transatlantic plunder that roused the average American. It awoke in
him a terrible, calm anger--a feeling that some one must be punished.
It was as though he broke off suddenly in what he was doing and
commenced rolling up his shirt-sleeves. There was a grim, surprised
determination about his quietness, which had not been seen in any
other belligerent nation. France became consciously and tragically
heroic when war commenced. England became unwontedly cheerful because
life was moving on grander levels. In America there was no outward
change. The old habit of feverish industry still persisted, but was
intensified and applied in unselfish directions.
What has impressed me most in my tour of the American activities
in France is the businesslike relentlessness of the preparations.
Everything is being done on a titanic scale and everything is being
done to last. The ports, the railroads, the plants that are being
constructed will still be standing a hundred years from now. There's
no "Home for Christmas" optimism about America's method of making war.
One would think she was expecting to be still fighting when all the
present generation is dead. She is investing billions of dollars in
what can only be regarded as permanent improvements. The handsomeness
of her spirit is illustrated by the fact that she has no understanding
with the French for reimbursement.
In sharp contrast with this handsomeness of spirit is the iciness of
her purpose as regards the Boche. I heard no hatred of the individual
German--only the deep conviction that Prussianism must be crushed at
all costs. The American does not speak of "Poor old Fritz" as we do
on our British Front. He's too logical to be sorry for his enemy.
His attitude is too sternly impersonal for him to be moved by any
emotions, whether of detestation or charity, as regards the Hun. All
he knows is that a Frankenstein machinery has been set in motion for
the destruction of the world; to counteract it he is creating another
piece of machinery. He has set about his job in just the same spirit
that he set about overcoming the difficulties of the Panama Canal.
He has been used to overcoming the obstinacies of Nature; the human
obstinacies of his new task intrigue him. I believe that, just as
in peace times big business was his romance and the wealth which
he gained from it was often incidental, so in France the job
as a job impels him, quite apart from its heroic object. After
all, smashing the Pan-Germanic Combine is only another form of
trust-busting--trust-busting with aeroplanes and guns instead of with
law and ledgers.
There is something almost terrifying to me about this quiet
collectedness--this Pierpont Morgan touch of sphinxlike aloofness
from either malice or mercy. Just as America once said, "Business
is business" and formed her world-combines, collaring monopolies and
allowing the individual to survive only by virtue of belonging to
the fittest, so now she is saying, "War is war"--something to be
accomplished with as little regard to landscapes as blasting a
railroad across a continent.
For the first time in the history of this war Germany is "up against"
a nation which is going to fight her in her own spirit, borrowing
her own methods. This statement needs explaining; its truth was first
brought to my attention at American General Headquarters. The French
attitude towards the war is utterly personal; it is bayonet to
bayonet. It depends on the unflinching courage of every individual
French man and woman. The English attitude is that of the
knight-errant, seeking high adventures and welcoming death in a noble
cause. But the German attitude disregards the individual and knows
nothing of gallantry. It lacks utterly the spiritual elation which
made the strength of the French at Verdun and of the English at Mons.
The German attitude is that of a soulless organisation, invented for
one purpose--profitable conquest. War for the Hun is not a final and
dreaded atonement for the restoring of justice to the world; it is
a business undertaking which, as he is fond of telling us, has never
failed to yield him good interest on his capital. I have seen a
good deal of the capital he has invested in the battlefields he has
lost--men smashed to pulp, bruised by shells out of resemblance to
anything human, the breeding place of flies and pestilence, no
longer the homes of loyalties and affections. I cannot conceive what
percentage of returns can be said to compensate for the agony expended
on such indecent Golgothas. However, the Hun has assured us that it
pays him; he flatters himself that he is a first-class business man.
But so does the American, and he knows the game from more points of
view. For years he has patterned his schools and colleges on German
educational methods. What applies to his civilian centres of learning
applies to his military as well. German text-books gave the basis for
all American military thought. American officers have been trained in
German strategy just as thoroughly as if they had lived in Potsdam.
