Out to Win: the Story of America in France

Part 1

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OUT TO WIN

THE STORY OF AMERICA IN FRANCE

CONINGSBY DAWSON

AUTHOR OF "THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES," "CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WARTIME," ETC.

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD MCMXVIII

Copyright, 1918, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press of J.J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A.

MY AMERICAN FRIENDS AND BROTHERS-IN-ARMS THIS FRANK APPRECIATION OF THEIR EFFORT IN FRANCE IS DEDICATED

CONTENTS

PAGE

A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 9

"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 29

WAR AS A JOB 61

THE WAR OF COMPASSION 109

THE LAST WAR 196

A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY

I am not writing this preface for the conscious fool, but for his self-deceived brother who considers himself a very wise person. My hope is that some persons may recognise themselves and be provided with food for thought. They will usually be people who have contributed little to this war, except mean views and endless talk. Had they shared the sacrifice of it, they would have developed within themselves the faculty for a wider generosity. The extraordinary thing about generosity is its eagerness to recognise itself in others.

You find these untravelled critics and mischief-makers on both sides of the Atlantic. In most cases they have no definite desire to work harm, but they have inherited cantankerous prejudices which date back to the American Revolution, and they lack the vision to perceive that this war, despite its horror and tragedy, is the God-given chance of centuries to re-unite the great Anglo-Saxon races of the world in a truer bond of kindness and kinship. If we miss this chance we are flinging in God's face His splendid recompense for our common heroism.

It is an unfortunate fact that the merely foolish person constitutes as grave a danger as the deliberate plotter. His words, if they are acid enough, are quoted and re-quoted. They pass from mouth to mouth, gaining in authority. By the time they reach the friendly country at which they are directed, they have taken on the appearance of an opinion representative of a nation. The Hun is well aware of the value of gossip for the encouraging of divided counsels among his enemies. He invents a slander, pins it to some racial grievance, confides it to the fools among the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some of them wander about in a merely private capacity, nagging without knowledge, depositing poison, breeding doubts as to integrity, and all the while pretending to maintain a mildly impartial and judicial mental attitude. Their souls never rise from the ground. Their brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled malice. They suspect hero-worship; it smacks to them of sentiment. They examine, but never praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find something meretriciously melodramatic about men and nations who are capable. Had they lived nineteen hundred years ago, they would have haunted Calvary to discover fraud.

Then, there are others, by far more dangerous. These make their appearance daily in the morning press, thrusting their pessimisms across our breakfast tables, beleaguering our faith with ill-natured judgements and querulous warnings. One of our London Dailies, for instance, specializes in annoying America; it works as effectively to breed distrust as if its policy were dictated from Berlin.

I have just returned from a prolonged tour of America's activities in France. Wherever I went I heard nothing but unstinted appreciation of Great Britain's surpassing gallantry: "We never knew that you Britishers were what you are; you never told us. We had to come over here to find out." When that had been said I always waited, for I guessed the qualifying statement that would follow: "There's only one thing that makes us mad. Why the devil does your censor allow the P---- to sneer at us every morning? Your army doesn't feel that way towards us; at least, if it ever did, it doesn't now. Are there really people in England who--?"

At this point I would cut my questioner short: "There are men so short-sighted in every country that, to warm their hands, they would burn the crown of thorns. You have them in America. Such men are not representative."

The purpose of this book is to tell what America has done, is doing, and, on the strength of her splendid and accomplished facts, to plead for a closer friendship between my two countries. As an Englishman who has lived in the States for ten years and is serving with the Canadian Forces, I feel that I have a sympathetic understanding of the affections and aloofnesses of both nations; as a member of both families I claim the domestic right of indulging in a little plain speaking to each in turn.

In my appeal I leave the fighting men out of the question. Death is a universal teacher of charity. At the end of the war the men who survive will acknowledge no kinship save the kinship of courage. To have answered the call of duty and to have played the man, will make a closer bond than having been born of the same mother. At a New York theatre last October I met some French officers who had fought on the right of the Canadian Corps frontage at the Somme. We got to talking, commenced remembering, missed the entire performance and parted as old friends. In France I stayed with an American-Irish Division. They were for the most part American citizens in the second generation: few of them had been to Ireland. As frequently happens, they were more Irish than the Irish. They had learned from their parents the abuses which had driven them to emigrate, but had no knowledge of the reciprocal provocations which had caused the abuses. Consequently, when they sailed on their troop-ships for France they were anti-British almost to a man--many of them were theoretically Sinn Feiners. They were coming to fight for France and for Lafayette, who had helped to lick Britain--but not for the British. By the time I met them they were marvellously changed. They were going into the line almost any day and--this was what had worked the change--they had been trained for their ordeal by British N.C.O.'s and officers. They had swamped their hatred and inherited bitterness in admiration. Their highest hope was that they might do as well as the British. "They're men if you like," they said. In the imminence of death, their feeling for these old-timers, who had faced death so often, amounted to hero-worship. It was good to hear them deriding the caricature of the typical Briton, which had served in their mental galleries as an exact likeness for so many years. It was proof to me that men who have endured the same hell in a common cause will be nearer in spirit, when the war is ended, than they are to their own civilian populations. For in all belligerent countries there are two armies fighting--the military and the civilian; either can let the other down. If the civilian army loses its morale, its vision, its unselfishness, and allows itself to be out-bluffed by the civilian army of Germany, it as surely betrays its soldiers as if it joined forces with the Hun. We execute soldiers for cowardice; it's a pity that the same law does not govern the civilian army. There would be a rapid revision in the tone of more than one English and American newspaper. A soldier is shot for cowardice because his example is contagious. What can be more contagious than a panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated? Already there are many of us who have a kindlier feeling and certainly more respect for a Boche who fights gamely, than for a Britisher or American who bickers and sulks in comfort. Only one doubt as to ultimate victory ever assails the Western Front: that it may be attacked in the rear by the premature peace negotiations of the civil populations it defends. Should that ever happen, the Western Front would cease to be a mixture of French, Americans, Canadians, Australians, British and Belgians; it would become a nation by itself, pledged to fight on till the ideals for which it set out to fight are definitely established.

We get rather tired of reading speeches in which civilians presume that the making of peace is in their hands. The making may be, but the acceptance is in ours. I do not mean that we love war for war's sake. We love it rather less than the civilian does. When an honourable peace has been confirmed, there will be no stauncher pacifist than the soldier; but we reserve our pacifism till the war is won. We shall be the last people in Europe to get war-weary. We started with a vision--the achieving of justice; we shall not grow weary till that vision has become a reality. When one has faced up to an ultimate self-denial, giving becomes a habit. One becomes eager to be allowed to give all--to keep none of life's small change. The fury of an ideal enfevers us. We become fanatical to outdo our own best record in self-surrender. Many of us, if we are alive when peace is declared, will feel an uneasy reproach that perhaps we did not give enough.

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