are impatient. There is no need of all that defensive argument. England
realizes the difficulty of President Wilson and has a profound reverence
for his ideals."
But my friend used to shake his head sadly.
"You are always guying us," he said. "Even at the mess-table your young
officers fling about the words 'too proud to fight!' It makes it very
hard for an American among you."
That was true. Our young officers, and some of our old ones, liked to
"pull the leg" of any American who sat at table with them. They made
jocular remarks about President Wilson as a complete letter-writer. That
unfortunate remark, "too proud to fight," was too good to miss by young
men with a careless sense of humor. It came in with devilish
appropriateness on all sorts of occasions, as when a battery of ours
fired off a consignment of American shells in which some failed to
explode.
"They're too proud to fight, sir," said a subaltern, addressing the
major, and there was a roar of laughter which hurt an American war
correspondent in English uniform.
The English sense of humor remains of schoolboy character among any
body of young men who delight in a little playful "ragging," and there
is no doubt that some of us were not sufficiently aware how sensitive
any American was at this time, and how a chance word spoken in jest
would make his nerves jump.
But I am sure that the main body of English opinion was not impatient
with America before she entered the war, but, on the contrary,
understood the difficulty of obtaining a unanimous spirit over so vast a
territory in order to have the whole nation behind the President. Indeed
we exaggerated the differences of opinion in the United States and made
a bogy of the alien population in the great "melting-pot." It seemed to
many of us certain that if America declared war against Germany there
would be civil riots and rebellions on a serious scale among
German-Americans. That thought was always in our minds when we justified
Wilson's philosophical reluctance to draw the sword; that and a very
general belief among English "intellectuals" that it would be well to
have one great nation and democracy outside the arena of conflict, free
from the war madness that had taken possession of Europe, to act as
arbitrator if no decision could be obtained in the battlefields. It is
safe to say now that in spite of newspaper optimism, engineered by the
propaganda departments, there were many competent observers in the army
as well as in the country who were led to the belief, after the first
eighteen months of strife, that the war would end in a deadlock and that
its continuance would only lead to further years of mutual
extermination. For that reason they looked to the American people, under
the leadership of President Wilson, as the only neutral power which
could intervene to save the civilization of Europe, not by military
acts, but by a call back to sanity and conciliation.
It was not until the downfall of Russia and the approaching menace of an
immense concentration of German divisions on the western front that
France and England began to look across the Atlantic with anxious eyes
for military aid. Our immense losses and the complete elimination of
Russia gave the Germans a chance of striking us mortal blows before
their own man-power was exhausted. The vast accession of power that
would come to us if the United States mobilized her manhood and threw
them into the scale was realized and coveted by our military leaders,
but even after America's declaration of war the imagination of the rank
and file in England and France was not profoundly stirred by a new hope
of support. Vaguely we heard of the tremendous whirlwind efforts "over
there" to raise and equip armies, but there was hardly a man that I met
who really believed in his soul that he would ever hear the tramp of
American battalions up our old roads of war or see the Stars and Stripes
fluttering over headquarters in France. Our men knew that at the
quickest it would take a year to raise and train an American army, and
in 1917 the thought of another year of war seemed fantastic, incredible,
impossible. We believed--many of us--that before that year had passed
the endurance of European armies and peoples would be at an end, and
that in some way or other, by German defeat or general exhaustion, peace
would come. To American people that may seem like weakness of soul. In a
way it was weakness, but justified by the superhuman strain which our
men had endured so long. Week after week, month after month, year after
year, they had gone into the fields of massacre, and strong battalions
had come out with frightful losses, to be made up again by new drafts
and to be reduced again after another spell in the trenches or a few
hours "over the top." It is true they destroyed an equal number of
Germans, but Germany seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of
"gun-fodder." Only extreme optimists, and generally those who were most
ignorant, prophesied an absolute smash of the enemy's defensive power.
By the end of 1917, when the British alone had lost 800,000 men in the
fields of Flanders, the thought that another year still might pass
before the end of the war seemed too horrible to entertain by men who
were actually in the peril and misery of this conflict. Not even then
did it seem likely that the Americans could be in before the finish. It
was only when the startling menace of a new German offensive, in a last
and mighty effort, threatened our weakened lines that England became
impatient at last for American legions and sent out a call across the
Atlantic, "Come quickly or you will come too late!"
