Brothers in arms
Date: 2023-10-24T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: World War; 1914-1918 -- United States; 1914-1918 -- France

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Brothers in arms

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Title: Brothers in arms

Author: E. Alexander Powell

Release date: October 24, 2023 [eBook #71951]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston: Houghton Mifflin company, 1917

Credits: Peter Becker, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROTHERS IN ARMS ***

BROTHERS IN ARMS

BROTHERS IN ARMS

BY

E. ALEXANDER POWELL

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON AND NEW YORK :: THE
RIVERSIDE PRESS CAMBRIDGE

COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY E. ALEXANDER POWELL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published June 1917

To

Brigadier-General Joseph E. Kuhn, U.S.A.
and his associates of the Army War College
in appreciation of the many kindnesses
they have shown me

BROTHERS IN ARMS

BROTHERS IN ARMS

We fight once more for freedom. For the fifth time in our history we draw the sword in the cause of liberty. The Revolution won the freedom of the nation. In 1812 we fought for the freedom of the seas. The Civil War was waged for the preservation of the Union and the liberation of the slaves. We went to war with Spain that Cuba might be free. Now we enter the Great War to preserve democracy and to insure the freedom of the world. And France, after an interim of nearly seven-score years, is our ally once again. In order to draw closer the bonds of our ancient friendship, to hearten us in the tremendous task which we have undertaken, and to place at our disposal the knowledge for which she has paid in blood and tears, France sent to us across perilous seas a mission composed of her most illustrious men. She sent them as a reminder that she was our first friend among the nations and an old comrade in arms, and because her ideals and aspirations are identical with our own. It was as though she had stretched out a hand across the ocean and laid it on America’s shoulder and had said, “Sister, well done.”

Though the coming of these men stirs our souls and grips our imagination, we are still too close to the picture to perceive its full beauty and grandeur. Real appreciation of its significance to ourselves and to the world can come only with the years. When time grants it the justice of perspective, the visit of the French envoys to our shores will be recognized as one of the turning-points in our history. It will prove as epochal as the landing of the Pilgrims, as the coming of Rochambeau, as the emancipation of the slaves. Meanwhile we must not make the mistake of looking on it as merely a picturesque incident which afforded an excuse for processions and banquets and addresses of welcome. It has a far deeper meaning; it means that History, in writing the story of the American people, has begun a new chapter.

Because I have myself marched with the armies of France, because in her hospitals I have seen the endless rows of white-bandaged wounded and upon her hillsides the other rows of white crosses, because I have witnessed the desecration of her churches and the destruction of her cities and the cruelties inflicted on her civil population by a brutal and ruthless soldiery, because from the bottom of my heart I admire her courage, her serenity, her abstinence from all complaint, because I appreciate the sentiment which prompted her to send us these great men as a pledge of her friendship and faith, and because I wish those of my country-people who have not had the opportunity of knowing the French as well as I have to understand what manner of men are these, our brothers in arms, I have written this little book.

On the 25th of April, 1917,—it is a date which we shall teach our children,—the anchor of the Lorraine, which brought the commissioners from France, rumbled down off the Virginia shore. The route by which the mission traveled from the Capes of the Chesapeake to the Capital held in its one hundred and eighty-five miles more places of historical significance to the American people than any other route of like distance that could be laid out on a map of the world. At Hampton Roads, where the commissioners boarded the Mayflower, which was to take them up the Potomac to Washington, was fought the first battle between ironclads; a battle which sent the wooden navies of Europe to the scrap-heap and changed the history of the world. Across the bay the visitors could see the mouth of the James, up which sailed, two centuries ago, Captain John Smith and his fellow-adventurers, to found on its shores the first permanent English settlement in the New World. A half-hour’s steam brought them to the mouth of another river, the York, where once lay the frigates of the Comte de Grasse, the lilied flag of France drooping from their sterns. Here one of the commissioners, the young Marquis de Chambrun, might have said with pardonable pride, “A few miles up that river my grandfather, the Marquis de Lafayette, helped General Washington to win the battle which assured to the American Colonies their independence.”

