id="pgepubid00011">I

"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS"

The American Troops have set words to one of their bugle calls. These words are indicative of their spirit—of the calculated determination with which they have faced up to their adventure: an adventure unparalleled for magnitude in the history of their nation.

They fall in in two ranks. They tell off from the right in fours. "Move to the right in fours. Quick March," comes the order. The bugles strike up. The men swing into column formation, heads erect and picking up the step. To the song of the bugles they chant words as they march. "We've got four years to do this job. We've got four years to do this job."

That is the spirit of America. Her soldiers give her four years, but to judge from the scale of her preparations she might be planning for thirty.

America is out to win. I write this opening sentence in Paris where I am temporarily absent from my battery, that I may record the story of America's efforts in France. My purpose is to prove with facts that America is in the war to her last dollar, her last man, and for just as long as Germany remains unrepentant. Her strength is unexpended, her spirit is un-war-weary. She has a greater efficient man-power for her population than any nation that has yet entered the arena of hostilities. Her resources are continental rather than national; it is as though a new and undivided Europe had sprung to arms in moral horror against Germany. She has this to add fierceness to her soul—the reproach that she came in too late. That reproach is being wiped out rapidly by the scarlet of self-imposed sacrifice. She did come in late—for that very reason she will be the last of Germany's adversaries to withdraw.

She did not want to come in at all. Many of her hundred million population emigrated to her shores out of hatred of militarism and to escape from just such a hell as is now raging in Europe. At first it seemed a far cry from Flanders to San Francisco. Philanthropy could stretch that far, but not the risking of human lives. Moreover, the American nation is not racially a unit; it is bound together by its ideal quest for peaceful and democratic institutions. It was a difficult task for any government to convince so remote a people that their destiny was being made molten in the furnace of the Western Front; when once that truth was fully apprehended the diverse souls of America leapt up as one soul and declared for war. In so doing the people of the United States forewent the freedom from fear that they had gained by their journey across the Atlantic; they turned back in their tracks to smite again with renewed strength and redoubled hate the old brutal Fee-Fo-Fum of despotism, from whose clutches they thought they had escaped.

America's is the case of The Terrible Meek; for two and a half years she lulled Germany and astonished the Allies by her abnormal patience. The most terrifying warriors of history have been peace-loving nations hounded into hostility by outraged ideals. Certainly no nation was ever more peace-loving than the American. To the boy of the Middle West the fury of kings must have read like a fairy-tale. The appeal to armed force was a method of compelling righteousness which his entire training had taught him to view with contempt as obsolete. Yet never has any nation mobilised its resources more efficiently, on so titanic a scale, in so brief a space of time to re-establish justice with armed force. The outraged ideal which achieved this miracle was the denial by the Hun of the right of every man to personal liberty and happiness.

Few people guessed that America would fling her weight so utterly into the winning of the Allied cause. Those who knew her best thought it scarcely possible. Germany, who believed she knew her, thought it least of all. German statesmen argued that America had too much to lose by such a decision—too little to gain; the task of transporting men and materials across three thousand miles of ocean seemed insuperable; the differing traditions of her population would make it impossible for her to concentrate her will in so unusual a direction. Basing their arguments on a knowledge of the deep-seated selfishness of human nature, Hun statesmen were of the fixed opinion that no amount of insult would compel America to take up the sword.

Two and a half years before, those same statesmen made the same mistake with regard to Great Britain and her Dominions. The British were a race of shop-keepers; no matter how chivalrous the call, nothing would persuade them to jeopardise their money-bags. If they did for once leap across their counters to become Sir Galahads, then the Dominions would seize that opportunity to secure their own base safety and to fling the Mother Country out of doors. The British gave these students of selfishness a surprise from which their military machine has never recovered, when the "Old Contemptibles" held up the advance of the Hun legions and won for Europe a breathing-space. The Dominions gave them a second lesson in magnanimity when Canada's lads built a wall with their bodies to block the drive at Ypres. America refuted them for the third time, when she proved her love of world-liberty greater than her affection for the dollar, bugling across the Atlantic her shrill challenge to mailed bestiality. Germany has made the grave mistake of estimating human nature at its lowest worth as she sees it reflected in her own face. In every case, in her judgment of the two great Anglo-Saxon races, she has been at fault through over-emphasising their capacity for baseness and under-estimating their capacity to respond to an ideal. It was an ideal that led the Pilgrim Fathers westward; after more than two hundred years it is an ideal which pilots their sons home again, racing through danger zones in their steel-built greyhounds that they may lay down their lives in France.

In view of the monumental stupidity of her diplomacy Germany has found it necessary to invent explanations. The form these have taken as regards America has been the attributing of fresh low motives. Her object at first was to prove to the world at large how very little difference America's participation in hostilities would make. When America tacitly negatived this theory by the energy with which she raised billions and mobilised her industries, Hun propagandists, by an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad the opinion that these mighty preparations were a colossal bluff which would redound to Germany's advantage. They said that President Wilson had bided his time so that his country might strut as a belligerent for only the last six months, and so obtain a voice in the peace negotiations. He did not intend that America should fight, and was only getting his armies ready that they might enforce peace when the Allies were exhausted and already counting on Americans manning their trenches. Inasmuch as his country would neither have sacrificed nor died, he would be willing to give Germany better terms; therefore America's apparent joining of the Allies was a camouflage which would turn out an advantage to Germany. This lie, with variations, has spread beyond the Rhine and gained currency in certain of the neutral nations.

Four days after President Wilson's declaration of war the Canadians captured Vimy Ridge. As the Hun prisoners came running like scared rabbits through the shell-fire, we used to question them as to conditions on their side of the line. Almost the first question that was asked was, "What do you think about the United States?" By far the most frequent reply was, "We have submarines; the United States will make no difference." The answer was so often in the same formula