At the start of the war many of them were in the field with the German
armies as observers. They are able to synchronise their thoughts with
the thoughts of their German enemies and at the same time to take
advantage of all that the Allies can teach them.
"War is a business," the Germans have said. The Americans, with an
ideal shining in their eyes, have replied, "Very well. We didn't want
to fight you; but now that you have forced us, we will fight you on
your own terms. We will make war on you as a business, for we are
businessmen. We will crush you coldly, dispassionately, without
rancour, without mercy till we have proved to you that war is not
profitable business, but hell."
The American, as I have met him in France, has not changed one iota
from the man that he was in New York or Chicago. He has transplanted
himself untheatrically to the scenes of battlefields and set himself
undisturbedly to the task of dying. There is an amazing normality
about him. You find him in towns, ancient with châteaux and wonderful
with age; he is absolutely himself, keenly efficient and irreverently
modern. Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border, from
the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you see the lean figure and
the slouch hat of the U.S.A. soldier. He is invariably well-conducted,
almost always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself. The
excessive gravity of the American in khaki has astonished the men of
the other armies who feel that, life being uncertain, it is well to
make as genial a use of it as possible while it lasts. The soldier
from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone,
listening--waiting for the call to come. He doesn't sink into the
landscape the way other troops have done. His impatience picks him
out--the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose. I have
seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the
crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself. Every man
and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is
happening inside him, "Let them take off my khaki and send me back
to America, or else hurry me into the trenches. I came here to get
started on this job; the waiting makes me tired."
"Let me get into the trenches," that was the cry of the American
soldier that I heard on every hand. Having witnessed his eagerness,
cleanness and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will
acquit himself.
I have presented him as an extremely practical person, but no American
that I ever met was solely practical. If you watch him closely you
will always find that he is doing practical things for an idealistic
end. The American who accumulates a fortune to himself, whether it be
through corralling railroads, controlling industries, developing mines
or establishing a chain of dry-goods stores, doesn't do it for the
money only, but because he finds in business the poetry of creating,
manipulating, evolving--the exhilaration and adventure of swaying
power. And so there came a day when I caught my American soldier
dreaming and off his guard.
All day I had been motoring through high uplands. It was a part of
France with which I was totally unfamiliar. A thin mist was drifting
across the country, getting lost in valleys where it piled up into
fleecy mounds, getting caught in tree-tops where it fluttered like
tattered banners. Every now and then, with the suddenness of our
approach, we would startle an aged shepherd, muffled and pensive as
an Arab, strolling slowly across moorlands, followed closely by the
sentinel goats which led his flock. The day had been strangely mystic.
Time seemed a mood. I had ceased to trouble about where I was going;
that I knew my ultimate destination was sufficient. The way that led
to it, which I had never seen before, should never see again perhaps,
and through which I travelled at the rate of an express, seemed a
fairy non-existent Hollow Land. Landscapes grew blurred with the speed
of our passage. They loomed up on us like waves, stayed with us for a
second and vanished. The staff-officer, who was my conductor, drowsed
on his seat beside the driver. He had wearied himself in the morning,
taking me now here to see an American Division putting on a manoeuvre,
now there to where the artillery were practising, then to another
valley where machine-guns tapped like thousands of busy typewriters
working on death's manuscript. After that had come bayonet charges
against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging--all the industrious
pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We
were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the
brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there
wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy.
My head nodded. I opened my eyes, pulled myself together and again
nodded. The roar of the engine was soothing. The rush of wind lay
heavy against my eye-lids. It seemed odd that I should be here and
not in the trenches. When I was in the line I had often made up life's
deficiencies by imagining, imagining.... Perhaps I was really in
the line now. I wouldn't wake up to find out. That would come
presently--it always had.
