Ian Hay

“ America's national imagination is not yet fired. She wants time. The chief barrier which stands between her and the true spirit of this war—the factor which prevents the American pulse from quickening into instant enthusiasm for the cause which America has officially made her own—is the Atlantic Ocean. ”

“ Again, the issue for which the Allies were fighting—the great principle at stake—the principle upon which the American Constitution itself is founded—had been so clouded and distorted by the arts of Bernstorff and his press-gang, that America in general inclined to the view that there was a good deal to be said on both sides, and that John Bull in particular was not in the habit of indulging in war simply for exercise. ”

“ So it is only natural that America, removed from all risk of actual invasion, should require a little time to adjust herself to new conditions, and to re-awaken that martial and indomitable spirit which has made her such a formidable fighting power in the past. ”

“ Far more insidious will be the underground work of the skilled secret agent. He will endeavour to paralyse America through her own children by fomenting industrial strife, by financing spurious labour unions, and by affording surreptitious aid and comfort to anarchists, pacifists, and all the dead weight of knaves and fools which hangs round the neck of every great and free community. ”

“ The attitude of the Allies is naturally one of confident expectation, coupled with extreme vagueness as to what America is really capable of doing. The fact is, America herself hardly knows what she is capable of doing. So vast are her resources, so great her population, so remarkable the individual capacity of her people, that her future as a military power is limited only by one thing-her willingness to submit to discipline. ”

“ He was requested to resume the leadership of the Army on his own terms. He did so, and immediately led his followers to a brilliant victory. In the same way America—and it must be remembered that the America of to-day is not the America of the Revolution or the Civil War, but contains a far larger and less amenable population—will have to find out for herself, by the only infallible means open to man, namely, hard experience, to what extent the pure spirit of democracy must be diluted to meet the demands of military efficiency. ”

“ The American soldier is a professional man pure and simple, and he lives on his pay. His profession absorbs the whole of his time, and frequently consigns him during the best years of his life to an arid existence in some outlying fort or depôt. And-the American soldier must have a genuine affection for his calling. Too often, in a country where wealth is almost the sole passport to social distinction, the soldier, with his scant leisure and comparatively humble income, ranks lower in the eyes of the unthinking than a successful commercial traveller. ”

“ If you take a walk down the lower end of Fifth Avenue during the dinner-hour, when the mighty sky-scraping office buildings of perhaps forty storeys have temporarily decanted their human contents on to the pavement below, you will find yourself elbowing your way through a crowd which is more fitted to serve as an ethnological museum than as a representative body of capital citizens. Within the compass of a mile you will probably hear seven or eight languages spoken—French, German, Italian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Yiddish, and Czech. ”

“ Again, the sturdy American democrat is apt to smile upon our social watertight compartments, and tells us that "in the United States we are one class only." But in truth America is, above all other countries, the home of intellectual and social extremes. ”

“ In fact, to this day Germany has never even acknowledged that she is at war with America. Germany has too much good taste and feeling. America, explains Germany, has no Army, no Navy to speak of, no national spirit or discipline at all. It would be an outrage to make war upon such defenceless people. ”

“ In the Middle West you will find farmers of Kansas and Illinois who regard New York City as an annexe to hell, and who care nothing for world politics so long as their pigs get safe to Chicago and their wheat to Minneapolis. Further west again, cut off from their fellow-countrymen by trackless deserts and impassable mountains, you will find isolated communities, like Denver and Salt Lake City, each with its own activities, traditions, and public opinion. ”

“ Germany, falling into the error of all bullies, and mistaking patience for cowardice, took that one step further which is inevitable and fatal in such cases. On the First of February, 1917, she announced her programme of ruthless submarine warfare against the Allies. To injury to American trade was added insult in the shape of a farcical decree permitting America to dispatch one ship, painted with broad black and white stripes, to Falmouth once a week. That proclamation unified America as nothing else had done. Public indignation rose to fever heat. ”

“ New York State alone is not much smaller than England; California is larger. Within the boundaries of this huge federation you will find every type of humanity, several distinct languages, every degree of education, every shade of public opinion. Most countries are dominated by their capital. In America there are a vast number of populous cities, each a little centre in itself, with its own newspapers and its own opinion of things in general and the rest of America in particular. ”

“ To make a nation efficient in a military sense a certain amount of individual liberty-liberty to go one's own way, to be one's own master, and, above all, liberty to ask Why?-must be sacrificed; and the average American, to whom the word liberty is a sacred obsession, may prove difficult in that respect. ”

“ Now we are fighting for one thing only—victory. And throughout the Allied countries to-day there is a strengthening of arms and an uplifting of hearts at the thought that France, glorious France, as she goes forward to the deliverance of her sacred soil from the desecration of the invader, is supported on either hand by the two English-speaking races of the world. ”

“ The people of Texas, who took no burning interest in the American Atlantic trade, and had seen no particular reason to involve the country in war because ships from New York were foolish enough to get sunk in German minefields, suddenly assumed a genuine interest in national unity upon learning that their State had been offered by Germany as a douceur to Mexico. ”

