People of Destiny Part 4

America was ready. In a year she had raised the greatest army in the world by a natural energy which was terrific in its concentration and enthusiasm. We knew that if she could get those men across the Atlantic, in spite of submarines, the Germans would be broken to bits, unless they could break us first by a series of rapid blows which would outpace the coming 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 lines and England sent out her last reserves of youth--300,000 of them--to fill up our gaps. The Germans were stopped at a dead halt, exhausted after the immensity of their effort and by prodigious losses. Behind our lines, and behind the French front, there came now a tide of "new boys." America was in France, and the doom of the German war machine was at hand.

It would be foolish of me to recapitulate the history of the American campaign. The people of the United States know what their men did in valor and in achievement, and Europe has not forgotten their heroism.

Here I will rather describe as far as I may the impressions created in my own mind by the first sight of those American soldiers and by those I met on the battle-front.

The very first "bunch" of "Yanks" (as we called them) that I met in the field were non-combatants who suddenly found themselves in a tight corner. They belonged to some sections of engineers who were working on light railways in the neighborhood of two villages called Gouzeaucourt and Fins, 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 with squadrons of tanks, and rounded up thousands of prisoners and many guns. As I went through Fins toward Gouzeaucourt I was aware of some kind of trouble. The men of some labor battalions were tramping back in a strange, disorganized way, and a number of field batteries were falling back.

"What's up?" I asked, and a young officer answered me.

"The Germans have made a surprise attack and broken through."

"Where are they?" I asked again, startled by this news.

He pointed up the road.

"Just there.... Inside Gouzeaucourt."

The situation was extremely unpleasant. The enemy had brought up some field-guns and was scattering his fire. It was in a field close by that I met the American engineers.

"I guess this is not in the contract," said one of them, grinning. "All the same, if I find any Britisher to lend me a rifle I'll get a knock at those fellers who spoiled my breakfast."

One man stooped for a petrol tin and put it on his head as a sh.e.l.l came howling over us.

"I guess this makes me look more like you other guys," he said, with a glance at our steel helmets.

One tall, loose-limbed, swarthy fellow, who looked like a Mexican, but came from Texas, as he told me, was spoiling for a fight, and with many strange oaths declared his intention of going into Gouzeaucourt with the first batch of English who would 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 the enemy's machine-gun nests and recapture the ruins of the village. I met some of them the following day again, and they told me it was a "darned good sc.r.a.p." They were "darned" good men, hard, tough, humorous, and full of individual character.

The general type of young Americans was not, however, like these hard-grained men of middle age who had led an adventurous life before they came to see what war was like in Europe. We watched them curiously as the first battalions came streaming along the old roads of France and Picardy, and we were conscious that they were different from all the men and all the races behind our battle-front. Physically they were splendid--those boys of the Twenty-seventh and Seventy-seventh Divisions whom we saw first of all. They were taller than any of our regiments, apart from the Guards, and they had a fine, easy swing of body as they came marching along. They were better dressed than our Tommies, whose rough khaki was rather shapeless. There was a dandy cut about this American uniform and the cloth was of good 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 Americans. Looking down a marching column, we saw that it was something in the set of the eyes, in the character of the cheek-bones, and in the facial expression that made them distinctive.

They had a look of independence and self-reliance, and it was as visible as the sun that these were men with a sort of national pride and personal pride, conscious that behind them was a civilization and a power which would give them victory though they in the vanguard might die. Those words express feebly and foolishly the first impression that came to us when the "Yanks" came marching up the roads of war, but that in a broad way was the truth of what we thought. I remember one officer of ours summed up these ideas as he stood on the edge of the road, watching one of those battalions pa.s.sing with their transport.

"What we are seeing," he said, "is the greatest thing that has happened in history since the Norman Conquest. It is the arrival of America in Europe. Those boys are coming to fulfill the destiny of a people which for three hundred years has been preparing, building, growing, for the time when it will dominate the world. Those young soldiers will make many 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 throw against her. But by this victory, which will leave all the old Allies weakened and spent and licking their wounds, America will be the greatest power in the world, and will hold the destiny of mankind in her grasp. Those boys slogging through the dust are like the Roman legionaries. With them marches the fate of the world, of which they are masters."

"A good thing or a bad?" I asked my friend.

He made a circle in the dust with his trench stick, and stared into the center of it.

