A TRAVELLER IN WARTIME. 

By Winston Churchill

PREFACE

I am reprinting here, in response to requests, certain recentexperiences in Great Britain and France. These were selected in the hopeof conveying to American readers some idea of the atmosphere, of "whatit is like" in these countries under the immediate shadow of the battleclouds. It was what I myself most wished to know. My idea was first tosend home my impressions while they were fresh, and to refrain as far aspossible from comment and judgment until I should have had time to makea fuller survey. Hence I chose as a title for these articles, --intendedto be preliminary, "A Traveller in War-Time. " I tried to banish from mymind all previous impressions gained from reading. I wished to be freefor the moment to accept and record the chance invitation or adventure, wherever met with, at the Front, in the streets of Paris, in Ireland, oron the London omnibus. Later on, I hoped to write a book summarizing thechanging social conditions as I had found them. 

Unfortunately for me, my stay was unexpectedly cut short. I was ableto avail myself of but few of the many opportunities offered. With thisapology, the articles are presented as they were written. 

I have given the impression that at the time of my visit there was nolack of food in England, but I fear that I have not done justice to thefrugality of the people, much of which was self-imposed for the purposeof helping to win the war. On very, good authority I have been givento understand that food was less abundant during the winter just past;partly because of the effect of the severe weather on our Americanrailroads, which had trouble in getting supplies to the coast, andpartly because more and more ships were required for transportingAmerican troops and supplies for these troops, to France. Thisadditional curtailment was most felt by families of small income, whoseearners were at the front or away on other government service. Mothershad great difficulty in getting adequate nourishment for growingchildren. But the British people cheerfully submitted to this furtherdeprivation. Summer is at hand. It is to be hoped that before anotherwinter sets in, American and British shipping will have sufficientlyincreased to remedy the situation. 

In regard to what I have said of the British army, I was profoundlystruck, as were other visitors to that front, by the health andmorale of the men, by the marvel of organization accomplished in socomparatively brief a time. It was one of the many proofs of the extentto which the British nation had been socialized. When one thought ofthat little band of regulars sent to France in 1914, who became immortalat Mons, who shared the glory of the Marne, and in that first dreadfulwinter held back the German hosts from the Channel ports, the presenceon the battle line of millions of disciplined and determined men seemedastonishing indeed. And this had been accomplished by a nation facingthe gravest crisis in its history, under the necessity of sustaining andfinancing many allies and of protecting an Empire. Since my return toAmerica a serious reverse has occurred. 

After the Russian peace, the Germans attempted to overwhelm the Britishby hurling against them vastly superior numbers of highly trained men. It is for the military critic of the future to analyse any tacticalerrors that may have been made at the second battle of the Somme. Apparently there was an absence of preparation, of specific orders fromhigh sources in the event of having to cede ground. This much can besaid, that the morale of the British Army remains unimpaired; that thepresence of mind and ability of the great majority of the officerswho, flung on their own resources, conducted the retreat, cannot bequestioned; while the accomplishment of General Carey, in stopping thegap with an improvised force of non-combatants, will go down in history. In an attempt to bring home to myself, as well as to my readers, arealization of what American participation in this war means or shouldmean. 

A TRAVELLER IN WAR-TIME

CHAPTER I

Toward the end of the summer of 1917 it was very hot in New York, andhotter still aboard the transatlantic liner thrust between the piers. One glance at our cabins, at the crowded decks and dining-room, at thelittle writing-room above, where the ink had congealed in the ink-wells, sufficed to bring home to us that the days of luxurious sea travel, of ala carte restaurants, and Louis Seize bedrooms were gone--at least fora period. The prospect of a voyage of nearly two weeks was not enticing. The ship, to be sure, was far from being the best of those stillrunning on a line which had gained a magic reputation of immunity fromsubmarines; three years ago she carried only second and third classpassengers! But most of us were in a hurry to get to the countrieswhere war had already become a grim and terrible reality. In one way oranother we had all enlisted. 

By "we" I mean the American passengers. The first welcome discoveryamong the crowd wandering aimlessly and somewhat disconsolately aboutthe decks was the cheerful face of a friend whom at first I did notrecognize because of his amazing disguise in uniform. Hitherto he hadbeen associated in my mind with dinner parties and clubs. 

That life was past. He had laid up his yacht and joined the Red Crossand, henceforth, for an indeterminable period, he was to abide amidstthe discomforts and dangers of the Western Front, with five days' leaveevery three months. The members of a group similarly attired whom Ifound gathered by the after-rail were likewise cheerful. Two well-knownspecialists from the Massachusetts General Hospital made significantthe hegira now taking place that threatens to leave our country, likeBritain, almost doctorless. When I reached France it seemed to me that Imet all the celebrated medical men I ever heard of. A third in the groupwas a business man from the Middle West who had wound up his affairs andleft a startled family in charge of a trust company. Though his physicalactivities had hitherto consisted of an occasional mild game of golf, he wore his khaki like an old campaigner; and he seemed undaunted bythe prospect--still somewhat remotely ahead of him--of a winter journeyacross the Albanian Mountains from the Aegean to the Adriatic. 

After a restless night, we sailed away in the hot dawn of a Wednesday. The shores of America faded behind us, and as the days went by, we hadthe odd sense of threading uncharted seas; we found it more and moredifficult to believe that this empty, lonesome ocean was the Atlanticin the twentieth century. Once we saw a four-master; once a shy, silentsteamer avoided us, westward bound; and once in mid-ocean, tossed on asea sun-silvered under a rack of clouds, we overtook a gallant littleschooner out of New Bedford or Gloucester--a forthfarer, too. 

Meanwhile, amongst the Americans, the socializing process had begun. Many elements which in a former stratified existence would never havebeen brought into contact were fusing by the pressure of a purpose, ofa great adventure common to us all. On the upper deck, high above thewaves, was a little 'fumoir' which, by some odd trick of association, reminded me of the villa formerly occupied by the Kaiser inCorfu--perhaps because of the faience plaques set in the walls--althoughI cannot now recall whether the villa has faience plaques or not. Theroom was, of course, on the order of a French provincial cafe, and assuch delighted the bourgeoisie monopolizing the alcove tables and jokingwith the fat steward. Here in this 'fumoir', lawyers, doctors, businessmen of all descriptions, newspaper correspondents, movie photographers, and millionaires who had never crossed save in a 'cabine de luxe', rubbed elbows and exchanged views and played bridge together. There wereY. M. C. A. People on their way to the various camps, reconstructionworkers intending to build temporary homes for the homeless French, andyoungsters in the uniform of the American Field Service, going over todrive camions and ambulances; many of whom, without undue regret, had left college after a freshman year. They invaded the 'fumoir', undaunted, to practise atrocious French on the phlegmatic steward; theytook possession of a protesting piano in the banal little salon andsang: "We'll not come back till it's over over there. " And in theevening, on the darkened decks, we listened and thrilled to the refrain:

 "There's a long, long trail a-winding Into the land of my dreams. "

We were Argonauts--even the Red Cross ladies on their way to establishrest camps behind the lines and brave the mud and rains of a winterin eastern France. None, indeed, were more imbued with the forthfaringspirit than these women, who were leaving, without regret, sheltered, comfortable lives to face hardships and brave dangers without aquestion. And no sharper proof of the failure of the old social order toprovide for human instincts and needs could be found than the convictionthey gave of new and vitalizing forces released in them. The timiditieswith which their sex is supposedly encumbered had disappeared, and eventhe possibility of a disaster at sea held no terrors for them. When thesun fell down into the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the cabinsbelow were sealed--and thus become insupportable--they settledthemselves for the night in their steamer-chairs and smiled at theremark of M. Le Commissaire that it was a good "season" for submarines. The moonlight filtered through the chinks in the burlap shroudingthe deck. About 3 a. M. The khaki-clad lawyer from Milwaukee becamecommunicative, the Red Cross ladies produced chocolate. It was thegenial hour before the final nap, from which one awoke abruptly at thesound of squeegees and brooms to find the deck a river of sea water, onwhose banks a wild scramble for slippers and biscuit-boxes invariablyensued. No experience could have been more socializing. 

"Well, it's a relief, " one of the ladies exclaimed, "not to betravelling with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box! Oh, yes, I realizewhat I'm doing. I'm going to live in one of those flimsy portable houseswith twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but it's better than thrashing around looking for something to do andnever finding it, never getting anything real to spend one's energy-on. I've closed my country house, I've sublet my apartment, I've done withteas and bridge, and I'm happier than I've been in my life even if Idon't get enough sleep. "

Another lady, who looked still young, had two sons in the army. "Therewas nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and Iwant to be useful. My husband has to stay at home; he can't leave hisbusiness. " Be useful! There she struck the new and aggressive note ofemancipation from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, ofwider service for the unnamed and the unknown; and, above all, for thewider self-realization of which service is but a by-product. I recallparticularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in cleargrey eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope renewed. Hadshe lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been doomed to slowdesiccation. There are thousands of such women in France today, and tothem the great war has brought salvation. 

From what country other than America could so many thousands ofpilgrims--even before our nation had entered the war--have hurriedacross a wide ocean to take their part? No matter what religion weprofess, whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever. Our faces are set toward strangeworlds presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour andsubstance--worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values. Andon this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce's splendid summary of theAmerican philosophy--of the American religion as set forth by WilliamJames:

 "The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or the home-builder transferred to the metaphysical or to the religious realm. There is a far-off home, our long lost spiritual fortune. Experience alone can guide us to the place where these things are, hence indeed you need experience. You can only win your way on the frontier unless you are willing to live there. "

Through the pall of horror and tragedy the American sees a vision; forhim it is not merely a material and bloody contest of arms and men, a military victory to be gained over an aggressive and wrong-mindedpeople. It is a world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it hascome, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit of the futuresociety of mankind. It must be made to serve a purpose in helping toliberate the world from sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, andcant. 