We were slowing down. I opened my eyes lazily. No, we weren't
stopping--only going through a village. What a quaint grey village
it was--worth looking at if I wasn't so tired. I was on the point
of drowsing off again when I caught sight of a word written on a
sign-board, _Domrémy_. My brain cleared. I sat up with a jerk. It was
magic that I should find myself here without warning--at Domrémy, the
Bethlehem of warrior-woman's mercy. I had dreamed from boyhood of this
place as a legend--a memory of white chivalry to be found on no map,
a record of beauty as utterly submerged as the lost land of Lyonesse.
Hauntingly the words came back, "Who is this that cometh from Domrémy?
Who is she in bloody coronation robes from Rheims? Who is she that
cometh with blackened flesh from walking in the furnaces of Rouen?
This is she, the shepherd girl...." All about me on the little hills
were the woodlands through which she must have led her sheep and
wandered with her heavenly visions.
We had come to a bend in the village street. Where the road took a
turn stood an aged church; nestling beside it in a little garden was
a grey, semi-fortified mediæval dwelling. The garden was surrounded by
high spiked railings, planted on a low stone wall. Sitting on the wall
beside the entrance was an American soldier. He had a small French
child on either knee--one arm about each of them; thus embarrassed
he was doing his patient best to roll a Bull Durham cigarette. The
children were vividly interested; they laughed up into the soldier's
face. One of them was a boy, the other a girl. The long golden curls
of the girl brushed against the soldier's cheek. The three heads bent
together, almost touching. The scene was timelessly human, despite the
modernity of the khaki. Joan of Arc might have been that little girl.
I stopped the driver, got out and approached the group. The soldier
jumped to attention and saluted. In answer to my question, he said,
"Yes, this is where she lived. That's her house--that grey cottage
with scarcely any windows. Bastien le Page could never have seen it;
it isn't a bit like his picture in the Metropolitan Gallery."
He spoke in a curiously intimate way as if he had known Joan of Arc
and had spoken with her there--as if she had only just departed.
It was odd to reflect that America had still lain hidden behind the
Atlantic when Joan walked the world.
We entered the gate into the garden, the American soldier, the
children and I together. The little girl, with that wistful confidence
that all French children show for men in khaki, slipped her grubby
little paw into my hand. I expect Joan was often grubby like that.
Brown winter leaves strewed the path. The grass was bleached and dead.
At our approach an old sheep-dog rattled his chain and looked out of
his kennel. He was shaggy and matted with years. His bark was so
weak that it broke in the middle. He was a Rip Van Winkle of a
sheep-dog--the kind of dog you would picture in a fairy-tale. One
couldn't help feeling that he had accompanied the shepherd girl and
had kept the flock from straying while she spoke with her visions.
All those centuries ago he had seen her ride away--ride away to save
France--and she had not come back. All through the centuries he had
waited; at every footstep on the path he had come hopefully out from
his kennel, wagging his tail and barking ever more weakly. He would
not believe that she was dead. And it was difficult to believe it in
that ancient quiet. If ever France needed her, it was now.
Across my memory flashed the words of a dreamer, prophetic in the
light of recent events, "Daughter of Domrémy, when the gratitude of
thy king shall awaken, thou wilt be sleeping the sleep of the dead.
Call her, King of France, but she will not hear thee. Cite her by the
apparitors to come and receive a robe of honour, but she will not be
found. When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen,
shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd girl that gave up her
all for her country, thy ear, young shepherd girl, will have been deaf
five centuries."
Quite illogically it seemed to me that January evening that this
American soldier was the symbol of the power that had come in her
stead.
The barking of the dog had awakened a bowed old Mother Hubbard lady.
She opened the door of her diminutive castle and peered across the
threshold, jingling her keys.
Would we come in? Ah, Monsieur from America was there! He was always
there when he was not training, playing with the children and rolling
cigarettes. And Monsieur, the English officer, perhaps he did not
know that she was descended from Joan's family. Oh, yes, there was no
mistake about it; that was why she had been made custodian. She must
light the lamp. There! That was better. There was not much to see, but
if we would follow....