"Who can tell?" he said, presently. "Was it good or bad that the Romans conquered Europe, or that afterward they fell before the barbarians? Was it good or 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 energy, decay, and rebirth. After this war, which those lads will help to win, the power will pa.s.s to the west, and Europe will fall into the second cla.s.s."

Those were high views. Thinking less in prophecy, getting into touch with the actual men, I was struck by the exceptionally high level of individual intelligence among the rank and file, and by the general gravity among them. The American private soldier seemed to me less repressed by discipline than our men. He had more original points of view, expressed himself with more independence of thought, and had a greater sense of his own personal value and dignity. He was immensely ignorant of European life and conditions, and our Tommies were superior to him in that respect. Nor had he their easy way of comradeship with French and Flemish peasants, their 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 p.r.o.nounce. They had a fierce theoretical hatred of the Germans, who, they believed, were bad men, in the real old-fashioned style of devil incarnate, so that it was up to every American soldier to kill Germans in large numbers. It was noticeable that after the armistice, when the American troops were billeted among German civilians, that hatred wore off very quickly, as it did with the English Tommies, human nature being stronger than war pa.s.sion. Before they had been in the fighting-line a week these "new boys" had no illusions left about the romance or the adventure of modern war. They hated sh.e.l.l-fire as all soldiers hate it, they loathed the filth of the trenches, and--they were very homesick.

I remember one private soldier who had fought in the American-Spanish war and in the Philippines--an old "tough."

"Three weeks of this war," he said, "is equal to three years of all others."

But he and "the pups," as he called his younger comrades, were going to see it through, and they were animated by the same ideals with which the French and British had gone into the war.

"This is a fight for civilization," said one man, and another said, "There'll be no liberty in the world if the Germans win."

It is natural that many of the boys were full of "buck" before they saw the real thing, and were rather scornful of the British and French troops, who had been such a long time "doing nothing," as they said.

"You've been kidding yourselves that you know how to fight," said one of them to an English Tommy. "We've come to show you!"

That was boys' talk, like our "ragging," and was not meant seriously. On the contrary, the companies of the Twenty-seventh Division who went into action with the Australians at Hamel near Amiens--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 top at dawn. The American boys were tense and strained, knowing that in a few hours they would be facing death. But when the time came they went away like greyhounds, and were reckless of fire.

"They'll go far when they've learned a bit," said the Australians.

They had to learn the usual lessons in the same old way, by mistakes, by tragedy, by lack of care. They overcrowded their forward trenches so that they suffered more heavily than they should have done under enemy sh.e.l.l-fire. They advanced in the open against machine-gun nests and were mown down. They went ahead too fast without "mopping up" the ground behind them, 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 the American transport system broke down, so that the fighting troops did not always obtain their supplies on the field of battle, and there were other errors, inevitable in an army starting a great campaign with inexperienced staff officers. What never failed was the gallantry of the troops, which reached heights of desperate valor in the forest of the Argonne.

The officers were tremendously in earnest. What struck us most was their gravity. Our officers took their responsibility lightly, laughed and joked more readily, and had a boyish, whimsical sense of humor. It seemed to us, perhaps quite wrongly, that the American officers were not, on the whole, of a merry disposition. They were frank and hearty, 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 of sw.a.n.k, simple, straight, and delightfully courteous. Their modesty was at times almost painful. They were over-anxious to avoid hurting the feelings of French or British by any appearance of self-conceit. "We don't know a darned thing about this war," said many of them, so that the phrase became familiar to us. "We have come here to learn."

Well, they learned pretty quickly and there were some things they did not need teaching--courage, endurance, pride of manhood, pride of race.

They were not going to let down the Stars and Stripes, though all h.e.l.l 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, with the French and British armies attacking all together, under the directing genius of Foch, helped to break the German war machine and to achieve decisive and supreme victory.

It would have been better, I think, for America and for all of us, especially for France, if quickly after victory the American troops had gone back again. That was impossible because of holding the Rhine and enforcing the terms of peace. But during the long time that great bodies of American troops remained in France after the day of armistice, there was occasion for the bigness of ideals and achievements to be whittled down by the little nagging annoyances of a rather purposeless existence.