II

One night we entered the danger zone. There had been an entertainment inthe little salon which, packed with passengers, had gradually achievedthe temperature and humidity of a Turkish bath. For the ports had beenclosed as tight as gaskets could make them, the electric fans, as usual, obstinately "refused to march. " After the amateur speechmaking andconcert pieces an Italian violinist, who had thrown over a lucrativecontract to become a soldier, played exquisitely; and one of the Frenchsisters we had seen walking the deck with the mincing steps of thecloister sang; somewhat precariously and pathetically, the Ave Maria. Its pathos was of the past, and after she had finished, as we fled intothe open air, we were conscious of having turned our backs irrevocablyyet determinedly upon an era whose life and convictions the music of thecomposer so beautifully expressed. And the sister's sweet withered facewas reminiscent of a missal, one bright with colour, and still shiningfaintly. A missal in a library of modern books!

On deck a fine rain was blowing through a gap in our burlap shroud, aphosphorescent fringe of foam hissed along the sides of the ship, givingthe illusory appearance of our deadlights open and ablaze, exaggeratingthe sinister blackness of the night. We were, apparently, a beacon inthat sepia waste where modern undersea monsters were lurking. 

There were on board other elements which in the normal times gone bywould have seemed disquieting enough. The evening after we had left NewYork, while we were still off the coast of Long Island, I saw on thepoop a crowd of steerage passengers listening intently to haranguesby speakers addressing them from the top of a pile of life rafts. Armenians, I was told, on their way to fight the Turks, all recruitedin America by one frenzied woman who had seen her child cut in two bya German officer. Twilight was gathering as I joined the group, the seawas silvered by the light of an August moon floating serenely betweenswaying stays. The orator's passionate words and gestures evoked wildresponses from his hearers, whom the drag of an ancient hatred hadsnatched from the peaceful asylum of the west. This smiling, happyfolk, which I had seen in our manufacturing towns and cities, were nowtransformed, atavistic--all save one, a student, who stared wistfullythrough his spectacles across the waters. Later, when twilight deepened, when the moon had changed from silver to gold, the orators gave place toa singer. He had been a bootblack in America. Now he had become a bard. His plaintive minor chant evoked, one knew not how, the flavour of thatage-long history of oppression and wrong these were now determined toavenge. Their conventional costumes were proof that we had harbouredthem--almost, indeed, assimilated them. And suddenly they had reverted. They were going to slaughter the Turks. 

On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the wide mouth of theGironde, a name stirring vague memories of romance and terror. TheFrench passengers gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand andforest, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and hailed it as thepromised land of self-realization. A richly coloured watering-placeslid into view, as in a moving-picture show. There was, indeed, all thereality and unreality of the cinematograph about our arrival; presentlythe reel would end abruptly, and we should find ourselves pushing ourway out of the emptying theatre into a rainy street. The impression ofunreality in the face of visual evidence persisted into the night when, after an afternoon at anchor, we glided up the river, our decks andports ablaze across the land. Silhouettes of tall poplars loomed againstthe blackness; occasionally a lamp revealed the milky blue facade of ahouse. This was France! War-torn France--at last vividly brought hometo us when a glare appeared on the sky, growing brighter and brighteruntil, at a turn of the river, abruptly we came abreast of vomitingfurnaces, thousands of electric lights strung like beads over the crestof a hill, and, below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness, stretching along monotonous streets. A munitions town in the night. 

One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs where the workmen, crouching over their tasks, straightened up at sight of us andcheered. And one cried out hoarsely, "Vous venez nous sauver, vousAmericains"--"You come to save us"--an exclamation I was to hear againin the days that followed. 

III

All day long, as the 'rapide' hurried us through the smiling winecountry and past the well-remembered chateaux of the Loire, we wonderedhow we should find Paris--beautiful Paris, saved from violation as by amiracle! Our first discovery, after we had pushed our way out of thedim station into the obscurity of the street, was that of the absence oftaxicabs. The horse-drawn buses ranged along the curb were reservedfor the foresighted and privileged few. Men and women were rushingdesperately about in search of conveyances, and in the midst of thisconfusion, undismayed, debonnair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted figurestanding under a lamp--the unmistakable American soldier. 

"Aren't there any cabs in Paris?" I asked. 

"Oh, yes, they tell me they're here, " he said. "I've given a man adollar to chase one. "

Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have aroused such burningsin the heart of the French poilu, with his five sous a day! We left himthere, and staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French officerapproached us. "You come from America, " he said. "Let me help you. "There was just enough light in the streets to prevent us from gettingutterly lost, and we recognized the dark mass of the Tuileries as wecrossed the gardens. The hotel we sought was still there, and its menu, save for the war-bread and the tiny portion of sugar, as irreproachableas ever. 

The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis had sprung intoexistence, though they were much in demand. And in spite of the soldiersthronging the sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one hadalways known, gay--insouciante, pleasure-bent. The luxury shops appearedto be thriving, the world-renowned restaurants to be doing businessas usual; to judge from the prices, a little better than usual; theexpensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, of course, yet itseemed none the less surprising that it should still exist. Oddly enoughthe presence of such overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failedto strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, of the castingoff of mundane troubles for which the French capital has so long beenknown. But so it was. Most of these soldiers were here precisely withthe object of banishing from their minds the degradations and horrors ofthe region from which they had come, and which was so unbelievably near;a few hours in an automobile--less than that in one of those dragon-flymachines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue above our heads!

Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated little districtde luxe of which the Place Vendome is the centre, and we had alwaysunconsciously thought of it as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons. Soit seems today. One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, in allsorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and visor to the traditionalcloth blouse and kepi; once in a while a smart French officer. TheEnglish and Canadians, the Australians, New Zealanders, and Americanswere much in evidence. Set them down anywhere on the face of the globe, under any conditions conceivable, and you could not surprise them; suchwas the impression. The British officers and even the British Tommieswere blase, wearing the air of the 'semaine Anglaise', and the "fiveo'clock tea, " as the French delight to call it. That these could havecome direct from the purgatory of the trenches seemed unbelievable. The Anzacs, with looped-up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, halting before the shops in the Rue de la Paix to gaze at the pricelessjewellery there, or stopping at a sidewalk cafe to enjoy a drink. Oursoldiers had not seen the front; many of them, no doubt, were on leavefrom the training-camps, others were on duty in Paris, but all seemed ina hurry to get somewhere, bound for a definite destination. They mighthave been in New York or San Francisco. It was a novel sight, indeed, to observe them striding across the Place Vendome with out so much asdeigning to cast a glance at the column dedicated to the greatemperor who fought that other world-war a century ago; to see oursquare-shouldered officers hustling around corners in Ford and Packardautomobiles. And the atmosphere of our communication headquarters wasso essentially one of "getting things done" as to make one forget themediaeval narrowness of the Rue Sainte Anne, and the inconvenient Frenchprivate-dwelling arrangements of the house. You were transported backto America. Such, too, was the air of our Red Cross establishment in theancient building facing the Palace de la Concorde, where the unfortunateLouis lost his head. 

History had been thrust into the background. I was never more aware ofthis than when, shortly after dawn Wednesday, the massive grey pileof the Palace of Versailles suddenly rose before me. As the motor shotthrough the empty Place d'Armes I made a desperate attempt to summonagain a vivid impression, when I had first stood there many years ago, of an angry Paris mob beating against that grill, of the Swiss guardsdying on the stairway for their Queen. But it was no use. France hasundergone some subtle change, yet I knew I was in France. I knew it whenwe left Paris and sped through the dim leafy tunnels of the Bois; whenI beheld a touch of filtered sunlight on the dense blue thatch of the'marroniers' behind the walls of a vast estate once dedicated to thesports and pleasures of Kings; when I caught glimpses of silent chateauxmirrored in still waters. 

I was on my way, with one of our naval officers, to visit an Americannaval base on the western coast. It was France, but the laughter haddied on her lips. A few women and old men and children were to be seenin the villages, a bent figure in a field, an occasional cart that drewaside as we hurried at eighty kilometers an hour along deserted routesdrawn as with a ruler across the land. Sometimes the road dipped into acanyon of poplars, and the sky between their crests was a tiny stripof mottled blue and white. The sun crept in and out, the clouds castshadows on the hills; here and there the tower of lonely church orcastle broke the line of a distant ridge. Morning-glories nodded overlodge walls where the ivy was turning crimson, and the little gardenswere masses of colours--French colours like that in the beds of theTuileries, brick-red geraniums and dahlias, yellow marigolds and purpleasters. 

We lunched at one of the little inns that for generations have beentucked away in the narrow streets of provincial towns; this time aCheval Blanc, with an unimposing front and a blaze of sunshine in itsheart. After a dejeuner fit for the most exacting of bon viveurs we satin that courtyard and smoked, while an ancient waiter served us withcoffee that dripped through silver percolators into our glasses. Thetourists have fled. "If happily you should come again, monsieur, " saidmadame, as she led me with pardonable pride through her immaculatebedrooms and salons with wavy floors. And I dwelt upon a future holidaythere, on the joys of sharing with a friend that historic place. Thenext afternoon I lingered in another town, built on a little hill ringedabout with ancient walls, from whose battlements tide-veined marshesstretched away to a gleaming sea. A figure flitting through the cobbledstreets, a woman in black who sat sewing, sewing in a window, onlyserved to heighten the impression of emptiness, to give birth to the oddfancy that some alchemic quality in the honeyed sunlight now steeping itmust have preserved the place through the ages. But in the white closesurrounding the church were signs that life still persisted. A peasantwas drawing water at the pump, and the handle made a noise; a priestchatted with three French ladies who had come over from a neighbouringseaside resort. And then a woman in deep mourning emerged from a tinyshop and took her bicycle from against the wall and spoke to me. 

