A Straight Deal [6]
but for the entire world, of these two great democratic peoples knowing each other as they really are and cooperating as only they can cooperate to establish and maintain peace on just and permanent foundations."
Chapter III: In Front of a Bulletin Board
There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing--side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not "high-brows" only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting words, "there is such a thing as being too proud to fight." The British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by- passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the
Chapter III: In Front of a Bulletin Board
There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was published in the American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing--side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not "high-brows" only.
May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken us out of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting words, "there is such a thing as being too proud to fight." The British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since March 23rd the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French morale was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and Leonard Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to happen, and to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards? Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would step out of your office to see if anything new had happened during the last sixty minutes--would stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came back? We knew from the faces of our friends what our own faces were like. In company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our apprehensions--do you remember? For our future's sake may everybody remember, may nobody forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by- passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt, Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since, where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the eyes of the Hun, the