People of Destiny: Americans as I saw them at Home and Abroad

mocracy in the United States. Before then America was judged by tourists who came to "do" Europe in a few months or a few

of the world who could afford to buy all the luxury of life, but had no refinement of taste or delicacy of sentiment. There was an enormous ignorance of the education, civilization, and temperament of the great mass

o French soil. The cause of the change was mainly the immensely generous, and marvelously efficient, campaign of

habitants who had not escaped by quick flight from the advancing tide of war, but had been made civil prisoners behind the enemy lines. Their rescue was more difficult because of the needs of the German army, which requisitioned the produce and the labor of the peasants and work-people, so that they were cut off from the means of life. The United States was quick to understand and to act, and in Mr. Hoover it had a man able to translate the generous emotion in th

those bombarded places I saw the sign-boards of the American Relief over wooden shanties where half-starved men and women came to get their weekly rations which had come across the sea and by some miracle, as it seemed to them, had arrived at their village close to the firing-lines. I went into those places, some of which had escaped from shel

elf, it is certain, I think, that in those villages which were engirdled by the barbed wire of the hostile armies, and to which the American supplies came in days of dire distress, there will be a lasting reverence for the name of America, which was the fairy godmother of so many women and children. Over and ove

nce, and other countries, who gave generously, out of their own needs, for the sake of those who were in

hat "almighty dollar" which now the American people poured into this abyss of European distress, it was impossible for France or England

e of waiting when President Wilson was writing his series of "Notes," and I could see how strained was their patience and how self-conscious and apologetic they were because their President used arguments instead of "direct action." One American friend of mine, with whom I often used to walk when streams of wounded Tommies were a bloody commentary on the everlastin

atient. There is no need of all that defensive argument. England realizes the

used to shake

le your young officers fling about the words 'too proud to

esident 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 cam

ressing the major, and there was a roar of laughter whic

a little playful "ragging," and there is no doubt that some of us were not sufficiently aware how sen

s 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 propag

ramp 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 th

ming 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 li

ir men did in valor and in achievement, and Europe has not forgotten their heroism. Here I will rather describe as far as I m

s, 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 wi

ed, and a young of

de a surprise attack

I asked again, sta

ted up

... Inside G

ught up some field-guns and was scattering his fire. It w

ning. "All the same, if I find any Britisher to lend me a rif

tin and put it on his head as

like you other guys," he said, wi

ld 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

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 A

any 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 thro

or a bad?" I a

with his trench stick, and

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

eir 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

d fought in the American-Spanish war

" he said, "is equal to t

going to see it through, and they were animated by the same i

one man, and another said, "There'll be n

aw the real thing, and were rather scornful of the British and French

know how to fight," said one of them to a

iens-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 t

hey've learned a bit,"

hem, 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

arty, 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 o

tars 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,

wn 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 ci

ris 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 cafés, 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 Afri

prings of human tolerance and international common sense, these American visitors did not throw down the general scheme for a league of nations, and looked to the Peace Conference to put forward a treaty which might at least embody the general aspirations of stricken peoples. Gradually these onlookers sickened with disgust. They sickened at the interminable delays in the work of the Conference, and the imperialistic ambitions of the Allied powers, and the greedy rivalries of the little nations, at all the falsity of lip-service to high principles while hatred, vengeance, injustice, and sordid interests were in the spirit of that document which might have been the new Charter of Rights for the peoples of the world. They saw that Clemenceau's vision of peace was limited to the immediate degradation and ruin of the Central Powers, and that he did not care for safeguarding the future or for giving liberty and justice and a chance of economic life to democracies liberated from military serfdom. They saw that Lloyd George was shifting his ground continually as pressure was brought to bear on him now from one side of the Cabinet and now from the other, so that his policy was a strange compound of extreme imperialism and democratic idealism, with the imperialist ambition winning most of the time. They saw that

e greatest school of medicine in the world, the birthplace and home of many great musicians, and the dwelling-place of a happy, careless, and luxurious people, was now delivered over to beggary and lingering death. With all its provinces amputated so that it was cut off from its old natural resources of food and raw material, it had no means of livelihood and no hope. Austrian paper money had fallen away to mere trash. The krone tumbled down to the value of a cent, and it needed many kronen to buy any article of life-2,000 for a suit of clothes, 800 for a pair of boots, 25 for the smallest piece of meat in any restaurant. Middle-class people lived almost exclusively on cabbage soup, with now and then potatoes. A young doctor I met had a salary of 60 kronen a week. When I asked him how he lived he said: "I don't. This is not life." The situation goes into a nutshell when I say-as an actual fact-that the combined salaries of the Austrian Cabinet amounted, according to

one of the best types of manhood I have ever met up and down the roads of life. His soul was in his job, but there was nothing sloppy about his sentiment or his system. He was a master of organization and details and had established the machinery of relief, with Austrian ladies doing the drudgery with splendid devotion (as he told me, and as I saw), so that it was in perfect working order. As a picture of childhood receiv

put on colored spectacles to stare at the life in which they found themselves. The American girls were as frank and courageous as the men in their facing of naked truth, and they had no false prudery or sentimental shrinking from the spectacle of pain and misery. Their greatest drawback was an ignorance of foreign languages, which prevented many of them from getting more than superficial views of national psychology, and I think many of them suffered from the defect of admirable qualities by a humorous contempt of foreign habits and ideas. That did not make them

pended a good deal upon Anglo-American friendship. It was true that the average citizen of the United States, even if he were uninfluenced by Irish-American propaganda, believed that England was treating Ireland stupidly and unjustly-to which I answered that the majority of English people agreed with that view, though realizing the difficulty of satisfying Ireland by any measure short of absolute independence and separation. It was also true, they told me, that there was a general suspicion in the United States that England had made a big grab in the peace terms for imperial aggrandizement, masked under the high-sounding name of "mandate" for the protection of African and Oriental states. My reply to that, not as a political argument, but as simple sincerity, was the necessity of some control of such states, if the pow

hey like, and whose language, literature, and ideals belong to our united civilization. They have not found in England any of that hostility which they were told to expect, apart from a few blackguardly

e type of civilization and to the same code of principles. Most of the so-called hostility between us is the mere froth of foul-mouthed men on both sides, and the rest of it is due to the ignorance of the masses. We must get to know each other, as the Americans in Europe have learned to know us and to like us, an

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