"Vous etes Americain, monsieur?"

I acknowledged it. 

"Vous venez nous sauver"--the same question I had heard on the lips ofthe workman in the night. "I hope so, madame, " I replied, and wouldhave added, "We come also to save ourselves. " She looked at me withsad, questioning eyes, and I knew that for her--and alas for many likeher--we were too late. When she had mounted her wheel and ridden away Ibought a 'Matin' and sat down on a doorstep to read about Kerensky andthe Russian Revolution. The thing seemed incredible here--war seemedincredible, and yet its tentacles had reached out to this peaceful OldWorld spot and taken a heavy toll. Once more I sought the ramparts, onlyto be reminded by those crumbling, machicolated ruins that I was in awar-ridden land. Few generations had escaped the pestilence. 

At no great distance lay the little city which had been handed over tous by the French Government for a naval base, one of the ports where ourtroops and supplies are landed. Those who know provincial France willvisualize its narrow streets and reticent shops, its grey-white and ecruhouses all more or less of the same design, with long French windowsguarded by ornamental balconies of cast iron--a city that has neverexperienced such a thing as a real-estate boom. Imagine, against sucha background, the bewildering effect of the dynamic presence of a fewregiments of our new army! It is a curious commentary on this war thatone does not think of these young men as soldiers, but as citizensengaged in a scientific undertaking of a magnitude unprecedented. Youcome unexpectedly upon truck-loads of tanned youngsters, whose features, despite flannel shirts and campaign hats, summon up memories of HarvardSquare and the Yale Yard, of campuses at Berkeley and Ithaca. Theyouthful drivers of these camions are alert, intent, but a hard day'swork on the docks by no means suffices to dampen the spirits of thepassengers, who whistle ragtime airs as they bump over the cobbles. Andthe note they strike is presently sustained by a glimpse, on a siding, of an efficient-looking Baldwin, ranged alongside several of the tinyFrench locomotives of yesterday; sustained, too, by an acquaintancewith the young colonel in command of the town. Though an officer ofthe regular army, he brings home to one the fact that the days of themilitary martinet have gone for ever. He is military, indeed-erect andsoldierly--but fortune has amazingly made him a mayor and an autocrat, a builder, and in some sense a railway-manager and superintendentof docks. And to these functions have been added those of policecommissioner, of administrator of social welfare and hygiene. It willbe a comfort to those at home to learn that their sons in our army inFrance are cared for as no enlisted men have ever been cared for before. 

IV

By the end of September I had reached England, eager to gain a freshimpression of conditions there. 

The weather in London was mild and clear. The third evening after I hadgot settled in one of those delightfully English hotels in the heartof the city, yet removed from the traffic, with letter-boxes that stillbear the initials of Victoria, I went to visit some American navalofficers in their sitting-room on the ground floor. The cloth had notbeen removed from the dinner-table, around which we were chatting, whena certain strange sound reached our ears--a sound not to be identifiedwith the distant roar of the motor-busses in Pall Mall, nor with thesharp bark of the taxi-horns, although not unlike them. We sat listeningintently, and heard the sound again. 

"The Germans have come, " one of the officers remarked, as he finishedhis coffee. The other looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock. "Theymust have left their lines about seven, " he said. 

In spite of the fact that our newspapers at home had made me familiarwith these aeroplane raids, as I sat there, amidst those comfortablesurroundings, the thing seemed absolutely incredible. To fly one hundredand fifty miles across the Channel and southern England, bomb London, and fly back again by midnight! We were going to be bombed! Theanti-aircraft guns were already searching the sky for the invaders. Itis sinister, and yet you are seized by an overwhelming curiosity thatdraws you, first to pull aside the heavy curtains of the window, andthen to rush out into the dark street both proceedings in the worstpossible form! The little street was deserted, but in Pall Mall the darkforms of busses could be made out scurrying for shelter, one wonderedwhere? Above the roar of London, the pop pop pop! of the defending gunscould be heard now almost continuously, followed by the shrieks andmoans of the shrapnel shells as they passed close overhead. They soundedlike giant rockets, and even as rockets some of them broke into acascade of sparks. Star shells they are called, bursting, it seemed, among the immutable stars themselves that burned serenely on. And therewere other stars like November meteors hurrying across space--the lightsof the British planes scouring the heavens for their relentless enemies. Everywhere the restless white rays of the searchlights pierced thedarkness, seeking, but seeking in vain. Not a sign of the intruders wasto be seen. I was induced to return to the sitting-room. 

"But what are they shooting at?" I asked. 

"Listen, " said one of the officers. There came a lull in the firingand then a faint, droning noise like the humming of insects on a stillsummer day. "It's all they have to shoot at, that noise. "

"But their own planes?" I objected. 

"The Gotha has two engines, it has a slightly different noise, when youget used to it. You'd better step out of that window. It's against thelaw to show light, and if a bomb falls in the street you'd be filledwith glass. " I overcame my fascination and obeyed. "It isn't only thebombs, " my friend went on, "it's the falling shrapnel, too. "

The noise made by those bombs is unmistakable, unforgetable, and quitedistinct from the chorus of the guns and shrapnel--a crashing note, reverberating, sustained, like the E minor of some giant calliope. 

In face of the raids, which coincide with the coming of the moon, Londonis calm, but naturally indignant over such methods of warfare. Thedamage done is ridiculously small; the percentage of deaths and injuriesinsignificant. There exists, in every large city, a riffraff to getpanicky: these are mostly foreigners; they seek the Tubes, and somethe crypt of St. Paul's, for it is wise to get under shelter during thebrief period of the raids, and most citizens obey the warnings of thepolice. It is odd, indeed, that more people are not hurt by shrapnel. The Friday following the raid I have described I went out of town for aweek-end, and returned on Tuesday to be informed that a shell had gonethrough the roof outside of the room I had vacated, and the ceilingand floor of the bedroom of one of the officers who lived below. He wascovered with dust and debris, his lights went out, but he calmly steppedthrough the window. "You'd best have your dinner early, sir, " I was toldby the waiter on my return. "Last night a lady had her soup up-stairs, her chicken in the office, and her coffee in the cellar. " It is worthwhile noting that she had all three. Another evening, when I was diningwith Sir James Barrie, he showed me a handful of shrapnel fragments. "Igathered them off the roof, " he informed me. And a lady next to whom Isat at luncheon told me in a matter-of-fact tone that a bomb hadfallen the night before in the garden of her town house. "It was quitedisagreeable, " she said, "and broke all our windows on that side. "During the last raids before the moon disappeared, by a new andingenious system of barrage fire the Germans were driven off. Thequestion of the ethics of reprisals is agitating London. 

One "raid, " which occurred at midday, is worth recording. I was on myway to our Embassy when, in the residential quarter through which Ipassed, I found all the housemaids in the areas gazing up at the sky, and I was told by a man in a grocer's cart that the Huns had come again. But the invader on this occasion turned out to be a British aviator fromone of the camps who was bringing a message to London. The warmth of hisreception was all that could be desired, and he alighted hastily in thefirst open space that presented itself. 

Looking back to the time when I left America, I can recall theexpectation of finding a Britain beginning to show signs of distress. I was prepared to live on a small ration. And the impression of thescarcity of food was seemingly confirmed when the table was being setfor the first meal at my hotel; when the waiter, who chanced to be anold friend, pointed to a little bowl half-full of sugar and exclaimed:"I ought to warn you, sir, it's all you're to have for a week, andI'm sorry to say you're only allowed a bit of bread, too. " It is humanperversity to want a great deal of bread when bread becomes scarce; evenwar bread, which, by the way, is better than white. But the rest of theluncheon, when it came, proved that John Bull was under no necessityof stinting himself. Save for wheat and sugar; he is not in want. Everywhere in London you are confronted by signs of an incomprehensibleprosperity; everywhere, indeed, in Great Britain. There can be no doubtabout that of the wage-earners--nothing like it has ever been seenbefore. One sure sign of this is the phenomenal sale of pianos tohouseholds whose occupants had never dreamed of such luxuries. And notonce, but many times, have I read in the newspapers of workingmen'sfamilies of four or five which are gaining collectively more than fivehundred pounds a year. The economic and social significance of thistendency, the new attitude of the working classes, the ferment it iscausing need not be dwelt upon here. That England will be a changedEngland is unquestionable. 

