Coningsby Dawson

“ A Germanised world is like a glimpse of madness; the very thought strikes terror to the heart. Yet it is to Germanise the world that Germany is waging war to-day—that she may confer upon us the benefits of her own proved swinishness. There is nothing left for us but to fight for our souls like men.
The last war! We believed that at first, but as the years dragged on the certainty became an optimism, the optimism a dream which we well-nigh knew to be impossible. We have always known that we would beat Germany—we have never doubted that. ”

“ It builds up the hearts and hopes of people who in three and a half years have grown numb. It restores the human touch to their lives and, with it, the spiritual horizon. Its business, while the army is still preparing, is to bring home to the Allies in every possible way the fact that America, with her hundred and ten millions of population, is in the war with them, eager to play the game, anxious to sacrifice as they have sacrificed, to give her man-power and resources as they have done, until justice has been established for every man and nation. ”

“ They brought civilian minds, undisciplined to the conquest of fear, to their task; they never for one instant guessed the truly spiritual exaltation which gives wings to the soul of the man who fights in a just cause. Squalor, depravity, brutalisation, death—moral, mental and physical deformity were the rewards which the American public learned the fighting man gained in the trenches. They heard very little of the capacity for heroism, the eagerness for sacrifice, the gallant self-effacement which having honor for a companion taught. ”

“ The leader is reputed to be the laziest man in the French Army. It is said that they tried him at everything and then, in despair, sent him to Evian to drum forgotten happiness into the bones of repatriés. Whatever his former military record, he now does his utmost to impersonate the defiant and impassioned soul of France. His moustaches are curled fiercely. His brows are heavy as thunderclouds. When he drums, the veins swell out in his neck with the violence of his energy. ”

“ The plunderer who knew that it was not Great Britain, nor France, nor America, but all three of them united as Allies that he had to face, no matter how tempted he was to prove that armed force meant big business, would be persuaded to expand his commerce by more legitimate methods. Whether this dream is to be accomplished will be decided not upon any battlefield but in the hearts of the civilians of all three countries—particularly in those of America and Great Britain. The soldiers who have fought and suffered together, can never be anything but friends. ”

“ We have cheated the men who have died for us. Our chief ideal in fighting is taken away. Many a lad who moulders in a stagnant trench, laid down his life for this sole purpose, that no children of the future ages should have to pass through his Gethsemane. He consciously gave himself up as a scapegoat, that the security of human sanity should be safeguarded against a recurrence of this enormity. The spirit-man, framed in the dusky window above the applauding crowds in Quebec, was typical of all these men who have made the supreme sacrifice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The soldier from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone, listening—waiting for the call to come. He doesn't sink into the landscape the way other troops have done. His impatience picks him out—the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose. I have seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself. Every man and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is happening inside him, "Let them take off my khaki and send me back to America, or else hurry me into the trenches. ”

“ That is all there is to see at Domrémy; three starveling, stone-paved rooms, a crumbling church, a garden full of dead leaves, an old dog growing mangy in his kennel and the wind-swept cathedral of the woodlands. The soul of France was born there in the humble body of a peasant-girl; yes, and more than the soul of France—the gallantry of all womanhood. God must be fond of His peasants ”

“ My purpose in writing this account of America in France has been to give grounds for understanding and appreciation; it has been to prove that the highest reward that either America or Great Britain can gain as a result of its heroism is an Anglo-American alliance, which will fortify the world against all such future terrors. There never ought to have been anything but alliance between my two great countries. They speak the same tongue, share a common heritage and pursue the same loyalties. Had we not blundered in our destinies, there would never have been occasion for anything but generosity. ”

“ Two out of three times when I thought I had run across a characteristically American expression of efficiency, I was told that it had been copied from the British. I learnt more about my own army's business efficiency in studying it secondhand with the Americans, than I had ever guessed existed in all the time that I had been an inhabitant of the British Front. It is characteristic of us as a people that we like to pretend that we muddle our way into success. We advertise our mistakes and camouflage our virtues. ”