Now the Mayflower entered the Potomac, a stream whose every mile is peopled with the ghosts of the history-makers. Here the imaginative Frenchmen, leaning over the steamer’s rail, with the incomparable landscape slipping past, could not but have yielded to the river’s mystic spell. Lulled by the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, they found themselves living in this region’s storied and romantic past. Indians in paint and feathers slipped silently along in their barken war-canoes. Lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past them down the stream. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, seeking a spot at which its band of colonists might land. Frigates, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from their tiers of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river-bars. Log forts and trading posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust-cloud rose above the river-bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiraled skyward from those rich Maryland valleys, where in reality sleek cattle browsed in lush-green pastures and the orchards were pink and white with promised fruit. Borne on the night wind came the rumble of ghostly cannonading, and the thoughts of the visitors harked back to the month-long battle of the Wilderness, fought yonder, amid the Virginia forests, by the armies of Grant and Lee. Dawn came, and out of the mist to starboard loomed the peninsula of Indian Head, where the ridiculed inventor, Langley, flew, for the first time in history, a motor-driven aeroplane—forerunner of the thousands of aircraft which to-day swoop and soar and circle above the battle-line. In the very waters through which the Mayflower was now ploughing, a poor Irish schoolmaster, John Philip Holland, evolved the marvel of the undersea boat and thereby did more to shape the course of this war than Haig or Hindenburg or Marshal Joffre himself. Now above the port rail, high on its wooded hillside, showed the stately white façade of Mount Vernon, the home of the founder of this nation and the first leader of its armies, and, close by, the modest brick tomb where the great soldier and his wife lie sleeping. Rounding the river bend, the mighty shaft of the Washington Monument rose skyward like a pointing finger, as though emphasizing the motto graved upon our coins. Alexandria, with its white steeples and its old, old houses, came in view, and beyond it the templed hills of Arlington, where rest, in their last bivouac, the men who died for the Union. Now the long journey of the Frenchmen was almost finished; their destination was at hand. Slowly, with much clanging of bells and shouting of orders, the white yacht sidled up to the quay, the gangway was run out, the Marine Band burst into Rouget de l’Isle’s splendid Hymn, and the envoys, filing between massed rows of bluejackets whose rifles formed a lane of burnished steel, set foot on the soil of the United States, not as strangers, but as allies and friends.

Each step in the route of the commissioners through Washington was a lesson in American history, and it was this that gave the route its great dignity and significance. It was not the cheering throngs that lined it, or the thousands of flags that fluttered from the buildings on either side, but the silent statues and the dumb reminders of those who had gone before, who had created this nation and had laid down their lives that this nation might live, and who had come back this day to charge the route with their unseen presence. The Navy Yard, where the commissioners landed, was burned, with the rest of Washington, by the British in 1814, yet now, barely a century later, its foundries were roaring night and day in the manufacture of guns to aid Britain. Swinging from Seventh Street into Pennsylvania Avenue, there rose in the path of the visitors the splendid dome of the Capitol, and beneath that dome the representatives of eight-and-forty States were enacting into law the measures which would send to the aid of France millions of American soldiers and billions of American dollars. At the foot of Capitol Hill the envoys passed the Naval Monument, “In memory of the officers, seamen, and marines who fell in defense of the Union and Liberty of their country.”

And now Pennsylvania Avenue stretched, broad and straight and white, before them. At the corner of Tenth Street they found Benjamin Franklin waiting to greet them, clad in the dress he wore when sent by the infant republic to solicit the sympathy and aid of France, and he might have said to them, “We owe our independence to the men and money which your country gave us.” From his granite pedestal at the corner of Thirteenth Street, Casimir Pulaski, the Polish soldier who fell before Savannah, debonair in his busby with its slanting feather and his swinging dolman, saluted the Frenchmen as they passed. At the end of the Avenue, opposite the imposing portico of the Treasury, Sherman sat on his bronze charger, just as he must have sat, half a century ago, when down this same avenue swept in the Last Review the war-worn hosts of the Grand Army, their tattered battle-flags flaunting above the slanting lines of steel, while the delirious crowds which packed the sidewalks chanted the marching-song of Sherman’s men:—

“So we made a thoroughfare for Freedom and her train,

Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main;

Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain,

While we were marching through Georgia.”