The London theatres are full, the "movies" crowded, and you have to waityour turn for a seat at a restaurant. Bond Street and Piccadillyare doing a thriving business--never so thriving, you are told, andpresently you are willing to believe it. The vendor beggars, so familiara sight a few years ago, have all but disappeared, and you may walk fromWaterloo Station to the Haymarket without so much as meeting a needysoul anxious to carry your bag. Taxicabs are in great demand. And oneodd result of the scarcity of what the English are pleased to call"petrol, " by which they mean gasoline, is the reappearance of thatrespectable, but almost obsolete animal, the family carriage-horse;of that equally obsolete vehicle, the victoria. The men on the box areinvariably in black. In spite of taxes to make the hair of an Americanturn grey, in spite of lavish charities, the wealthy classes still seemwealthy--if the expression may be allowed. That they are not so wealthyas they were goes without saying. In the country houses of the oldaristocracy the most rigid economy prevails. There are new fortunes, undoubtedly, munitions and war fortunes made before certain measureswere taken to control profits; and some establishments, including a fewsupported by American accumulations, still exhibit the number of menservants and amount of gold plate formerly thought adequate. But inmost of these great houses maids have replaced the butlers and footmen;mansions have been given over for hospitals; gardeners are fightingin the trenches, and courts and drives of country places are oftenovergrown with grass and weeds. 

"Yes, we do dine in public quite often, " said a very great lady. "It'scheaper than keeping servants. "

Two of her three sons had been killed in France, but she did notmention this. The English do not advertise their sorrows. Still anotherexplanation when husbands and sons and brothers come back across theChannel for a few days' leave after long months in the trenches, nothingis too good for them. And when these days have flown, there is alwaysthe possibility that there may never be another leave. Not long ago Iread a heart-rending article about the tragedies of the goodbyes inthe stations and the terminal hotels--tragedies hidden by silence and asmile. "Well, so long, " says an officer "bring back a V. C. , " crieshis sister from the group on the platform, and he waves his hand indeprecation as the train pulls out, lights his pipe, and pretends to bereading the Sphere. 

Some evening, perchance, you happen to be in the dark street outsideof Charing Cross station. An occasional hooded lamp throws a precariousgleam on a long line of men carrying--so gently--stretchers on which liethe silent forms of rich and poor alike. 

CHAPTER II

For the student of history who is able to place himself within thestream of evolution the really important events of today are not takingplace on the battle lines, but behind them. The key-note of the new erahas been struck in Russia. And as I write these words, after the Italianretreat, a second revolution seems possible. For three years one hasthought inevitably of 1789, and of the ensuing world conflict outof which issued the beginnings of democracy. History does not repeatitself, yet evolution is fairly consistent. While our attention has beenfocused on the military drama enacted before our eyes and recorded inthe newspapers, another drama, unpremeditated but of vastly greatersignificance, is unfolding itself behind the stage. Never in the historyof the world were generals and admirals, statesmen and politicians sosensitive to or concerned about public opinion as they are today. Froma military point of view the situation of the Allies at the presentwriting is far from reassuring. Germany and her associates have theadvantage of interior lines, of a single dominating and purposefulleadership, while our five big nations, democracies or semi-democracies, are stretched in a huge ring with precarious connections on land, withthe submarine alert on the sea. Much of their territory is occupied. They did not seek the war; they still lack co-ordination and leadershipin waging it. In some of these countries, at least, politicians andstatesmen are so absorbed by administrative duties, by national ratherthan international problems, by the effort to sustain themselves, thatthey have little time for allied strategy. Governments rise and fall, familiar names and reputations are juggled about like numbered balls ina shaker, come to the top to be submerged again in a new 'emeute'. Thereare conferences and conferences without end. Meanwhile a social fermentis at work, in Russia conspicuously, in Italy a little less so, inGermany and Austria undoubtedly, in France and England, and even in ourown country--once of the most radical in the world, now become the mostconservative. 

What form will the social revolution take? Will it be unbridled, unguided; will it run through a long period of anarchy before thefermentation begun shall have been completed, or shall it be handled, inall the nations concerned, by leaders who understand and sympathize withthe evolutionary trend, who are capable of controlling it, of takingthe necessary international steps of co-operation in order that itmay become secure and mutually beneficial to all? This is an age ofco-operation, and in this at least, if not in other matters, the UnitedStates of America is in an ideal position to assume the leadership. 

To a certain extent, one is not prepared to say how far, the militaryand social crises are interdependent. And undoubtedly the militaryproblem rests on the suppression of the submarine. If Germany continuesto destroy shipping on the seas, if we are not able to supply our newarmies and the Allied nations with food and other things, the increasingsocial ferment will paralyze the military operations of the Entente. The result of a German victory under such circumstances is impossible topredict; but the chances are certainly not worth running. In a sense, therefore, in a great sense, the situation is "up" to us in moreways than one, not only to supply wise democratic leadership but tocontribute material aid and brains in suppressing the submarine, and tobuild ships enough to keep Britain, France, and Italy from starving. We are looked upon by all the Allies, and I believe justly, as being adisinterested nation, free from the age-long jealousies of Europe. And we can do much in bringing together and making more purposeful thevarious elements represented by the nations to whose aid we have come. 

I had not intended in these early papers to comment, but to confinemyself to such of my experiences abroad as might prove interesting andsomewhat illuminating. So much I cannot refrain from saying. 

It is a pleasure to praise where praise is due, and too much cannot besaid of the personnel of our naval service--something of which I canspeak from intimate personal experience. In these days, in that part ofLondon near the Admiralty, you may chance to run across a tall, erect, and broad-shouldered man in blue uniform with three stars on his collar, striding rapidly along the sidewalk, and sometimes, in his haste, cutting across a street. People smile at him--costermongers, clerks, and shoppers--and whisper among themselves, "There goes the Americanadmiral!" and he invariably smiles back at them, especially at thechildren. He is an admiral, every inch a seaman, commanding a devotedloyalty from his staff and from the young men who are scouring the seaswith our destroyers. In France as well as in England the name Sims is ahousehold word, and if he chose he might be feted every day of the week. He does not choose. He spends long hours instead in the quarters devotedto his administration in Grosvenor Gardens, or in travelling in Franceand Ireland supervising the growing forces under his command. 

It may not be out of place to relate a characteristic story of AdmiralSims, whose career in our service, whose notable contributions to navalgunnery are too well known to need repetition. Several years ago, on amemorable trip to England, he was designated by the admiral of the fleetto be present at a banquet given our sailors in the Guildhall. Of coursethe lord mayor called upon him for a speech, but Commander Sims insistedthat a bluejacket should make the address. "What, a bluejacket!"exclaimed the lord mayor in astonishment. "Do bluejackets make speechesin your country?" "Certainly they do, " said Sims. "Now there's afine-looking man over there, a quartermaster on my ship. Let's call onhim and see what he has to say. " The quartermaster, duly summoned, rosewith aplomb and delivered himself of a speech that made the hallring, that formed the subject of a puzzled and amazed comment bythe newspapers of the British Capital. Nor was it ever divulgedthat Commander Sims had foreseen the occasion and had picked out theimpressive quartermaster to make a reputation for oratory for theenlisted force. 

As a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to add that there were andare other non-commissioned officers and enlisted men in the service whocould have acquitted themselves equally well. One has only to attendsome of their theatrical performances to be assured of it. 

But to the European mind our bluejacket is still something of ananomaly. He is a credit to our public schools, a fruit of our systemof universal education. And he belongs to a service in which arereconciled, paradoxically, democracy and discipline. One moment you mayhear a bluejacket talking to an officer as man to man, and the next youwill see him salute and obey an order implicitly. 

On a wet and smoky night I went from the London streets into thebrightness and warmth of that refuge for American soldiers and sailors, the "Eagle Hut, " as the Y. M. C. A. Is called. The place was full, as usual, but my glance was at once attracted by three strapping, intelligent-looking men in sailor blouses playing pool in a corner. "Isimply can't get used to the fact that people like that are ordinarysailors, " said the lady in charge to me as we leaned against thesoda-fountain. "They're a continual pride and delight to us Americanshere--always so willing to help when there's anything to be done, andso interesting to talk to. " When I suggested that her ideas of the navymust have been derived from Pinafore she laughed. "I can't imagine usinga cat-o'-nine-tails on them!" she exclaimed--and neither could I. I heard many similar comments. They are indubitably American, thesesailors, youngsters with the stamp of our environment on their features, keen and self-reliant. I am not speaking now only of those who haveenlisted since the war, but of those others, largely from the smalltowns and villages of our Middle West, who in the past dozen years or sohave been recruited by an interesting and scientific system which is theresult of the genius of our naval recruiting officers. In the files atWashington may be seen, carefully tabulated, the several reasons fortheir enlisting. Some have "friends in the service"; others wish to"perfect themselves in a trade, " to "complete their education" or "seethe world"--our adventurous spirit. And they are seeing it. They arealso engaged in the most exciting and adventurous sport--with theexception of aerial warfare ever devised or developed--that of huntingdown in all weathers over the wide spaces of the Atlantic thosemodern sea monsters that prey upon the Allied shipping. For thesuperdreadnought is reposing behind the nets, the battle-cruiserignominiously laying mines; and for the present at least, until somewizard shall invent a more effective method of annihilation, victoryover Germany depends primarily on the airplane and the destroyer. At three o'clock one morning I stood on the crowded deck of an Irishmail-boat watching the full moon riding over Holyhead Mountain andshimmering on the Irish Sea. A few hours later, in the early light, Isaw the green hills of Killarney against a washed and clearing sky, the mud-flats beside the railway shining like purple enamel. Allthe forenoon, in the train, I travelled through a country bathed intranslucent colours, a country of green pastures dotted over with whitesheep, of banked hedges and perfect trees, of shadowy blue hills inthe high distance. It reminded one of nothing so much as astained-glass-window depicting some delectable land of plenty and peace. And it was Ireland! When at length I arrived at the station of the portfor which I was bound, and which the censor does not permit me to name, I caught sight of the figure of our Admiral on the platform; and thefact that I was in Ireland and not in Emmanuel's Land was brought hometo me by the jolting drive we took on an "outside car, " the admiralperched precariously over one wheel and I over the other. Winding up thehill by narrow roads, we reached the gates of the Admiralty House. 