America was ready. In a year she had raised the greatest army in the
world by a natural energy which was terrific in its concentration and
enthusiasm. We knew that if she could get those men across the Atlantic,
in spite of submarines, the Germans would be broken to bits, unless they
could break us first by a series of rapid blows which would outpace the
coming of the American troops. We did not believe that possible. Even
when the enemy broke through the British lines in March of 1918, with
one hundred and fourteen divisions to our forty-eight, we did not
believe they would destroy our armies or force us to the coast. Facts
showed that our belief was right, though it was a touch-and-go chance.
We held our lines and England sent out her last reserves of
youth--300,000 of them--to fill up our gaps. The Germans were stopped at
a dead halt, exhausted after the immensity of their effort and by
prodigious losses. Behind our lines, and behind the French front, there
came now a tide of "new boys." America was in France, and the doom of
the German war machine was at hand.
It would be foolish of me to recapitulate the history of the American
campaign. The people of the United States know what their men did in
valor and in achievement, and Europe has not forgotten their heroism.
Here I will rather describe as far as I may the impressions created in
my own mind by the first sight of those American soldiers and by those I
met on the battle-front.
The very first "bunch" of "Yanks" (as we called them) that I met in the
field were non-combatants who suddenly found themselves in a tight
corner. They belonged to some sections of engineers who were working on
light railways in the neighborhood of two villages called Gouzeaucourt
and Fins, in the Cambrai district. On the morning of November 30, 1917,
I went up very early with the idea of going through Gouzeaucourt to the
front line, three miles ahead, which we had just organized after Byng's
surprise victory of November 20th, when we broke through the Hindenburg
lines with squadrons of tanks, and rounded up thousands of prisoners and
many guns. As I went through Fins toward Gouzeaucourt I was aware of
some kind of trouble. The men of some labor battalions were tramping
back in a strange, disorganized way, and a number of field batteries
were falling back.
"What's up?" I asked, and a young officer answered me.
"The Germans have made a surprise attack and broken through."
"Where are they?" I asked again, startled by this news.
He pointed up the road.
"Just there.... Inside Gouzeaucourt."
The situation was extremely unpleasant. The enemy had brought up some
field-guns and was scattering his fire. It was in a field close by that
I met the American engineers.
"I guess this is not in the contract," said one of them, grinning. "All
the same, if I find any Britisher to lend me a rifle I'll get a knock at
those fellers who spoiled my breakfast."
One man stooped for a petrol tin and put it on his head as a shell came
howling over us.
"I guess this makes me look more like you other guys," he said, with a
glance at our steel helmets.
One tall, loose-limbed, swarthy fellow, who looked like a Mexican, but
came from Texas, as he told me, was spoiling for a fight, and with many
strange oaths declared his intention of going into Gouzeaucourt with the
first batch of English who would go that way with him. They were the
Grenadier Guards who came up to the counter-attack, munching apples, as
I remember, when they marched toward the enemy. Some of the American
engineers joined them and with borrowed rifles helped to clear out the
enemy's machine-gun nests and recapture the ruins of the village. I met
some of them the following day again, and they told me it was a "darned
good scrap." They were "darned" good men, hard, tough, humorous, and
full of individual character.
The general type of young Americans was not, however, like these
hard-grained men of middle age who had led an adventurous life before
they came to see what war was like in Europe. We watched them curiously
as the first battalions came streaming along the old roads of France and
Picardy, and we were conscious that they were different from all the men
and all the races behind our battle-front. Physically they were
splendid--those boys of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions
whom we saw first of all. They were taller than any of our regiments,
apart from the Guards, and they had a fine, easy swing of body as they
came marching along. They were better dressed than our Tommies, whose
rough khaki was rather shapeless. There was a dandy cut about this
American uniform and the cloth was of good quality, so that, arriving
fresh, they looked wonderfully spruce and neat compared with our
weatherworn, battle-battered lads who had been fighting through some
hard and dreadful days. But those accidental differences did not matter.
What was more interesting was the physiognomy and character of these
young men who, by a strange chapter of history, had come across the wide
Atlantic to prove the mettle of their race and the power of their nation
in this world struggle. It came to me, and to many other Englishmen, as
a revelation that there was an American type, distinctive, clearly
marked off from our own, utterly different from the Canadians,
Australians, and New-Zealanders, as strongly racial as the French or
Italians. In whatever uniform those men had been marching one would have
known them as Americans. Looking down a marching column, we saw that it
was something in the set of the eyes, in the character of the
cheek-bones, and in the facial expression that made them distinctive.
They had a look of independence and self-reliance, and it was as visible
as the sun that these were men with a sort of national pride and
personal pride, conscious that behind them was a civilization and a
power which would give them victory though they in the vanguard might
die. Those words express feebly and foolishly the first impression that
came to us when the "Yanks" came marching up the roads of war, but that
in a broad way was the truth of what we thought. I remember one officer
of ours summed up these ideas as he stood on the edge of the road,
watching one of those battalions passing with their transport.