Swinging around the corner of the Treasury Building, with a distant glimpse of the stately Grecian temple reared by a loving people in memory of their murdered President, the procession passed the White House, rising, pale and lovely, from amid its trees and flowers. At the corner of Madison Place our first French friend, Lafayette, extended a welcoming hand to his countrymen, and awaiting them, a few rods beyond, was Rochambeau, who commanded the French armies at Yorktown. In the center of the square Andrew Jackson, the frontiersman who at New Orleans routed the Peninsular veterans of Wellington, sat on his prancing horse, guarded by captured cannon, and raised his cocked hat in hearty greeting. Then past the statue of Baron von Steuben, the adjutant and friend of Frederick the Great, who exchanged the glitter of the Prussian Court for the misery of Valley Forge, and who, were he alive to-day, would, I fancy, once again be fighting on the side of freedom. A stone’s throw beyond, in front of the house where Dolly Madison once held her republican court, stood Kosciusko, the Polish light-horseman, who, when his sword was no longer needed by America, returned to his own people and lies buried in the Cathedral of Cracow. Then the cortège, with its cloud of clattering troopers in blue and yellow, swerved sharply into Sixteenth Street, the beautiful thoroughfare which should, and some day doubtless will, be dignified by being named “The Avenue of the Presidents,” and was lost to sight amid its foliage and its fluttering flags.

The procession was not as effective as it might have been, first, because it moved so rapidly as to give the impression that those in charge of it were worried and anxious to get it over with, and secondly, because so many generals and admirals and cabinet ministers were crowded into the automobiles that the people on the streets had great difficulty in distinguishing them. In a foreign country there would have been lines of soldiers and police to push the onlookers back and keep the way clear, but here there was nothing of the sort, for the men in the crowd acted as their own police and looked after their guests themselves, which was more democratic and essentially American. But the most memorable feature of the affair, when all is said and done, was the extraordinary warmth and spontaneity of the welcome which the people extended to their visitors. The sidewalks surged with waving hats and upraised hands as the cortège passed and the cheers rose into a roar which drowned the chorus of the motor-horns and the clatter of the cavalry. The women in the windows and on the balconies waved their handkerchiefs and cheered, and the men beat the air with their hats and cheered, and the white-mustached old soldier raised his hand again and again to the visor of his scarlet képi and smiled at the people and winked away the tears in his eyes.

In sending Marshal Joffre to the United States, the French Government did a peculiarly wise and happy thing. Viviani, Chocheprat, de Chambrun—their names held no significance for most Americans. But Joffre! Ah, there was a name to conjure with. The hero of the Marne, the bulwark of civilization, he was the one figure in the whole world the mere sight of whom would instantly fan into flame the slumbering fires of American patriotism. In the first place, he did not come to us as a stranger. We already knew him, you see, through the illustrated papers and the motion-picture screens,—a stoutish, white-mustached, twinkling-eyed, benevolent-looking old gentleman in a great blue coat, walking rather heavily down lanes of motionless troops with their rifles held rigidly toward him, or stooping over a hospital cot to pin to the breast of a wounded soldier a bit of enamel and ribbon,—and seeing him thus, day after day, he became as familiar to us as Colonel Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie and Billy Sunday. And because we recognized that he was, despite his splendid achievements and his sounding title, a simple, kindly, homely man, our great admiration for him grew into a sort of personal affection. He does not dazzle us with the glamour of Napoleon; he does not pique our curiosity like Kitchener; he does not appeal to our sympathies like King Albert; the appeal that he makes is to our hearts and our imaginations. He is—I must have recourse to a Spanish word to express my meaning—simpatico. We recognize his greatness, but it does not awe us. We feel that he is “home folks,” that in the humblest dwelling he would be at home; we would like to give him the big armchair by the fire and a pair of slippers and a cigar and visit with him. For he is a man of the people, as simple, as friendly, as democratic as Lincoln. We remember the story told about him; that he said that when the Germans had been driven out of France he wanted no triumphal entry into Paris, but that he wanted to go fishing. We understand such a man.