The house sits, as it were, in the emperor's seat of the amphitheatreof the town, overlooking the panorama of a perfect harbour. A ring ofemerald hills is broken by a little gap to seaward, and in the centreis a miniature emerald isle. The ships lying at anchor seemed likechildren's boats in a pond. To the right, where a river empties in, werescattered groups of queer, rakish craft, each with four slanting pipesand a tiny flag floating from her halyards; a flag--as the binocularsrevealed--of crimson bars and stars on a field of blue. These were ourAmerican destroyers. And in the midst of them, swinging to the tide, were the big "mother ships" we have sent over to nurse them when, aftermany days and nights of hazardous work at sea, they have brought theirflock of transports and merchantmen safely to port. This "mothering" byrepair-ships which are merely huge machine-shops afloat--this trickof keeping destroyers tuned up and constantly ready for service hasinspired much favourable comment from our allies in the Britishservice. It is an instance of our national adaptability, learned froman experience on long coasts where navy-yards are not too handy. Fewlandsmen understand how delicate an instrument the destroyer is. 

A service so hazardous, demanding as it does such qualities as theability to make instantaneous decisions and powers of mental andphysical endurance, a service so irresistibly attractive to the youngand adventurous, produces a type of officer quite unmistakable. The dayI arrived in London from France, seeking a characteristically Englishmeal, I went to Simpson's in the Strand, where I found myself seated bythe side of two very junior officers of the British navy. It appearedthat they were celebrating what was left of a precious leave. At aneighbouring table they spied two of our officers, almost equallyyouthful. "Let's have 'em over, " suggested one of the Britishers; andthey were "had" over; he raised his glass. "Here's how--as you say inAmerica!" he exclaimed. "You destroyer chaps are certainly top hole. "And then he added, with a blush, "I say, I hope you don't think I'mcheeking you!"

I saw them afloat, I saw them coming ashore in that Irish port, these young destroyer captains, after five wakeful nights at sea, weather-bitten, clear-eyed, trained down to the last ounce. One, withwhom I had played golf on the New England hills, carried his clubs inhis hand and invited me to have a game with him. Another, who apologizedfor not being dressed at noon on Sunday--he had made the harbour atthree that morning!--was taking his racquet out of its case, preparingto spend the afternoon on the hospitable courts of Admiralty House witha fellow captain and two British officers. He was ashamed of his laterising, but when it was suggested that some sleep was necessary heexplained that, on the trip just ended, it wasn't only the submarinesthat kept him awake. "When these craft get jumping about in a seaway youcan't sleep even if you want to. " He who has had experience with themknows the truth of this remark. Incidentally, though he did not mentionit, this young captain was one of three who had been recommended by theBritish admiral to his government for the Distinguished ServiceOrder. The captain's report, which I read, is terse, and needs to bevisualized. There is simply a statement of the latitude and longitude, the time of day, the fact that the wave of a periscope was sighted at1, 500 yards by the quartermaster first class on duty; general quartersrung, the executive officer signals full speed ahead, the commandingofficer takes charge and manoeuvres for position--and then somethinghappens which the censor may be fussy about mentioning. At any rate, oil and other things rise to the surface of the sea, and the Germans areminus another submarine. The chief machinist's mate, however, comes infor special mention. It seems that he ignored the ladder and literallyfell down the hatch, dislocating his shoulder but getting the throttlewide open within five seconds!

In this town, facing the sea, is a street lined with quaint housespainted in yellows and browns and greens, and under each house the kindof a shop that brings back to the middleaged delectable memories ofextreme youth and nickels to spend. Up and down that street on a brightSaturday afternoon may be seen our Middle-Western jackies chumming withthe British sailors and Tommies, or flirting with the Irish girls, orgazing through the little panes of the show-windows, whose enterprisingproprietors have imported from the States a popular brand of chewing-gumto make us feel more at home. In one of these shops, where I went tochoose a picture post-card, I caught sight of an artistic display of adelicacy I had thought long obsolete--the everlasting gum-drop. But whenI produced a shilling the shopkeeper shook his head. "Sure, every daythe sailors are wanting to buy them of me, but it's for ornament I'mkeeping them, " he said. "There's no more to be had till the war willbe over. Eight years they're here now, and you wouldn't get a tooth inthem, sir!" So I wandered out again, joined the admiral, and inspectedthe Bluejackets' Club by the water's edge. Nothing one sees, perhaps, isso eloquent of the change that has taken place in the life and fabric ofour navy. If you are an enlisted man, here in this commodious group ofbuildings you can get a good shore meal and entertain your friends amongthe Allies, you may sleep in a real bed, instead of a hammock, you mayplay pool, or see a moving-picture show, or witness a vaudeville worthyof professionals, like that recently given in honour of the visit ofthe admiral of our Atlantic fleet. A band of thirty pieces furnished themusic, and in the opinion of the jackies one feature alone was lackingto make the entertainment a complete success--the new drop-curtain hadfailed to arrive from London. I happened to be present when this curtainwas first unrolled, and beheld spread out before me a most realisticpresentation of "little old New York, " seen from the North River, towering against blue American skies. And though I have never beenoverfond of New York, that curtain in that place gave me a sensation!

Such is the life of our officers and sailors in these strange times thathave descended upon us. Five to eight days of vigilance, of hardshipand danger--in short, of war--and then three days of relaxation andenjoyment in clubs, on golf-courses and tennis-courts, barring the timeit takes to clean ship and paint. There need be no fear that the warwill be neglected. It is eminently safe to declare that our service willbe true to its traditions. 

III

"Dogged does it" ought to be added to "Dieu et mon droit" and otherdevices of England. On a day when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd Georgein the dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over the HorseGuards' Parade, the present premier, with a characteristic gesture, flung out his hand toward the portrait of a young man in the panel overthe mantel. It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals anddrunk his port in this very room in that other great war a hundred yearsago. The news of Austerlitz, brought to him during his illness, is saidto have killed him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade, and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier thanPitt's, happily retains his health; and his is the indomitable spiritcharacteristic of the new Britain as well as of the old. For it is a newBritain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformedBritain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who, when he first witnessed a performance of "Uncle Tom's Cabin, " criedout, "How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!" the American wholunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim: "How different fromLord North and Palmerston!" We have, I fear, been too long accustomedto interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what theyrepresented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimicalaristocracy. Three out of the five men who form the war cabinet of anempire are of what would once have been termed an "humble origin. "One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General Smuts, unofficially associated with this council, not many years ago was inarms against Britain in South Africa, and the prime minister himselfis the son of a Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the mostexacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats!

I listened to many speeches and explanations of the prejudice thatexisted in the mind of the dyed-in-the-wool American against England, and the reason most frequently given was the "school-book" reason;our histories kept the feeling alive. Now; there is no doubt that thehistories out of which we were taught made what psychologists wouldcall "action patterns, " or "complexes, " in our brains, just as theschool-books have made similar complexes in the brains of Germanchildren and prepared them for this war. But, after all, there was acertain animus behind the histories. Boiled down, the sentiment was oneagainst the rule of a hereditary aristocracy, and our forefathers had itlong before the separation took place. The Middle-Western farmer has noprejudice against France, because France is a republic. The French arelovable, and worthy of all the sympathy and affection we can give them. But Britain is still nominally a monarchy; and our patriot thinks of itspeople very much as the cowboy used to regard citizens of New York. Theyall lived on Fifth Avenue. For the cowboy, the residents of the drearyside streets simply did not exist. We have been wont to think of allthe British as aristocrats, while they have returned the compliment byvisualizing all Americans as plutocrats--despite the fact that one-tenthof our population is said to own nine-tenths of all our wealth!

But the war will change that, is already changing it. 

'Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner'. We have been soaked in the samecommon law, literature, and traditions of liberty--or of chaos, as onelikes. Whether we all be of British origin or not, it is the mind thatmakes the true patriot; and there is no American so dead as not to feela thrill when he first sets foot on British soil. Our school-teachersfelt it when they began to travel some twenty years ago, and thethousands of our soldiers who pass through on their way to France arefeeling it today, and writing home about it. Our soldiers and sailorsare being cared for and entertained in England just as they would becared for and entertained at home. So are their officers. Not long agoone of the finest town houses in London was donated by the owner foran American officers' club, the funds were raised by contributionsfrom British officers, and the club was inaugurated by the King andQueen--and Admiral Sims. Hospitality and good-will have gone muchfurther than this. Any one who knows London will understand thesacredness of those private squares, surrounded by proprietaryresidences, where every tree and every blade of grass has been jealouslyguarded from intrusion for a century or more. And of all these squaresthat of St. James's is perhaps the most exclusive, and yet it isprecisely in St. James's there is to be built the first of those hotelsdesigned primarily for the benefit of American officers, where they canget a good room for five shillings a night and breakfast at a reasonableprice. One has only to sample the war-time prices of certain hostelriesto appreciate the value of this. 

On the first of four unforgettable days during which I was a guestbehind the British lines in France the officer who was my guide stoppedthe motor in the street of an old village, beside a courtyard surroundedby ancient barns. 

"There are some of your Americans, " he remarked. 