"What we are seeing," he said, "is the greatest thing that has happened
in history since the Norman Conquest. It is the arrival of America in
Europe. Those boys are coming to fulfill the destiny of a people which
for three hundred years has been preparing, building, growing, for the
time when it will dominate the world. Those young soldiers will make
many mistakes. They will be mown down in their first attacks. They will
throw away their lives recklessly, because of their freshness and
ignorance. But behind them are endless waves of other men of their own
breed and type. Germany will be destroyed because her man-power is
already exhausted, and she cannot resist the weight which America will
now throw against her. But by this victory, which will leave all the
old Allies weakened and spent and licking their wounds, America will be
the greatest power in the world, and will hold the destiny of mankind in
her grasp. Those boys slogging through the dust are like the Roman
legionaries. With them marches the fate of the world, of which they are
masters."
"A good thing or a bad?" I asked my friend.
He made a circle in the dust with his trench stick, and stared into the
center of it.
"Who can tell?" he said, presently. "Was it good or bad that the Romans
conquered Europe, or that afterward they fell before the barbarians? Was
it good or bad that William and his Normans conquered England? There is
no good or bad in history; there is only change, building-up, and
disintegrating, new cycles of energy, decay, and rebirth. After this
war, which those lads will help to win, the power will pass to the west,
and Europe will fall into the second class."
Those were high views. Thinking less in prophecy, getting into touch
with the actual men, I was struck by the exceptionally high level of
individual intelligence among the rank and file, and by the general
gravity among them. The American private soldier seemed to me less
repressed by discipline than our men. He had more original points of
view, expressed himself with more independence of thought, and had a
greater sense of his own personal value and dignity. He was immensely
ignorant of European life and conditions, and our Tommies were superior
to him in that respect. Nor had he their easy way of comradeship with
French and Flemish peasants, their whimsical philosophy of life which
enabled them to make a joke in the foulest places and conditions. They
were harder, less sympathetic; in a way, I think, less imaginative and
spiritual than English or French. They had no tolerance with foreign
habits or people. After their first look round they had very little use
for France or the French. The language difficulty balked them at the
outset and they did not trouble much to cope with it, though I remember
some of the boys sitting under the walls of French villages with small
children who read out words in conversation-books and taught them to
pronounce. They had a fierce theoretical hatred of the Germans, who,
they believed, were bad men, in the real old-fashioned style of devil
incarnate, so that it was up to every American soldier to kill Germans
in large numbers. It was noticeable that after the armistice, when the
American troops were billeted among German civilians, that hatred wore
off very quickly, as it did with the English Tommies, human nature being
stronger than war passion. Before they had been in the fighting-line a
week these "new boys" had no illusions left about the romance or the
adventure of modern war. They hated shell-fire as all soldiers hate it,
they loathed the filth of the trenches, and--they were very homesick.
I remember one private soldier who had fought in the American-Spanish
war and in the Philippines--an old "tough."
"Three weeks of this war," he said, "is equal to three years of all
others."
But he and "the pups," as he called his younger comrades, were going to
see it through, and they were animated by the same ideals with which the
French and British had gone into the war.
"This is a fight for civilization," said one man, and another said,
"There'll be no liberty in the world if the Germans win."
It is natural that many of the boys were full of "buck" before they saw
the real thing, and were rather scornful of the British and French
troops, who had been such a long time "doing nothing," as they said.
"You've been kidding yourselves that you know how to fight," said one of
them to an English Tommy. "We've come to show you!"
That was boys' talk, like our "ragging," and was not meant seriously. On
the contrary, the companies of the Twenty-seventh Division who went into
action with the Australians at Hamel near Amiens--the first time that
American troops were in action in France--were filled with admiration
for the stolid way in which those veterans played cards in their dugouts
before going over the top at dawn. The American boys were tense and
strained, knowing that in a few hours they would be facing death. But
when the time came they went away like greyhounds, and were reckless of
fire.
"They'll go far when they've learned a bit," said the Australians.
They had to learn the usual lessons in the same old way, by mistakes, by
tragedy, by lack of care. They overcrowded their forward trenches so
that they suffered more heavily than they should have done under enemy
shell-fire. They advanced in the open against machine-gun nests and were
mown down. They went ahead too fast without "mopping up" the ground
behind them, and on the day they helped to break the Hindenburg line
they did not clear out the German dugouts, and the Germans came out with
their machine-guns and started fighting in the rear, so that when the
Australians came up in support they had to capture the ground again, and
lost many men before they could get in touch with the Americans ahead.