This war has been singularly barren of heroic figures, perhaps because its very magnitude has produced such a multitude of heroes that no one can be placed before the rest, yet, when this greatest phase of history comes to be written down with historic perspective, it is probable that Joseph Joffre will stand forth as its most imposing figure. As Charles Martel, “the Hammer of God,” saved Europe from Arab conquest at Tours, and John Sobieski, by turning back the Turks from the gates of Vienna, saved the cause of Christianity, so Joffre broke the wave of German invasion at the Marne and saved mankind from subjection to a no less barbarous despotism. In this elderly man in the scarlet képi we see one of the world’s great captains. His fame is immortal; his place in history is secure. Future generations will point to his visit to these shores as one of the great events of our history. But I like to think that the delirious enthusiasm which he everywhere aroused was something more than a tribute to the greatness of the man and the magnitude of his achievements. I like to think that the cheers which greeted him meant, rather, that we welcomed his presence on American soil as a tangible sign that we had at last returned to the traditions of our fathers, that we had regained our self-respect, that we had offered the sacrifice which will save the nation’s soul.

Though the coming of Joffre had in most quarters the effect of a great spiritual awakening, it was only to be expected that there should be some who would question the motives which brought him. These mean-souled little men went about whispering in their mean and furtive way that the Marshal and his companions were by no means as disinterested as they would have liked us to believe. When we hear such cynical intimations, it might be well for us to bear in mind, however, that in their day the motives of Washington and Lincoln were repeatedly impugned. But their critics have long since passed into the limbus of oblivion, while the men they criticized will live forever in the hearts of their countrymen. That the French hoped and prayed for our aid they would, I imagine, be the last to deny. Certainly their need of it was desperate. But the fact that we have afforded them financial assistance does not justify us in assuming the airs of philanthropists, for we are nothing of the sort. The money that we have furnished France is not given, but loaned, just as a bank loans money to an individual of known responsibility, and, moreover, every dollar of it is to be expended in the United States, thus providing employment for millions of our people. That we, who sent Franklin to implore the aid of the French king, we who accepted from France a loan which we have never repaid, we who owe our very existence as a nation to French soldiers, French ships, and French money, should presume to criticize France for eagerly accepting what we freely offered, is but to show a lack of gratitude and of good taste. Nor let us forget that France, the grip of the invader at her throat and her resources in men and money drained all but dry, has never, by word or hint, reminded us of our long-standing obligation.

The purposes which prompted the sending of the French Mission are set forth by M. Viviani with a grace and beauty of expression which are peculiarly French. No true American can read his words and not be thrilled by the sincerity and unselfishness breathed in every line:—

“We have come to this land to salute the American people and its government, to call to fresh vigor our life-long friendship, sweet and cordial in the ordinary course of our lives, but which these tragic hours have raised to all the ardor of a brotherly love—a brotherly love which, in these last years of suffering, has multiplied its most touching expressions. You have given help, not only in treasure, in every act of kindness and good-will; but for us your children have shed their blood, and the names of your sacred dead are inscribed forever in our hearts.”

One feels, upon reading these words, that the glowing tribute is undeserved. It has taken us three years—three long and bitter years of agony for France—to recognize what she has known from the beginning: that the cause for which she is fighting is our cause, that not merely the future of France but our own future, the future of democracy, is at stake. We are late in acting, and some historians of the future will probably be unkind enough to say that we were almost too late; but let us resolve that we will make up for the tardiness with which we enter the struggle by the fullness of the strength which we put into it; that we will spend, if need be, our last dollar and our last man; and that we will not relax our efforts by a whit until this Prussian horror is no more.

I believe that we are at heart a people of high ideals. Critics have said of us that our finer sensibilities have been blunted by our extraordinary commercial success, that our earlier ideals have been lost sight of in the business of growing rich, that we prefer the dollar mark to the laurel wreath. It is true that we have drunk too deeply of material success, but, thank God, we have come to our senses before it is too late! We are our true selves once again. We have shown that the altruism which caused us to go to war with Spain that Cuba might be free, which led us to pay for the Philippines, already ours by force of arms, which induced us to return the Boxer indemnity to China, still guides our actions. We have not entered upon this war to avenge our murdered citizens; we have not gone into it for territorial aggrandizement or trade expansion, we have not gone into it to pay our debt to France; we have gone to war from the most unselfish motive that ever actuated a nation—the desire to serve mankind. Our victory—for we never have and we never will enter upon a losing war—will be a victory of morality and right and will assure to all our children a world in which they can live in peace and happiness.