I had recognized them, not by their uniforms but by their type. Despitetheir costumes, which were negligible, they were eloquent of collegecampuses in every one of our eight and forty States, lean, thin-hipped, alert. The persistent rains had ceased, a dazzling sunlight made thatbeautiful countryside as bright as a coloured picture post-card, but ariotous cold gale was blowing; yet all wore cotton trousers that lefttheir knees as bare as Highlanders' kilts. Above these some had answeaters, others brown khaki tunics, from which I gathered that theybelonged to the officers' training corps. They were drawn up on twolines facing each other with fixed bayonets, a grim look on their facesthat would certainly have put any Hun to flight. Between the files stoodan unmistakable gipling sergeant with a crimson face and a bristlinglittle chestnut moustache, talking like a machine gun. 

"Now, then, not too lidylike!--there's a Bosch in front of you! Run 'imthrough! Now, then!"

The lines surged forward, out went the bayonets, first the long thrustand then the short, and then a man's gun was seized and by a swiftbackward twist of the arm he was made helpless. 

"Do you feel it?" asked the officer, as he turned to me. I did. "Upand down your spine, " he added, and I nodded. "Those chaps will do, "he said. He had been through that terrible battle of the Somme, and heknew. So had the sergeant. 

Presently came a resting-spell. One of the squad approached me, whom Irecognized as a young man I had met in the Harvard Union. 

"If you write about this, " he said, "just tell our people that we'regoing to take that sergeant home with us when the war's over. He's toogood to lose. "

IV

It is trite to observe that democracies are organized--if, indeed, theyare organized at all--not for war but for peace. And nowhere is thisfact more apparent than in Britain. Even while the war is in progresshas that internal democratic process of evolution been going on, presaging profound changes in the social fabric. And these changes mustbe dealt with by statesmen, must be guided with one hand while the waris being prosecuted with the other. The task is colossal. In no previouswar have the British given more striking proof of their inherent qualityof doggedness. Greatness, as Confucius said, does not consist in neverfalling, but in rising every time you fall. The British speak withappalling frankness of their blunders. They are fighting, indeed, forthe privilege of making blunders--since out of blunders arise new truthsand discoveries not contemplated in German philosophy. 

America must now contribute what Britain and France, with all theirenergies and resources and determination, have hitherto been unableto contribute. It must not be men, money, and material alone, but somequality that America has had in herself during her century and a halfof independent self-realization. Mr. Chesterton, in writing about theAmerican Revolution, observes that the real case for the colonists isthat they felt that they could be something which England would not helpthem to be. It is, in fact, the only case for separation. What maybe called the English tradition of democracy, which we inherit, growsthrough conflicts and differences, through experiments and failures andsuccesses, toward an intellectualized unity, --experiments by states, experiments by individuals, a widely spread development, and newcontributions to the whole. 

Democracy has arrived at the stage when it is ceasing to be national andselfish. 

It must be said of England, in her treatment of her colonies subsequentto our Revolution, that she took this greatest of all her nationalblunders to heart. As a result, Canada and Australia and New Zealandhave sent their sons across the seas to fight for an empire thatrefrains from coercion; while, thanks to the policy of the BritishLiberals--which was the expression of the sentiment of the Britishnation--we have the spectacle today of a Botha and a Smuts fightingunder the Union Jack. 

And how about Ireland? England has blundered there, and she admits itfreely. They exist in England who cry out for the coercion of Ireland, and who at times have almost had their way. But to do this, of course, would be a surrender to the German contentions, an acknowledgment of thewisdom of the German methods against which she is protesting with allher might. Democracy, apparently, must blunder on until that questiontoo, is solved. 

V

Many of those picturesque features of the older England, that stir us bytheir beauty and by the sense of stability and permanence they convey, will no doubt disappear or be transformed. I am thinking of the greatestates, some of which date from Norman times; I am thinking ofthe aristocracy, which we Americans repudiated in order to set upa plutocracy instead. Let us hope that what is fine in it willbe preserved, for there is much. By the theory of the Britishconstitution--that unwritten but very real document--in return forhonours, emoluments, and titles, the burden of government has hithertobeen thrown on a class. Nor can it be said that they have been untrue totheir responsibility. That class developed a tradition and held fast toit; and they had a foreign policy that guided England through centuriesof greatness. Democracy too must have a foreign policy, a tradition ofservice; a trained if not hereditary group to guide it through troubledwaters. Even in an intelligent community there must be leadership. And, if the world will no longer tolerate the old theories, a tribute mayat least be paid to those who from conviction upheld them; who ruled, perhaps in affluence, yet were also willing to toil and, if need be, todie for the privilege. 

One Saturday afternoon, after watching for a while the boys playingfives and football and romping over the green lawns at Eton, on my wayto the head master's rooms I paused in one of the ancient quads. My eyehad been caught by a long column of names posted there, printed in heavyblack letters. 'Etona non, immemora'! Every week many new names areadded to those columns. On the walls of the chapel and in other quadsand passages may be found tablets and inscriptions in memory of thosewho have died for England and the empire in by-gone wars. I am told thatthe proportion of Etonians of killed to wounded is greater than thatof any other public school--which is saying a great deal. They go backacross the channel and back again until their names appear on the lastand highest honour list of the school and nation. 

In one of the hospitals I visited lay a wounded giant who had once beena truckman in a little town in Kent. Incidentally, in common with hisneighbours, he had taken no interest in the war, which had seemed asremote to him as though he had lived in North Dakota. One day a Zeppelindropped a bomb on that village, whereupon the able-bodied males enlistedto a man, and he with them. A subaltern in his company was an Eton boy. "We just couldn't think of 'im as an orficer, sir; in the camps 'e usedto play with us like a child. And then we went to France. And one nightwhen we was wet to the skin and the Boschs was droppin' shell allaround us we got the word. It was him leaped over the top first of all, shouting back at us to come on. He tumbled right back and died in myarms, 'e did, as I was climbin' up after 'im. I shan't ever forget 'im. "

As you travel about in these days you become conscious, among the peopleyou meet, of a certain bewilderment. A static world and a static orderare dissolving; and in England that order was so static as to make thepresent spectacle the more surprising. Signs of the disintegration ofthe old social strata were not lacking, indeed, in the earlier years ofthe twentieth century, when labour members and north-country radicalsbegan to invade parliament; but the cataclysm of this war hasaccelerated the process. In the muddy trenches of Flanders and Francea new comradeship has sprung up between officers and Tommies, whiletime-honoured precedent has been broken by the necessity of givingthousands of commissions to men of merit who do not belong to the"officer caste. " At the Haymarket Theatre I saw a fashionable audiencewildly applaud a play in which the local tailor becomes a major-generaland returns home to marry the daughter of the lord of a mayor whoseclothes he used to cut before the war. 

"The age of great adventure, " were the words used by Mr. H. G. Wells todescribe this epoch as we discussed it. And a large proportion ofthe descendants of those who have governed England for centuries areapparently imbued with the spirit of this adventure, even though itmay spell the end of their exclusive rule. As significant of the socialmingling of elements which in the past never exchanged ideas or pointsof view I shall describe a week-end party at a large country house ofLiberal complexion; on the Thames. I have reason to believe it fairlytypical. The owner of this estate holds an important position in theForeign Office, and the hostess has, by her wit and intelligent grasp ofaffairs, made an enviable place for herself. On her right, at luncheonon Sunday, was a labour leader, the head of one of the most powerfulunions in Britain, and next him sat a member of one of the oldest ofEngland's titled families. The two were on terms of Christian names. Thegroup included two or three women, a sculptor and an educator, anotherForeign Office official who has made a reputation since the beginning ofthe war, and finally an employer of labour, the chairman of the biggestshipbuilding company in England. 

That a company presenting such a variety of interests should have beenbrought together in the frescoed dining-room of that particular house isnoteworthy. 

The thing could happen nowhere save in the England of today. At firstthe talk was general, ranging over a number of subjects from that ofthe personality of certain politicians to the conduct of the war andthe disturbing problem raised by the "conscientious objector"; littleby little, however, the rest of us became silent, to listen to a debatewhich had begun between the labour leader and the ship-builder on the"labour question. " It is not my purpose here to record what they said. Needless to add that they did not wholly agree, but they were muchnearer to agreement than one would have thought possible. What wasinteresting was the open-mindedness with which, on both sides, theargument was conducted, and the fact that it could seriously take placethen and there. For the subject of it had long been the supreme problemin the lives of both these men, their feelings concerning it must attimes have been tinged with bitterness, yet they spoke with courtesy andrestraint, and though each maintained his contentions he was quick toacknowledge a point made by the other. As one listened one was ledto hope that a happier day is perhaps at hand when such things as"complexes" and convictions will disappear. 

The types of these two were in striking contrast. The labour leader wasstocky, chestnut-coloured, vital, possessing the bulldog quality ofthe British self-made man combined with a natural wit, sharpened in thearena, that often startled the company into an appreciative laughter. The ship-builder, on the other hand, was one of those spare and hardEnglishmen whom no amount of business cares will induce to neglectthe exercise of his body, the obligation at all times to keep "fit";square-rigged, as it were, with a lean face and a wide moustacheaccentuating a square chin. Occasionally a gleam of humour, a ray ofidealism, lighted his practical grey eyes. Each of these two had managedrather marvellously to triumph over early training by self-education:the labour leader, who had had his first lessons in life from injusticesand hard knocks; and the ship-builder, who had overcome the handicap ofthe public-school tradition and of Manchester economics. 