We stepped down into a flagged room like a cellar--cold, ascetic
and bare. There was a big open fire-place, with a chimney hooded by
massive masonry and blackened by the fires of immemorial winters. This
was where Joan's parents had lived. She had probably been born here.
The picture that formed in my mind was not of Joan, but that other
woman unknown to history--her mother, who after Joan had left the
village and rumours of her battles and banquets drifted back, must
have sat there staring into the blazing logs, her peasant's hands
folded in her lap, brooding, wondering, hoping, fearing--fearing as
the mothers of soldiers have throughout the ages.
And this was Joan's brother's room--a cheerless place of hewn stone.
What kind of a man could he have been? What were his reflections as
he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of
armies? Was he merely a lout or something worse--the prototype of
our Conscientious Objector: a coward who disguised his cowardice with
moral scruples?
And this was Joan's room--a cell, with a narrow slit at the end
through which one gained a glimpse of the church. Before this slit she
had often knelt while the angels drifted from the belfry like doves
to peer in on her. The place was sacred. How many nights had she spent
here with girlish folded hands, her face ecstatic, the cold eating
into her tender body? I see her blue for lack of charity, forgotten,
unloved, neglected--the symbol of misunderstanding and loneliness.
They told her she was mad. She was a laughing stock in the village.
The world could find nothing better for her to do than driving sheep
through the bitter woodlands; but God found time to send his angels.
Yes, she was mad--mad as Christ was in Galilee--mad enough to save
others when she could not save herself. How nearly the sacrifice of
this most child-like of women parallels the sacrifice of the most
God-like of men! Both were born in a shepherd community; both forewent
the humanity of love and parenthood; both gave up their lives that the
world might be better; both were royally apparelled in mockery; both
followed their visions; for each the price of following was death.
She, too, was despised and rejected; as a sheep before her shearers is
dumb, so she opened not her mouth.
That is all there is to see at Domrémy; three starveling, stone-paved
rooms, a crumbling church, a garden full of dead leaves, an old
dog growing mangy in his kennel and the wind-swept cathedral of the
woodlands. The soul of France was born there in the humble body of a
peasant-girl; yes, and more than the soul of France--the gallantry of
all womanhood. God must be fond of His peasants; I think they will be
His aristocracy in Heaven.
The old lady led us out of the house. There was one more thing she
wished to show us. The sunset light was still in the tree-tops,
but her eyes were dim; she thought that night had already gathered.
Holding her lamp above her head, she pointed to a statue in a niche
above the doorway. It had been placed there by order of the King of
France after Joan was dead. But it wasn't so much the statue that she
wanted us to look at; it was the mutilations that were upon it. She
was filled with a great trembling of indignation. "Yes, gaze your fill
upon it, Messieurs," she said; "it was _les Boches_ did that. They
were here in 1870. To others she may be a saint, but to _them_--Bah!"
and she spat, "a woman is less than a woman always."
When we turned to go she was still cursing _les Boches_ beneath her
breath, tremblingly holding up the lamp above her head that she might
forget nothing of their defilement. The old dog rattled his chain as
we passed; he knew us now and did not trouble to come out. The dead
leaves whispered beneath our tread.
At the gate we halted. I turned to my American soldier. "How long
before you go into the line?"
He was carrying the little French girl in his arms. As he glanced
up to answer, his face caught the sunset. "Soon now. The sooner, the
better. She ...," and I knew he meant no living woman. "This place ...
I don't know how to express it. But everything here makes you want
to fight,--makes you ashamed of standing idle. If she could do
that--well, I guess that I...."
He made no attempt to fill his eloquent silences; and so I left. As
the car gathered speed, plunging into the pastoral solitudes, I looked
back. The last sight I had of Domrémy was a grey little garden, made
sacred by the centuries, and an American soldier standing with a
French child in his arms, her golden hair lying thickly against his
neck.