We have been charged with being France-mad. Yet, when you stop to think about it, there is nothing strange in our attachment for the French. We are both idealistic and intensely sentimental peoples. The name of France is indissolubly linked with the early history of this country. The first religion, the first education, the first attempts at government, and the first settlement of that vast middle region which stretches from the Great Lakes to the Gulf were French, and French influence has extended over its entire existence. A son of France, Jacques Cartier, was the first European to step beyond the threshold of the unguessed continent. Our mightiest river was first explored throughout its length by a Frenchman, and the people who dwell to-day upon the lands it waters are geographical descendants of France. At the mouth of this river the metropolis of the South is named after a city in France; a thousand miles upstream another busy city keeps on the lips of thousands the name of a French king; while, still farther to the north, yet a third great hive of industry is named for the détroit on which it stands, though the Frenchman who gave it its name would not understand our pronunciation of it. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Our national capital was planned by a Frenchman, and to the vision of another Frenchman we owe the waterway which links the oceans at Panama. The debt of America to France, though more direct, is no less obvious than France’s debt to America, for the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, and the spectacle of a free America under Washington’s administration proved a continual stimulus to the French in their own struggle for freedom. It is this solidarity of history, of sentiment, of aspiration which brings the French and ourselves so close together in this supreme struggle for liberty.

Even our national colors are the same: that red, white, and blue which—as some poetic Frenchman has said—symbolizes the rise of democracy from blood, through peace, to Heaven.

There has been much talk of France having been reborn through the agony of this war. Therein we are wrong. It is merely that we Americans have known the French only superficially, and that, in thinking and speaking of them, we have indulged in the careless and inaccurate habit of generalization. We have subscribed to the tradition of the superficiality and frivolity of the French people. We have believed them lacking in seriousness and perseverance, a strange misunderstanding of the race which has produced Richelieu and Talleyrand and Robespierre, La Salle and Marquette and Champlain. We thought them volatile and temperamental, these countrymen of Bossuet and Montesquieu, of Pascal and Corneille. We were wont to say quite patronizingly that French soldiers, though they possessed verve and élan, were not stayers and “last-ditchers”—this of the men of the Marne and Verdun! The trouble has always been not with France, but with ourselves. The France that we knew before this war gave us a broader vision was the France of Rue de la Paix and the Champs Élysées, of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, of Longchamps and Auteuil, of Poiret and Paquin, of Giro’s and Voisin’s, of the Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette, of the Opéra and the Comédie Française, of the Riviera and Trouville and Aix-les-Bains. What have we known of the sober, simple-hearted, industrious, frugal, plain-living, deeply religious people who are the real France? France has not been reborn. It is an affront to her to say it. She has but cast aside the glittering garment which she wore for the gratification of strangers in order to free her sword arm.

If you would understand the spirit which animates the French people, read this letter which was written by a French cook to his wife the day before he was killed in action. It is but a sample of thousands.

My dear Yvonne:—

Do not worry. I have good hope of seeing you again, as well as our Raymond. I beg you to take care of yourself and also of my son, for you know that I should never forgive you if anything should happen to you or to him.

Now, if by chance anything should happen to me,—for, after all, we are in war, and of course we are running some risk,—I hope you will be courageous, and be sure that if I die I put all my confidence in you, and I ask you to live in order to bring up my son to be a man—a man of spirit—and give him a good education as far as your means will permit.

And above all you shall tell him when he is grown up that his father died for him, or at least for a cause which should serve him, as well as all the generations to come.

Now, my dear Yvonne, all this is but a precaution, and I expect to be there to aid you in this task; but as I have said, one never knows what may happen. In any case we are leaving (for the front) all in good spirits and in the firm belief that we shall conquer.

As to you, my dear Yvonne, know that I have always loved you and that I will love you always no matter what happens. As soon as you can, leave for Fontenay, for on my return I should prefer to find you there; and once more let me say that I count on you, and that you will be brave.

I will give you no more advice, for I believe that would be superfluous.