Boredom, immense and long enduring, took possession of the American army in France. The boys wanted to go home, now that the job was done. They wanted the victory march down 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 civilians who had learned English in the war) about the miserable quality of French food and the darned arrogance of French officers. It was all natural and inevitable--but unfortunate. The French were too quick to forget after armistice that they owed a good deal to American troops for the complete defeat of Germany. The Americans were not quite careful in remembering the susceptibilities of a sensitive people. So there were disillusion and irritation on both sides, in a broad and general way, allowing for many individual friendships between French and Americans, many charming memories which will remain on both sides of the Atlantic when the war is old in history.

Americans who overcame the language difficulty by learning enough to exchange views with the French inhabitants--and there were many--were able to overlook the minor, petty things which divided the two races, and were charmed with the intelligence, spirit, and humor of the French bourgeoisie and educated cla.s.ses. They got the best out of France, and were enchanted with French cathedrals, mediaeval towns, picture-galleries, and life. Paris caught hold of them, as it takes hold of all men and women who know something of its history and learn to know and love its people. Thousands of American officers came to know Paris intimately, from Montmartre to Montparna.s.se, 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 pa.s.s by as they sat outside the cafes, studying the little high-heeled ladies who pa.s.sed 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 African soldiers went by, realizing the meaning of "Europe" with all its races and rivalries and national traditions, and getting to know the inside of European politics by conversations with men who spoke with expert knowledge about this conglomeration of peoples. Those young men who are now back in the United States have already made a difference to their country's intellectual outlook. They have taught America to look out upon the world with wider vision and to abandon the old isolation of American thought which was apt to ignore the rest of the human family and remain self-contained and aloof from a world policy.

During the months that followed the armistice many Americans of high intellectual standing came to Europe, attracted by the great drama and business of the Peace Conference, and to prepare the way for the reconstruction of civilization after the years of conflict. They were statesmen, bankers, lawyers, writers, and financiers. I met some of them in Paris, Rome, Vienna, London, and other cities of Europe. They were the onlookers and the critics of the new conflict that had followed the old, the conflict of ideas, policy, and pa.s.sion which raged outside the quiet chamber at Versailles, where President Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and a few less important mortals were redrawing the frontiers of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. From the first, many of these men were frank in private conversation about the hostility that was growing up in the United States against President Wilson, and the distrust of the American people in a league of nations which might involve the United States in European entanglements alien to her interests and without the consent of her people. At the same time, and at that time when there still seemed to be a chance of arriving at a new compact between nations which would eliminate the necessity of world-wide war, and of washing out the blood-stains of strife by new springs 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 doc.u.ment 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 Wilson was being hoodwinked by the subtlety of diplomatists who played on his vanity, and paid homage to his ideals, and made a prologue of his principles to a drama of injustice. Our American visitors were perplexed and distressed. They had desired to be heart and soul with the Allies in the settlement of peace. They still cherished the ideals which had uplifted them in the early days of the war. They were resolved that the United States should not play a selfish part in the settlement or profit by the distress of nations who had been hard hit. But gradually they became disillusioned with the statecraft of Europe, and disappointed with the low level of intelligence and morality reflected in the newspaper press of Europe, which still wrote in the old strain of "propaganda" when insincerity and manufactured falsehood took the place of truth. They hardened visibly, I think, against the view that the United States should be pledged by Wilson to the political and economic schemes of the big powers in Europe, which, far from healing the wounds of the world, kept them raw and bleeding, while arranging, not deliberately, but very certainly, for future strife into which America would be dragged against her will. England and France failed to see the American point of view, which seems to me reasonable and sound.

The generous way in which the United States came to the rescue of starving peoples in the early days of the war was not deserted by her when the armistice and the peace that followed revealed the frightful distress in Poland, Hungary, and Austria. While the doom of these people was being p.r.o.nounced by statesmen not naturally cruel, but nevertheless sentencing great populations to starvation, and while the blockade was still in force, American representatives of a higher law than that of vengeance went into these ruined countries and organized relief on a great scale for suffering childhood and despairing womanhood. I saw the work of the American Relief Committee in Vienna and remember it as one of the n.o.blest achievements I have seen. All ancient enmity, all demands for punishment or reparation, went down before the agony of Austria.