On the surface the American is unemotionally practical, but at heart
he is a dreamer, first, last and always. If the Americans have merited
any criticism in France, it is owing to the vastness of their plans;
the tremendous dream of their preparations postpones the beginning of
the reality. Their mistake, if they have made a mistake, is an error
of generosity. They are building with a view to flinging millions
into the line when thousands a little earlier would be of superlative
advantage. They had the choice of dribbling their men over in small
contingents or of waiting till they could put a fighting-force into
the field so overwhelming in equipment and numbers that its weight
would be decisive. They were urged to learn wisdom from England's
example and not to waste their strength by putting men into the
trenches in a hurry before they were properly trained. England was
compelled to adopt this chivalrous folly by the crying need of France.
It looked in the Spring of 1917, before Russia had broken down or the
pressure on the Italian front had become so menacing, as though the
Allies could afford to ask America to conduct her war on the lines
of big business. America jumped at the chance--big business being the
task to which her national genius was best suited. If her Allies could
hold on long enough, she would build her fleet and appear with an army
of millions that would bring the war to a rapid end. Her rôle was to
be that of the toreador in the European bull-fight.
But big business takes time and usually loses money at the start.
In the light of recent developments, we would rather have the
bird-in-the-hand of 300,000 Americans actually fighting than the
promise of a host a year from now. People at home in America realised
this in January. They were so afraid that their Allies might feel
disappointed. They were so keen to achieve tangible results in the war
that they grew impatient with the long delay. They weren't interested
in seeing other nations going over the top--the same nations who had
been over so many times; they wanted to see their sons and brothers at
once given the opportunity to share the wounds and the danger. Their
attitude was Spartan and splendid; they demanded a curtailment of
their respite that they might find themselves afloat on the crimson
tide. The cry of the civilians in America was identical with that of
their men in France. "Let them take off our khaki or else hurry us
into the trenches. We want to get started. This waiting makes us
tired."
And the civilians in America had earned a right to make their demand.
Industrially, financially, philanthropically, from every point of view
they had sacrificed and played the game, both by the Allies and
their army. When they, as civilians, had been so willing to wear
the stigmata of sacrifice, they were jealous lest their fighting men
should be baulked of their chance of making those sacrifices appear
worth while.
There have been many accusations in the States with regard to
the supposed breakdown of their military organization in
France--accusations inspired by generosity towards the Allies. From
what I have seen, and I have been given liberal opportunities to see
everything, I do not think that those accusations are justified. As
a combatant of another nation, I have my standards of comparison by
which to judge and I frankly state that I was amazed with the progress
that had been made. It is a progress based on a huge scale and
therefore less impressive to the layman than if the scale had been
less ambitious. What I saw were the foundations of an organisation
which can be expanded to handle a fighting-machine which staggers
the imagination. What the layman expects to see are Hun trophies and
Americans coming out of the line on stretchers. He will see all that,
if he waits long enough, for the American military hospitals in France
are being erected to accommodate 200,000 wounded.
Unfounded optimisms, which under no possible circumstances could ever
have been realised, are responsible for the disappointment felt in
America. Inasmuch as these optimisms were widely accepted in England
and France, civilian America's disappointment will be shared by
the Allies, unless some hint of the truth is told as to what may be
expected and what great preparations are under construction. It was
generally believed that by the spring of 1918 America would have
half a million men in the trenches and as many more behind the lines,
training to become reinforcements. People who spoke this way could
never have seen a hundred thousand men or have stopped to consider
what transport would be required to maintain them at a distance of
more than three thousand miles from their base. It was also believed
that by the April of 1918, one year after the declaring of war,
America would have manufactured ten thousand planes, standardised all
their parts, trained the requisite number of observers and pilots,
and would have them flying over the Hun lines. Such beliefs were pure
moonshine, incapable of accomplishment; but there are facts to be told
which are highly honourable.