Your little husband, who embraces you tenderly, as well as dear Raymond—

Georges

America’s entrance into the war is the surest guarantee that the world can have for a peaceful future. Our practically inexhaustible military, financial, industrial, and agricultural resources give us all the trump cards. We can double and, if necessary, redouble, every bid that Germany makes. We must beware, however, of one pitfall: of assuming that the war is going to be a short one. England, notwithstanding the solemn warnings of Lord Kitchener, made that mistake at the beginning of the war, and she has paid for it in blood and tears. Though we are warned with all earnestness by the men who are best qualified to know that peace is not in sight, and probably will not be in sight for many, many months to come, one nevertheless hears on every hand the confident assertion that Germany is on her last legs, that the morale of her armies is weakening, that her supply of men is almost exhausted, that her people are starving, and that American troops will never get within sound of the guns because the war will be over before they can be made ready to send to France. There is no surer way to prolong the war than to indulge in such talk as this. Why deceive ourselves? Let us look the facts in the face. Germany is not starving, nor is there any prospect of her being brought to that point for a long time to come, if, indeed, at all. Her man-power, though greatly depleted, is not giving out. Her morale apparently remains unimpaired; in short, her military machine still seems impregnable. Remember, moreover, that she is everywhere fighting on the enemy’s soil and that her own frontiers remain intact. The extreme gravity of the situation was recently made plain to the Canadian Parliament by the Premier, Sir Robert Borden, in these words: “A great struggle still lies before us, and I cannot put it before you more forcibly than by stating that at the commencement of this spring’s campaign Germany put into the field a million more men than she put into the field last spring. And that million was provided by Germany alone and not by the whole of the Central Powers.” There is, indeed, nothing to indicate at this time that the German Government is prepared to negotiate peace save on impossible terms. It has been a fallacy, and nearly a fatal one for the Allies, this underestimating the power of Germany. She has, as some one has truthfully said, made of war “a national industry.” She is a professional, while the rest of us are, after all, but amateurs, and she has repeatedly shown, moreover, that she has not the slightest intention of adhering to the rules laid down by civilized nations for the conduct of the game. She has spikes on her boots and brass knuckles on her fingers, and she will not hesitate to gouge or kick or strike below the belt. She is a ferocious, formidable, and desperate adversary, possessed of immense staying power, and the only way we can hope to crush her in reasonable time is by intelligent coördination of effort, by the fullest and most painstaking preparation, and by the exertion of every ounce of our strength.

Don’t let us be deceived by the made-in-Germany talk of an early peace. In accepting it we are only playing the enemy’s game. In every possible way Germany is throwing out the idea that the end of the war is in sight. She is doing this because she knows that she has reached the crest of her military strength. She is at “the peak of the load.” She knows that every day she is weaker by so many men, and that she no longer has any considerable reserves from which to replace these losses. She is ready and anxious to quit—upon her own terms. But she is prepared to fight a long, long time yet before accepting the terms that we and our allies must insist upon in order to safeguard the future peace of the world. The mere appearance of American troops upon the battle-line is not going to end the war, as so many of our people seem to think. Not until America begins making war as though she was facing Germany alone will it be possible to predict with any certainty when the end will come.

The truth of the matter is that the American people utterly fail to realize the seriousness of our situation. In fact, the Government itself did not realize its gravity until from the lips of the French and British commissioners it learned the startling truth. Up to the moment of our entrance into the war the Allied Governments, controlling all the channels of information, had so successfully fostered the impression that they had the Germans on the run, that all of our people, save a handful who were in possession of the facts, looked to see the war end in a sweeping victory for the Allies before the close of the present year. The truth of the matter is that, had we remained aloof, the war would in all probability have ended before this year was over, but not in a victory for the Allies. The almost pathetic eagerness with which the Allied Governments welcomed our proffered aid in money and men is the best proof of how desperate was their plight. Here are the facts: Germany’s submarine campaign is an almost unqualified success. Unless we can successfully and immediately combat this menace, England is in grave danger of being brought within measurable distance of starvation. France is rapidly approaching complete military and economic exhaustion. The drain upon her vitality of nearly three years of war has left her faint and gasping. Though she has inflicted huge losses upon the enemy, her own losses have been enormous, and, with her much smaller population, she is less able to stand them. It is not the slightest exaggeration to say that France is in as crying need of American assistance as were the American Colonies when Rochambeau and his soldiery disembarked upon these shores. Should the Russian Republic be betrayed into making a separate peace—and, at the moment of writing, the Russian prospect is anything but cheering—the Central Powers would have released for use upon the Western Front not less than two million veterans. The war has become, indeed, a race between ourselves and Germany. Can we build food-ships faster than Germany can sink them? Can we raise enough food to feed our allies as well as ourselves? Can we put more men and guns upon the Western Front than Germany can? Upon the answers to these questions depends the duration and decision of the war.