“ But his remoteness from the actualities of the conflict will undoubtedly make it more difficult for the average American—and when we speak of the average American, we are speaking not of the American of British descent, or the travelled American, or the American soldier, but of business men from New York and Ohio, of miners from Pennsylvania, of cowboys from Wyoming, and of a polyglot labouring class from everywhere—to awake to the greatness of his cause or the pressing needs of the situation. ”

“ In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and the great cities of the South you will find families of wealth and refinement whose ancestry can be traced back three or four hundred years. There is no prouder aristocracy in the world. In public life you will find bankers, financiers, and heads of great commercial enterprises who have achieved the last word in business organization. Some one once said that there were only three invincible organizations in the world—the Roman Catholic Church, the German Army (before the war, presumably) , and the Standard Oil Company of America. ”

“ To us, who have known what it is to belong to a nation suddenly plunged into war, it is most interesting to observe and compare the course of events in America. So far that course has been extremely normal. ”

“ Indeed, no comparison is necessary; for a country instinctively forges the weapons that will serve it best. It is sufficient to say here that the American Regular officer cannot be bettered from the point of view of bravery and competence; and he must incur our additional respect as a man who has had the courage and breadth of vision to follow the calling of a soldier in a country where regular soldiering is—or was—popularly regarded as a superfluous and socially unremunerative profession. ”

“ We who live under a monarchical system, where a popular vote can turn out a Government overnight and set up another in its stead, can have little conception what it means to be a citizen of a great democracy—in a country where the functions of King and Prime Minister are combined in the person of one man, who can usually enforce his will upon the Legislature, is responsible to no one for his actions, and cannot be removed from office by anything but death or a conviction for high treason for at least four years. ”

“ To-day there are great camps not only at Plattsburg, but at Fort Myer, near Washington, the Presidio at San Francisco, and in almost every State in the Union. These camps contain representatives of all grades of American life. The first to join, as usual, were the young men of means and leisure—the despised Idle Rich—all, that is, who had not enlisted in the Regular Army as privates. Later, as patriotism awoke, or business interests were adjusted, other walks of life contributed their share-farmers, commercial men, and members of various professions. ”

“ First of all, let us get over the delusion that America is entirely inhabited by our "cousins "-people of pure British descent. Before the war nearly two million immigrants entered the United States every year. Very few of these could speak English. To-day, it is said, only one-half of the inhabitants of Manhattan Island (the main part of New York City) are American born. ”

“ With this earnest and powerful influence at work, why did America hold aloof so long? That is the question which has been debated in Allied circles for many a day. It has been debated, as already noted, with even greater vehemence in certain American circles. And the explanation—the explanation which the stay-at-home Englishman and the stay-at-home American have both failed equally to grasp—can be found by looking at the map and comparing the size of the United States with the size of the other countries of the world. We who live in an island which it is possible to traverse in a day ”

“ He is suspicious of the essential relations between officers and men. He dislikes the idea of being at any one's absolute disposal. When in doubt about anything, he repeats to himself, or to as large an audience as he can collect, Lincoln's famous dictum on the subject of "Government of the People, by the People, for the People"; and he experiences some difficulty in squaring this with the practice prevailing in barrack-yards. "Government of the Army, by the Army, for the Army," sounds good, equally good, but he has recently had practical object lesson in the fallibility of such ideals. ”

“ At the outset it should be noted that in America soldiering is essentially a serious and absorbing profession, but it is not a socially exalted profession, as in most of the countries of Europe. Families of birth and position do not contribute a son to the Services as a matter of course, like ourselves; neither is a year or two in a crack regiment regarded as a fitting conclusion to the education of a young man in American society. ”

“ To the British people, face to face with the grim realities of the struggle, this attitude was absolutely unintelligible. With little opportunity, and less leisure, to study or consider the variegated local conditions in America's 48 States, all that the average Englishman saw across the sea was a people which "came not forward in the day of battle"—a people which, not being for us, was against us—led by a President who demanded satisfaction for German insults solely through the medium of futile correspondence. ”

“ For it means the end of British and American misunderstandings. Rivalry there will always be, but it will be healthy; criticism there will always be, but it will not be malicious. There will at times be passing resentments,rendered more acute by the fact that we share the blessings of a common tongue, and are therefore debarred from wrapping up our private reflections upon one another's conduct in the decent obscurity of a foreign language. ”

“ To a certain type of mind there is something not quite right about a man who deliberately practises the arts- of war in time of peace; to another, there is something not quite normal, not quite economic, about a man in full possession of his money-making faculties who . deliberately buries himself in business which is incapable of yielding him more than a couple of hundred dollars a month. As for the ordinary Broadway loafer, he regards the "enlisted man" as one of the lowest members of creation. But the American officer reeks nothing of that. His profession is its own reward ”

“ Conscription assured, industries mobilized, money raised, traditional and a naval and military force at work four thousand miles from their base! America may have been slow to put her hand to the plough, but having done so, she is losing no time in cleaving a straight furrow. ”

“ You will see men standing at street corners reading newspapers printed in German, or Hebrew, or Modern Greek—papers printed and published daily in New York. New York alone contains more Germans than many large German cities. The same may be said of Chicago. Indeed, the Mayor of that city recently excused himself from issuing an official invitation to Marshal Joffre and the French Mission on the ground that "Chicago is the third German city of the world." ”