Civil
War--well, it made one nation of the Americans in the same way as the
other did of the Germans."
"Well, Lootenant, if wars are just to make nations into one, what was
the good of our wars with you?"
Jackson was getting over his self-consciousness, and it was dawning on
him that the American Navy has a method of "drawing" very similar to
that in use in his own.
"They were a lot of use," he protested. "We sent German troops against
you, and you killed lots of them."
There was a general laugh.
"Say, Jackson," came a voice, "this little old country of yours isn't
doing much with the Germans now except kill them. Say, she's great!
You're doing all the work, and you've kept on telling us you're doing
nix. Your papers just talk small, as if your Army was only a
Yale-Princetown football crowd, and you were the coon and not the Big
Stick of the bunch that's in it."
"Well, you see, we don't like talking about ourselves except to just
buck our own people up."
Jackson's tone as he said this was, I regret to say, just what yours
or mine would have been. It could only be described as "smug."
"You sure don't. We like to say what we're doing when we come from New
York."
Jackson prepared for an effort of tact. "I hear," he said, "you've got
quite a lot of troops across already."
They told him--and his eyes opened.
"_What!_" he said. "And how many----?" He digested the answers for a
moment, and decided that his store of tact could be pigeon-holed again
for a while. "But what about--your papers haven't--I don't call that
talking much. We still think you're just beginning."
"So we are,--we've hardly started. But our papers were given the wise
word, and they don't talk war secrets."
Jackson readjusted his ideas slightly, and his attitude deflated
itself. The transportation of the First Expeditionary Force had been
talked of as a big thing, but this--and he had until then heard no
whisper of it.
"And the country?" he asked. "What about all your pro-Germans and
aliens?"
"They don't," came the answer. "What do you think of Wilson now?"
Jackson edged away to cover again. "He's a very fine statesman, and a
much bigger man than we thought him once."
"Same here; and he knows his America. He waited and he waited, and all
the time the country was just getting more raw about the Germans, and
then when he was good and ready he came in; and I guess now he's got
the country _solid_."
Jackson pondered this for a moment, studying the clean-cut young
faces--all of the universal "Naval" stamp--around him.
"I don't know," he said slowly, "that it wouldn't have been better for
us if we'd been able to stop out a few months ourselves at first. It
would have made _us_ more solid too. But we simply had to come in at
once."
"You had; and if you hadn't, we'd have talked at you some."
Jackson laughed. "What! 'Too proud to fight,' and all that sort of
thing? Yes, we'd have deserved it too. I say, what a shame Admiral
Mahan died right at the beginning! There's nobody to take his place
and write this war up."
"Yes, he'd have been over here first tap of the gong. And he'd have
seen it all for himself, and given you Britishers and us lectures on
the war of 1812--and every other war too."
"Yes, it's a great pity. He taught us what sea-power was, and till
then we hardly knew we had it at all."
"Well, he taught you enough to get us busy mailing you paper about the
blockade last year."
Jackson grinned. "You couldn't say much. You made all the precedents
yourselves when you blockaded the South in '61. We only had to refer
you to your own letters to get out of the argument."
The First Lieutenant beckoned for the cigar box again. "You knew too
much diplomatic work for us in those days. We were new to that card
game. But I'd sooner hear our talk now than the sort of gentle
breathing of your folks when it comes to diplomacy."
"Never mind," said Jackson. "We're getting better. We'll have an
autocracy, like you, before the war's over, instead of the democracy
we've got now."
The circle settled down and waited. This was evidently not an unarmed
foe, in the ancient Anglo-Saxon game.
"Amurrica's the only real democracy in the universe," said an
incautious voice. Two heads turned towards the speaker, and several
pairs of eyes spoke volumes.
"I beg your pardon," said Jackson. "America's a great country, but as
you told me just now, she's solid. That means she's so keen on getting
on with the work that she's chosen a boss and told him to go ahead and
give his orders, and so long as he does his best to get on with the
work, the people aren't going to quarrel with him. Now we are not
really solid, just because we're too much of a democracy."
"Say, you wouldn't think that if you'd been over and seen our last
elections; but there's sense in it, all the same. But Lloyd
George--isn't he the same sort of Big Stick over here?"
"You read our political papers and see," said Jackson. "Do you take
much interest in politics in your Navy?"
"Do we hell--does yours?"
"Not a bit, except to curse at them. Navies are outside politics."
"Except the German's, and their army and navy and politics are all the
same thing; and they'll all come down together, too."
"Yes, but it's going to take some tough scrapping to do it. Let's hope
no one starts fighting over the corpse when she's beaten."
"Well, I guess you won't, and we won't. We've both got all the land we
can do with, and if there are any colonies to hand out after, we
won't mind who gets 'em so long as the Kaiser doesn't. What we ought
to do is to join England in a policing act for the world, and just
keep them all from fighting."
"That'd be no good. The rest of them would combine against us. It
would only mean a different Balance of Power."
"Oh! Now you're talking European. We stand out of the old-world
Balance."
"You can't now. You've got hitched up in it, and you'll find you're
tangled when you want to get back."
"We sure won't. We'll pull out when this round-up's over--you watch us."
The Commander glanced at his watch and rose. "Dinner's at 'half-six,'"
he said. "You'd better let me show you the way to your room."
Jackson rose and followed him aft to the spare cabin. "Here you are,"
said the American. "Hope you'll be comfortable. The boys will do their
best to make your stay here real home-like, and I hope you'll stay
just as long as you can."
"I sure will, sir," came the answer, in a voice that was fast losing
its English drawl; and Jackson, alone with his thoughts, stared at the
door-curtain, and wondered why on earth it should have been considered
necessary to tell him that a supply of tact would be useful to him in
his new job.