If we are to win this war it will be necessary for us to practise self-denials, to endure hardships, perhaps to know sorrows of which we have never dreamed. We must hold back nothing. Our sheltered, ordered, comfortable lives will be turned topsy-turvy. There will be no man, woman, or child between the oceans which this war will not in some way affect. It will impose burdens alike on the rich and the poor, on the old no less than on the young, on women as well as on men. It will entail innumerable sacrifices, many of which will be hard and some of which will seem unjust, yet we must accept them cheerfully.

If millions of our young men are prepared to give up their lives for their country, is it too much to ask the rest of us to give up for a time our comforts and our pleasures?

The civilian must do his duty no less than the man in khaki. And “duty,” at this time, has many meanings. It is a duty to pay taxes. These will, without doubt, be increased again and again and yet again before this war is over, and in many cases they will be directly felt. The man who dodges taxes when his country is at war is more deserving of contempt than the soldier who shows the white feather on the firing-line, for whereas the one fears for his life the other fears only for his pocketbook. It is a duty to raise foodstuffs and to give every possible encouragement to others to do so. The householder who refuses to plough his yard and plant it to vegetables because it would spoil the looks of his place is as much a slacker as the man who attempts to evade his military obligations. It is a duty to refrain from every form of extravagance. By this I do not mean to imply that people should suddenly stop buying, but only that they should stop buying things that they do not need or that they can get along without. For how, pray, are we to place some seven billion dollars of purchasing power at the disposal of the Government unless we curtail our individual expenditures? And it is the duty of our merchants and business men to promptly cease their gloomy prophecies that an era of national economy will bring on a paralysis of trade and industry. As a matter of fact, it will do nothing of the sort. There is far more danger of there being a lack of workers than there is of there being a lack of work. Already there is more work in sight than can possibly be done. The shipyards, the steel-mills, the clothing-factories, the munitions plants, the mines, the farms, the railways are all clamoring for it, and they will clamor for labor still more insistently when a million or so men have been taken out of industry for the army. It is a duty to keep cool, to think sanely, to avoid hysteria. It is a duty to refrain from giving circulation to sensational rumors. It is a duty to refrain from nagging the Government, for the Government is, you may be sure, doing the best it can. And finally, it is a duty to buy your country’s bonds. Buy all you can. Take that ten or hundred or thousand dollars that you have been saving for some cherished personal purpose and invest it in the Liberty Loan. That is the most practical way I know of showing that your patriotism is not confined to words.

There is another form of sacrifice which the American people will inevitably be called upon to make, and that is to accept without complaint the heavy restrictions which the Government will find it necessary to put on their private activities. The Government must have the first call on coal, iron, steel, timber, chemicals, on supplies of every kind, and particularly on transportation and labor. The sooner the public gets over the idea that we must have “business as usual,” the better. The country must immediately awake to the fact that we cannot carry on a war like this with one hand and continue to do all the business we did before with the other. We can no more expect to change from peace conditions to war conditions without business inconvenience and loss than we can expect to send an army into battle without having killed and wounded. We must, therefore, adjust our business and personal affairs so as to support the army with the greatest possible efficiency, and we must do it with the least possible delay. The woman who orders a gown which she does not need is not helping labor to find employment, as she likes to think; she is preventing a soldier from having a uniform—for how is labor to be had for making uniforms unless it is released from making other clothes? Our soldiers must have blankets—but how are those blankets to be had unless the looms are released from something else? How is steel to be had for food-ships and field-guns and destroyers unless there is a prompt curtailment of its use for other purposes? If one of your pet trains is suddenly discontinued, don’t grumble, but just stop to remember that the Government needs that train and its crew for the purpose of moving troops and munitions. If your favorite restaurant curtails its menu, bear in mind that it has been done by order of the Government, which recognizes the imperative necessity for food control. It is a stupendous task that we have undertaken, and it will require every particle of grit and staying power that we possess to see it through.