"Yes, titles and fortunes must go, " remarked our hostess with a smile asshe rose from the table and led the way out on the sunny, stone-flaggedterrace. Below us was a wide parterre whose flower-beds, laid out by acelebrated landscape-gardener in the days of the Stuarts, were filledwith vegetables. The day was like our New England Indian summerthoughthe trees were still heavy with leaves--and a gossamer-blue veil of hazestained the hills between which the shining river ran. If the socialrevolution, or evolution, takes place, one wonders what will become ofthis long-cherished beauty. 

I venture to dwell upon one more experience of that week-end party. The Friday evening of my arrival I was met at the station, not by alimousine with a chauffeur and footman, but by a young woman with ataxicab--one of the many reminders that a war is going on. London hadbeen reeking in a green-yellow fog, but here the mist was white, andthrough it I caught glimpses of the silhouettes of stately trees in apark, and presently saw the great house with its clock-tower looming upbefore me. A fire was crackling in the hall, and before it my hostesswas conversing amusedly with a well-known sculptor--a sculptor typicalof these renaissance times, large, full-blooded, with vigorous opinionson all sorts of matters. 

"A lecturer is coming down from London to talk to the wounded in theamusement-hall of the hospital, " our hostess informed us. "And you bothmust come and speak too. "

The three of us got into the only motor of which the establishment nowboasts, a little runabout using a minimum of "petrol, " and she guidedus rapidly by devious roads through the fog until a blur of lightproclaimed the presence of a building, one of some score or more builton the golf-course by the British Government. I have not space heretodescribe that hospital, which is one of the best in England; but it mustbe observed that its excellence and the happiness of its inmates arealmost wholly due to the efforts of the lady who now conducted us acrossthe stage of the amusement-hall, where all the convalescents whocould walk or who could be rolled thither in chairs were gathered. Thelecturer had not arrived. But the lady of the manor seated herself atthe speaker's table, singling out Scotch wits in the audience--forwhom she was more than a match--while the sculptor and I looked on andgrinned and resisted her blandishments to make speeches. When at lastthe lecturer came he sat down informally on the table with one foothanging in the air and grinned, too, at her bantering but complimentaryintroduction. It was then I discovered for the first time that he wasone of the best educational experts of that interesting branch of theBritish Government, the Department of Reconstruction, whose businessit is to teach the convalescents the elements of social and politicalscience. This was not to be a lecture, he told them, but a debate inwhich every man must take a part. And his first startling question wasthis:

"Why should Mr. Lloyd George, instead of getting five thousand pounds ayear for his services as prime minister, receive any more than a commonlabourer?"

The question was a poser. The speaker folded his hands and beamed downat them; he seemed fairly to radiate benignity. 

"Now we mustn't be afraid of him, just because he seems to beintelligent, " declared our hostess. This sally was greeted withspasmodic laughter. Her eyes flitted from bench to bench, yet metnothing save averted glances. "Jock! Where are you, Jock? Why don't youspeak up?--you've never been downed before. "

More laughter, and craning of necks for the Jocks. This appeared to beher generic name for the vita. But the Jocks remained obdurately modest. The prolonged silence did not seem in the least painful to the lecturer, who thrust his hand in his pocket and continued to beam. He had learnedhow to wait. And at last his patience was rewarded. A middleaged soldierwith a very serious manner arose hesitatingly, with encouraging noisesfrom his comrades. 

"It's not Mr. Lloyd George I'm worrying about, sir, " he said, "all Iwants is enough for the missus and me. I had trouble to get that beforethe war. "

Cries of "Hear! Hear!"

"Why did you have trouble?" inquired the lecturer mildly. 

"The wages was too low. "

"And why were the wages too low?"

"You've got me there. I hadn't thought. "

"But isn't it your business as a voter to think?" asked the lecturer. "That's why the government is sending me here, to start you to thinking, to remind you that it is you soldiers who will have to take charge ofthis country and run it after the war is over. And you won't be able todo that unless you think, and think straight. "

"We've never been taught to think, " was the illuminating reply. 

"And if we do think we've never been educated to express ourselves, sameas you!" shouted another man, in whom excitement had overcome timidity. 

"I'm here to help you educate yourselves, " said the lecturer. "But firstlet's hear any ideas you may have on the question I asked you. "

There turned out to be plenty of ideas, after all. An opinion wasventured that Mr. Lloyd George served the nation, not for money but frompublic spirit; a conservative insisted that ability should be rewardedand rewarded well; whereupon ensued one of the most enlighteningdiscussions, not only as a revelation of intelligence, but of complexesand obsessions pervading many of the minds in whose power lies theultimate control of democracies. One, for instance, declared that--"ifevery man went to church proper of a Sunday and minded his own businessthe country would get along well enough. " He was evidently of theopinion that there was too much thinking and not enough of what he wouldhave termed "religion. " Gradually that audience split up into liberalsand conservatives; and the liberals noticeably were the younger men whohad had the advantages of better board schools, who had formed fewercomplexes and had had less time in which to get them set. Of these, aCanadian made a plea for the American system of universal education, whereupon a combative "stand-patter" declared that every man wasn't fitto be educated, that the American plan made only for discontent. "Lookat them, " he exclaimed, "They're never satisfied to stay in theirplaces. " This provoked laughter, but it was too much for thesculptor--and for me. We both broke our vows and made speeches in favourof equality and mental opportunity, while the lecturer looked on andsmiled. Mr. Lloyd George and his salary were forgotten. By some subtleart of the chairman the debate had been guided to the very point wherehe had from the first intended to guide it--to the burning question ofour day--education as the true foundation of democracy! Perhaps, afterall, this may be our American contribution to the world's advance. 

As we walked homeward through the fog I talked to him of ProfessorDewey's work and its results, while he explained to me the methods ofthe Reconstruction Department. "Out of every audience like that we geta group and form a class, " he said. "They're always a bit backward atfirst, just as they were tonight, but they grow very keen. We havea great many classes already started, and we see to it that they areprovided with text-books and teachers. Oh, no, it's not propaganda, " headded, in answer to my query; "all we do is to try to give them facts insuch a way as to make them able to draw their own conclusions and joinany political party they choose--just so they join one intelligently. "I must add that before Sunday was over he had organized his class andarranged for their future instruction. 

CHAPTER III

I would speak first of a contrast--and yet I have come to recognize howimpossible it is to convey to the dweller in America the difference inatmosphere between England and France on the one hand and our country onthe other. And when I use the word "atmosphere" I mean the mental stateof the peoples as well as the weather and the aspect of the skies. Ihave referred in another article to the anxious, feverish prosperity onebeholds in London and Paris, to that apparent indifference, despite thepresence on the streets of crowds of soldiers to the existence of a warof which one is ever aware. Yet, along with this, one is ever consciousof pressure. The air is heavy; there is a corresponding lack of thebuoyancy of mind which is the normal American condition. Perhaps, if German troops occupied New England and New York, our own mentalbarometer might be lower. It is difficult to say. At any rate, afteran ocean voyage of nine days one's spirits rise perceptibly as the shipnears Nantucket; and the icy-bright sunlight of New York harbour, thesight of the buildings aspiring to blue skies restore the throbbingoptimism which with us is normal; and it was with an effort, when Italked to the reporters on landing, that I was able to achieve andexpress the pessimism and darkness out of which I had come. Pessimismis perhaps too strong a word, and takes no account of the continuedunimpaired morale and determination of the greater part of the Britishand French peoples. They expect much from us. Yet the impression wasinstantaneous, when I set forth in the streets of New York, that we hadnot fully measured the magnitude of our task--an impression that hasbeen amply confirmed as the weeks have passed. 

The sense of relief I felt was not only the result of bright skies anda high barometer, of the palpable self-confidence of the pedestrians, ofthe white bread on the table and the knowledge that there was more, but also of the ease of accomplishing things. I called for a telephonenumber and got it cheerfully and instantly. I sent several telegrams, and did not have to wait twenty minutes before a wicket while apainstaking official multiplied and added and subtracted and paused totalk with a friend; the speed of the express in which I flew down-townseemed emblematic of America itself. I had been transported, in fact, into another world--my world; and in order to realize again that fromwhich I had come I turned to a diary recording a London filled with thesulphur fumes of fog, through which the lamps of the taxis and busesshone as yellow blots reflected on glistening streets; or, for somereason a still greater contrast, a blue, blue November Sunday afternoonin parts, the Esplanade of the Invalides black with people--sadpeople--and the Invalides itself all etched in blue as seen through thewide vista from the Seine. 

A few days later, with some children, I went to the Hippodrome. And itremained for the Hippodrome, of all places, to give me the thrill I hadnot achieved abroad, the thrill I had not experienced since the firstmonths of the war. Mr. George Cohan accomplished it. The transport withsteam up, is ready to leave the wharf, the khaki-clad regiment of erectand vigorous young Americans marches across the great stage, and theaudience strains forward and begins to sing, under its breath, the wordsthat proclaim, as nothing else perhaps proclaims, how America feels. 

 "Send the word, send the word over there. .. We'll be o-ver, we're coming o-ver, And we won't come back till it's o-ver, over there!"

Is it the prelude of a tragedy? We have always been so successful, weAmericans. Are we to fail now? I am an American, and I do not believe weare to fail. But I am soberer, somehow a different American than he whosailed away in August. Shall we learn other things than those that havehitherto been contained in our philosophy?