Vienna, a city of two and a half million souls, once the capital of a great empire, for centuries a rendezvous of gayety and genius, the 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-cla.s.s 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 nutsh.e.l.l when I say--as an actual fact--that the combined salaries of the Austrian Cabinet amounted, according to the rate of exchange, to the wages of three old women who look after the lavatories in Lucerne. Many people, once rich, lived on bundles of paper money which they flung away as leaves are scattered from autumn trees. They were the lucky ones, though ruin stared them in the eyes. By smuggling, which became an open and acknowledged system, they could afford to pay the ever-mounting prices of the peasants for at least enough food to keep themselves alive. But the working-cla.s.ses, who did not work because factories were closed for lack of coal and raw material, just starved, keeping the flame of life aflicker by a thin and miserable diet, until the weakest died. Eighty-three per cent. of the children had rickets in an advanced stage. Children of three and four had never sat up or walked. Thousands of children were just living skeletons, with gaunt cheek-bones and bloodless lips. They padded after one in the street, like little old monkeys, holding out their claws for alms.

The American Relief Committee got to work in the early months of 1919.

They brought truck-loads of food to Vienna, established distributing centers and feeding centers in old Viennese palaces, and when I was there in the early autumn they were giving 200,000 children a meal a day. I went round these places with a young American naval officer--Lieutenant Stockton--one of the leading organizers of relief, and I remember him as 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 receiving rescue from the agony of hunger, I remember nothing so moving nor so tragic as one of those scenes when I saw a thousand children sitting down to the meal that came from America.

Here before them in that bowl of soup was life and warmth. In their eyes there was the light of ecstasy, the spiritual grat.i.tude of children for the joy that had come after pain. For a little while they had been reprieved from the hunger-death.

American agents of the Y. M. C. A., nurses, members of American missions and philanthropic societies, penetrated Europe in far and strange places. I met a crowd of them on the "Entente train" from Vienna to Paris, and in various Italian towns. They were all people with shrewd, observant eyes, a quiet sense of humor, and a repugnance to be "fudged off" from actual facts by any humbug of theorists. They studied the economic conditions of the countries through which they traveled, studied poverty by personal visits to slum areas and working-cla.s.s homes, and did not 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 popular with people whom they were not directly helping. Their hearty laughter, their bunching together in groups in which conversation was apt to become noisy, and their cheerful disregard of conventionality in places where Europeans were on their "best behavior" had an irritating effect at times upon foreign observers, who said: "Those Americans have not learned good manners.

They are the new barbarians in Europe." English people, traveling as tourists before the war, were accused of the same lack of respect and courtesy, and were unpopular for the same reason.

Toward the end of 1919 and in the beginning of 1920 I came into touch with a number of Americans who came to Europe on business enterprises or to visit the battlefields. In private conversation they did not disguise their sense of distress that there were strained relations between the public opinion of England and America. Several of them asked me if it were true that England was as hostile to America as the newspapers tried to make out. By way of answer I asked them whether America were as hostile to us as the newspapers asked us to believe.

They admitted at once that this was a just and illuminating reply, because the intelligent section of American society--people of decent education and good will--was far from being hostile to England, but on the contrary believed firmly that the safety and happiness of the world depended 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 power of the Turk were to be abolished from his old strongholds, and a claim for the British tradition as an administrator of native races; but I added another statement which my American friends found it hard to believe, though it is the absolute truth, as nine Englishmen out of ten will affirm. So far from desiring an extension of our empire, the vast and overwhelming majority of British people, not only in England, but in our dominions beyond the seas, are aghast at the new responsibilities which we have undertaken, and would relinquish many of them, especially in Asia, with a sense of profound relief. We have been saddled with new and perilous burdens by the ambition of certain statesmen who have earned the bitter animosity of the great body of the British people entirely out of sympathy with their imperialistic ideals.

I have not encountered a single American in Europe who has not expressed, with what I believe is absolute sincerity, a friendly and affectionate regard for England, whose people and whose ways of life they 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 articles in low-cla.s.s journals. On the contrary, they have found a friendly folk, grateful for their help in the war, full of admiration for American methods, and welcoming them to our little old island.

They have gone back to the United States with the conviction, which I share, with all my soul, that commercial rivalry, political differences, and minor irritations, inevitable between two progressive peoples of strong character, must never be allowed to divide our two nations, who fundamentally belong to the same 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 ma.s.ses. We must get to know each other, as the Americans in Europe have learned to know us and to like us, and as all of us who have crossed the Atlantic the other way about have learned to know and like the American people. For the sake of the future of the world and all the hopes of humanity we must get to the heart of each other and establish a lasting and unbreakable friendship. It is only folly that will prevent us.

THE END