“ 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.
This being the spirit of our soldiers, it is easy to understand their contempt for those civilians who go on strike, prate of weariness, scream their terror when a few Hun planes sail over London, devote columns in their papers to pin-prick tragedies of food-shortage, and cloud the growing generosity between England and America by cavilling [pg 16] criticisms and mean reflections. ”

“ They were urged to learn wisdom from England's example and not to waste their strength by putting men into the trenches in a hurry before they were properly trained. England was compelled to adopt this chivalrous folly by the crying need of France. It looked in the Spring of 1917, before Russia had broken down or the pressure on the Italian front had become so menacing, as though the Allies could afford to ask America to conduct her war on the lines of big business. America jumped at the chance—big business being the task to which her national genius was best suited. ”

“ Were I a German, the spectacle of that solitary consumptive leaving the climate which meant life to him and hastening home to give just six months of service to his country, would be more menacing than the loss of an entire corps frontage.
And there's the type who can't forget; he suffers from a fundamental lack of generosity. The Englishman of this type can't refrain from quoting such phrases as, "Too proud to fight," whenever opportunity offers. His American counterpart insists that he is not fighting for Great Britain, but for the French. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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.
[pg 15]
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. ”

“ He has set about his job in just the same spirit that he set about overcoming the difficulties of the Panama Canal. He has been used to overcoming the obstinacies of Nature; the human obstinacies of his new task intrigue him. I believe that, just as in peace times big business was his romance and the wealth which he gained from it was often incidental, so in France the job as a job impels him, quite apart from its heroic object. After all, smashing the Pan-Germanic Combine is only another form of trust-busting—trust-busting with aeroplanes and guns instead of with law and ledgers. ”

“ I should say that in the eyes of the combatant, after President Wilson, Mr. Ford has done more than any other one man to interpret the spirit of his nation; our altered attitude towards him typifies our altered attitude towards America. Mr. Ford, the impassioned pacifist, sailing to Europe in his ark of peace, staggered our amazement. Mr. Ford, still the impassioned pacifist, whose aeroplane engines will help to bomb the Hun's conscience into wakefulness, staggers our amazement but commands our admiration. ”

“ When one says that America came into the war to save herself it is only true of her statesmen; it is no more true of her masses than it was true of the masses of Great Britain.
So far, in my explanation as to why America came into the war, I have been scarcely more generous in the attributing of magnanimous motives than my Hollander. To all intents and purposes I have said, "America is fighting because she knows that if the Allies are over-weakened or crushed, it will be her turn next." ”

“ But our fighting forces of to-day are the manhood of nations. The fronts which they occupy can scarcely boast a blade of grass. The towns which lie behind them have been picked clean to the very marrow. France herself, into which a military population of many millions has been poured, was never at the best of times entirely self-supporting. Whatever surplus of commodities the Allies possessed, they had already shared long before the spring of 1917. When America landed into the war, she found herself in the position of one who arrives at an overcrowded inn late at night. ”

“ But the poverty of these people is not the worst condition that the Red Cross workers have to tackle; money can always replace money. Hope, trust, affection and a genial belief in the world's goodness cannot be transplanted into another man's heart in exchange for bitterness by even the most lavish giver. I can think of no modern parallel for their blank despair; the only eloquence which approximately expresses it is that of Job, centuries old, "Why is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom God hath hedged in? ”

“ The Americans see to the children. They come from living in cellars, from conditions which are insanitary, from cities in the army zones where they were underfed. The fear is that they may spread contagion all over France. When infectious cases are found the remnants of families have to be broken up afresh. The mothers collapse on benches sobbing their hearts out as their children are led away. For three and a half years everything they have loved has been led away—how can they believe that these Americans mean only mercy? ”

“ When those words are spoken, the American Red Cross knows that it is achieving its object [pg 195] and is winning its war of compassion. The whole drive of all its effort is to win the war in the shortest possible space of time. It is in Europe to save children for the future, to re-kindle hope in broken lives, to mitigate the toll of unavoidable suffering, but first and foremost to help men to fight better. ”