I would that every man and woman in these United States might show the spirit which led the third-year cadets at West Point, who were this summer entitled by law and custom to the one furlough a cadet has in four years, to unite in waiving their right to these two months to which they had looked forward so long and so eagerly and for the spending of which they had made so many plans, and to offer their services to the Secretary of War in any work for which he thinks them fitted. In writing to his parents to explain why he would probably not be home on the long-talked-of furlough, one of these cadets said:—

“You know, as cadets, we haven’t anything but these two months to give, so we thought if we offered all we had it would maybe be worth while, even if it wasn’t much.”

How about it, my friend? Have you offered your country all you have to give?

There are doubtless those who sometimes ask themselves, though they may deem it the part of wisdom not to ask others, “Even if the Germans were to win this war, what difference would it make anyway?” Well, just for the sake of argument, suppose that our European allies had been forced to sign a separate peace and that Germany, thus left free to give us her undivided attention, had landed an army on these shores (which she could do with comparatively little trouble, the military experts agree) and held a portion of our Eastern seaboard. And suppose that one evening a column of men in gray came tramping into the little town where you live—Quincy or Tarrytown or Plainfield or New Rochelle, which it doesn’t matter. And suppose that the first thing they did after establishing themselves in your town was to arrest the mayor and a score or so of the leading citizens—some of your closest friends, members of your own family, perhaps, among them—and lock them up in the jail or the town hall. And suppose that the next morning, when you start down town, your eye is caught by a notice tacked to a tree. The notice, which is headed by the Prussian eagle, reads something like this:—

PROCLAMATION

In future the inhabitants of places situated near railways and telegraph lines which have been destroyed will be punished without mercy (whether they are guilty of this destruction or not). For this purpose hostages have been taken in all places in the vicinity of railways in danger of similar attacks; and at the first attempt to destroy any railway, telegraph, or telephone line, they will be shot immediately.

The Governor

And supposing, still for the sake of argument, that that same evening some one, ignorant of the German threat or wishful to hamper the invaders at any cost, succeeds in destroying a bridge or cutting a telegraph line. And that, early the next morning, you are awakened by a sudden crash, as though many rifles were fired in unison. And that, hurriedly dressing, you hasten down town to learn what has happened. And that, turning into the main street, you see a row of bodies—the bodies of men some of whom you had known all your life, men with whom you had gone to college, men who were fellow lodge-members, men with whom you had played bridge at the club, the body of your father or your son or your brother perhaps among them—sprawled on the asphalt in grotesque and horrid attitudes amid a slowly widening lake of crimson. Suppose that this dreadful thing happened, not in some European town of which you had but vaguely heard, but in your own town—in Newburyport or Yonkers or Princeton, which it doesn’t matter. Then would you ask “Even if the Germans were to win this war, what difference would it make anyway?” The proclamation just quoted is not imaginary. It was signed by Field Marshal von der Goltz when German governor of Belgium and was posted on the walls of Brussels in October, 1914. I saw it there myself. It is to destroy the monstrous system which permits and approves the execution of people “whether they are guilty or not” that we have gone to war. For if we don’t destroy it, it will most certainly destroy us. The trouble is that we stubbornly shut our eyes to the gravity of the situation which confronts us; we have not aroused ourselves to the colossal magnitude of our task. Sacrifices and sorrows without number await us. Before this business is over with, we must expect to be deprived of many of our comforts and most of our pleasures. We must be prepared to accept without grumbling the imposition of very burdensome taxes. We must be prepared to make countless personal sacrifices, to submit to innumerable annoying restrictions. We must expect months of discouragement and heart-breaking anxiety and gloom. We must gird ourselves for those dark days when the lists of the wounded and the dead begin to come in. For such will be the price of victory.

The surest way to bring about an early peace is to convince Germany, beyond the possibility of misunderstanding, that we stand behind the Government to the last cent in our purses and the last breath in our bodies; that in our vocabulary there is no such word as “quit”; that, no matter how appalling the price that may be exacted from us, we shall not relax our efforts by one iota until the world has been “made free for Democracy” forever.

THE END

The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

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