For some time the American transport system broke down, so that the
fighting troops did not always obtain their supplies on the field of
battle, and there were other errors, inevitable in an army starting a
great campaign with inexperienced staff officers. What never failed was
the gallantry of the troops, which reached heights of desperate valor in
the forest of the Argonne.
The officers were tremendously in earnest. What struck us most was their
gravity. Our officers took their responsibility lightly, laughed and
joked more readily, and had a boyish, whimsical sense of humor. It
seemed to us, perhaps quite wrongly, that the American officers were
not, on the whole, of a merry disposition. They were frank and hearty,
but as they walked about their billeting area behind the lines some of
them looked rather solemn and grim, and our young men were nervous of
them. I think that was simply a matter of facial expression plus a pair
of spectacles, for on closer acquaintance one found, invariably, that an
American officer was a human soul, utterly devoid of swank, simple,
straight, and delightfully courteous. Their modesty was at times almost
painful. They were over-anxious to avoid hurting the feelings of French
or British by any appearance of self-conceit. "We don't know a darned
thing about this war," said many of them, so that the phrase became
familiar to us. "We have come here to learn."
Well, they learned pretty quickly and there were some things they did
not need teaching--courage, endurance, pride of manhood, pride of race.
They were not going to let down the Stars and Stripes, though all hell
was against them. They won a new glory for the Star-spangled Banner, and
it was the weight they threw in and the valor that went with it which,
with the French and British armies attacking all together, under the
directing genius of Foch, helped to break the German war machine and to
achieve decisive and supreme victory.
It would have been better, I think, for America and for all of us,
especially for France, if quickly after victory the American troops had
gone back again. That was impossible because of holding the Rhine and
enforcing the terms of peace. But during the long time that great bodies
of American troops remained in France after the day of armistice, there
was occasion for the bigness of ideals and achievements to be whittled
down by the little nagging annoyances of a rather purposeless existence.
Boredom, immense and long enduring, took possession of the American army
in France. The boys wanted to go home, now that the job was done. They
wanted the victory march down Fifth Avenue, not the lounging life in
little French villages, nor even the hectic gayeties of leave in Paris.
Old French chateaux used as temporary headquarters suffered from
successive waves of occupation by officers who proceeded to modernize
their surroundings by plugging old panels for electric light and fixing
up telephone-wires through painted ceilings, to the horror of the
concierges and the scandal of the neighborhood. In the restaurants and
hotels and cinema halls the Americans trooped in, took possession of all
the tables, shouted at the waiters who did not seem to know their jobs,
and expressed strong views in loud voices (understood by French
civilians who had learned English in the war) about the miserable
quality of French food and the darned arrogance of French officers. It
was all natural and inevitable--but unfortunate. The French were too
quick to forget after armistice that they owed a good deal to American
troops for the complete defeat of Germany. The Americans were not quite
careful in remembering the susceptibilities of a sensitive people. So
there were disillusion and irritation on both sides, in a broad and
general way, allowing for many individual friendships between French and
Americans, many charming memories which will remain on both sides of the
Atlantic when the war is old in history.
Americans who overcame the language difficulty by learning enough to
exchange views with the French inhabitants--and there were many--were
able to overlook the minor, petty things which divided the two races,
and were charmed with the intelligence, spirit, and humor of the
French bourgeoisie and educated classes. They got the best out of
France, and were enchanted with French cathedrals, mediaeval towns,
picture-galleries, and life. Paris caught hold of them, as it takes hold
of all men and women who know something of its history and learn to know
and love its people. Thousands of American officers came to know Paris
intimately, from Montmartre to Montparnasse, became familiar and welcome
friends in little restaurants tucked away in the side-streets, where
they exchanged badinage with the proprietor and the waitresses, and felt
the spirit of Paris creep into their bones and souls. Along the Grands
Boulevards these young men from America watched the pageant of life pass
by as they sat outside the cafes, studying the little high-heeled ladies
who passed by with a side-glance at these young men, marveling at the
strange medley of uniforms, as French, English, Australian, New Zealand,
Canadian, Italian, Portuguese, and African soldiers went by, realizing
the meaning of "Europe" with all its races and rivalries and national
traditions, and getting to know the inside of European politics by
conversations with men who spoke with expert knowledge about this
conglomeration of peoples. Those young men who are now back in the
United States have already made a difference to their country's
intellectual outlook. They have taught America to look out upon the
world with wider vision and to abandon the old isolation of American
thought which was apt to ignore the rest of the human family and remain
self-contained and aloof from a world policy.