Of one thing I am convinced. It is the first war of the world that isnot a miltary war, although miltary genius is demanded, although it isthe bloodiest war in history. But other qualities are required; men andwomen who are not professional soldiers are fighting in it and will aidin victory. The pomp and circumstance of other wars are lacking in this, the greatest of all. We had the thrills, even in America, three yearsago, when Britain and France and Canada went in. We tingled when weread of the mobilizing of the huge armies, of the leave-takings ofthe soldiers. We bought every extra for news of those first battleson Belgian soil. And I remember my sensations when in the provinceof Quebec in the autumn of 1914, looking out of the car-window at thetroops gathering on the platforms who were to go across the seasto fight for the empire and liberty. They were singing "Tipperary!""Tipperary!" One seldoms hears it now, and the way has provedlong--longer than we reckoned. And we are singing "Over There!"

In those first months of the war there was, we were told, in Englandand France a revival of "religion, " and indeed many of the books thenwritten gave evidence of having been composed in exalted, mystic moods. I remember one in particular, called "En Campagne, " by a young Frenchofficer. And then, somehow, the note of mystic exaltation died away, to be succeeded by a period of realism. Read "Le Feu, " which is mosttypical, which has sold in numberless editions. Here is a pictureof that other aspect--the grimness, the monotony, and the frequentbestiality of trench life, the horror of slaughtering millions of menby highly specialized machinery. And yet, as an American, I strikeinevitably the note of optimism once more. Even now the truer spiritualgoal is glimpsed through the battle clouds, and has been hailed inworld-reverberating phrases by our American President. Day by day thereal issue is clearer, while the "religion" it implies embraces notone nation, wills not one patriotism, but humanity itself. I heard aFrenchwoman who had been deeply "religious" in the old sense exclaim: "Ino longer have any faith in God; he is on the side of the Germans. " Whenthe war began there were many evidences of a survival of that faith thatGod fights for nations, interferes in behalf of the "righteous"cause. When General Joffre was in America he was asked by one of ourcountrywomen how the battle of the Marne was won. "Madame, " he isreported to have said, "it was won by me, by my generals and soldiers. "The tendency to regard this victory, which we hope saved France and theWestern humanitarian civilization we cherish, as a special interpositionof Providence, as a miracle, has given place to the realization thatthe battle was won by the resourcefulness, science, and coolness of theFrench commander-in-chief. Science preserves armies, since killing, ifit has to be done, is now wholly within that realm; science heals thewounded, transports them rapidly to the hospitals, gives the shatteredsomething still to live for; and, if we are able to abandon thesentimental view and look facts in the face--as many anointed chaplainsin Europe are doing--science not only eliminates typhoid but is able toprevent those terrible diseases that devastate armies and nations. Andscience is no longer confined to the physical but has invaded thesocial kingdom, is able to weave a juster fabric into the governmentof peoples. On all sides we are beginning to embrace thereligion of self-reliance, a faith that God is on the side ofintelligence--intelligence with a broader meaning than the Germans havegiven it, for it includes charity. 

II

It seems to me that I remember, somewhere in the realistic novel I havementioned "Le Feu"--reading of singing soldiers, and an assumptionon the part of their hearers that such songs are prompted only by adevil-may-care lightness of heart which the soldier achieves. A shallowpsychology (as the author points out), especially in these days oftrench warfare! The soldier sings to hide his real feelings, perhaps togive vent to them. I am reminded of all this in connection with my tripto the British front. I left London after lunch on one of those dreary, grey days to which I have referred; the rain had begun to splash angrilyagainst the panes of the car windows before we reached the coast. Atfive o'clock the boat pushed off into a black channel, whipped by a galethat drove the rain across the decks and into every passage and gangway. The steamer was literally loaded with human beings, officers and menreturning from a brief glimpse of home. There was nothing of the gloryof war in the embarkation, and, to add to the sad and sinister effect ofit, each man as he came aboard mounted the ladder and chose, from a pileon the hatch combing, a sodden life-preserver, which he flung around hisshoulders as he went in search of a shelter. The saloon below, wherewe had our tea, was lighted indeed, but sealed so tight as to beinsupportable; and the cabin above, stifling too, was dark as a pocket. One stumbled over unseen passengers on the lounges, or sitting on kitson the floor. Even the steps up which I groped my way to the deck abovewere filled, while on the deck there was standing-room only and not muchof that. Mal de mer added to the discomforts of many. At length I foundan uncertain refuge in a gangway amidships, hedged in between unseencompanions; but even here the rain stung our faces and the spray ofan occasional comber drenched our feet, while through the gloom of thenight only a few yards of white water were to be discerned. For threehours I stood there, trying to imagine what was in the minds of thesemen with whose bodies I was in such intimate contact. They were goingto a foreign land to fight, many of them to die, not in one of thoseadventurous campaigns of times gone by, but in the wet trenches or thehideous No Man's Land between. What were the images they summoned up inthe darkness? Visions of long-familiar homes and long-familiar friends?And just how were they facing the future? Even as I wondered, voicesrose in a song, English voices, soldier voices. It was not "Tipperary, "the song that thrilled us a few years ago. I strove to catch the words:

 "I want to go home! I don't want to go back to the trenches no more, Where there are bullets and shrapnel galore, I want to go home!"

It was sung boisterously, in a defiant tone of mockery of the desire itexpressed, and thus tremendously gained in pathos. They did want to gohome--naturally. It was sung with the same spirit our men sing "We won'tcome back till it's over, over there!" The difference is that theseBritishers have been over there, have seen the horrors face to face, have tasted the sweets of home, and in spite of heartsickness andseasickness are resolved to see it through. Such is the morale of theBritish army. I have not the slightest doubt that it will be the moraleof our own army also, but at present the British are holding the fort. Tommy would never give up the war, but he has had a realistic taste ofit, and his songs reflect his experience. Other songs reached my earseach night, above the hissing and pounding of the Channel seas, butthe unseen group returned always to this. One thought of Agincourt andCrecy, of Waterloo, of the countless journeys across this same stormystrip of water the ancestors of these man had made in the past, and onewondered whether war were eternal and inevitable, after all. 

And what does Tommy think about it--this war? My own limitedexperience thoroughly indorses Mr. Galsworthy's splendid analysis ofBritish-soldier psychology that appeared in the December North American. The average man, with native doggedness, is fighting for the defence ofEngland. The British Government itself, in its reconstruction departmentfor the political education of the wounded, has given partial denialto the old maxim that it is the soldier's business not to think but toobey; and the British army is leavened with men who read and reflectin the long nights of watching in the rain, who are gaining ideas aboutconditions in the past and resolutions concerning those of the future. The very army itself has had a miracle happen to it: it has beendemocratized--and with the cheerful consent of the class to whichformerly the possession of commissions was largely confined. Gradually, to these soldier-thinkers, as well as to the mass of others at home, is unfolding the vision of a new social order which is indeed worthfighting for and dying for. 

III

At last, our knees cramped and our feet soaked, we saw the lights of theFrench port dancing across the veil of rain, like thistledowns of fire, and presently we were at rest at a stone quay. As I stood waiting on thedeck to have my passport vised, I tried to reconstruct the features ofthis little seaport as I had seen it, many years before, on a brightsummer's day when I had motored from Paris on my way to London. The gayline of hotels facing the water was hidden in the darkness. Suddenly Iheard my name called, and I was rescued from the group of civilians bya British officer who introduced himself as my host. It was after nineo'clock, and he had been on the lookout for me since half past seven. The effect of his welcome at that time and place was electrical, andI was further immensely cheered by the news he gave me, as we hurriedalong the street, that two friends of mine were here and quite hungry, having delayed dinner for my arrival. One of them was a young memberof Congress who had been making exhaustive studies of the situation inItaly, France and England, and the other one of our best-known writers, both bound for London. We sat around the table until nearly eleven, exchanging impressions and experiences. Then my officer declared that itwas time to go home. 

"Home" proved to be the big chateau which the British Government hasleased for the kindly purpose of entertaining such American guests asthey choose to invite. It is known as the "American Chateau, " and in theearly morning hours we reached it after a long drive through the gale. We crossed a bridge over a moat and traversed a huge stone hall tothe Gothic drawing-room. Here a fire was crackling on the hearth, refreshments were laid out, and the major in command rose from his bookto greet me. Hospitality, with these people, has attained to art, and, though I had come here at the invitation of his government, I had thefeeling of being his personal guest in his own house. Presently he ledthe way up the stone stairs and showed me the room I was to occupy. 

I awoke to the sound of the wind whistling through the open lattice, andlooking down on the ruffled blue waters of the moat I saw a great whiteswan at his morning toilet, his feathers dazzling in the sun. It was oneof those rare crisp and sparkling days that remind one of our Americanautumn. A green stretch of lawn made a vista through the woods. Following the example of the swan, I plunged into the tin tub theorderly had placed beside my bed and went down to porridge in a glow. Porridge, for the major was Scotch, and had taught his French cook tomake it as the Scotch make it. Then, going out into the hall, from atable on which lay a contour map of the battle region, the major pickedup a hideous mask that seemed to have been made for some barbaricrevelries. 

"We may not strike any gas, " he said, "but it's as well to be on thesafe side, " whereupon he made me practise inserting the tube in mymouth, pinching the nostrils instantly with the wire-covered nippers. He also presented me with a steel helmet. Thus equipped for any untowardoccurrence, putting on sweaters and heavy overcoats, and wrappingourselves in the fur rugs of the waiting automobile, we started off, with the gale on our quarter, for the front. 

Picardy, on whose soil has been shed so much English blood, never wasmore beautiful than on that October day. The trees were still in fullleaf, the fields green, though the crops had been gathered, and thecrystal air gave vivid value to every colour in the landscape. From timeto time we wound through the cobble-stoned streets of historic villages, each having its stone church end the bodki-shaped steeple of blue slateso characteristic of that country. And, as though we were still inthe pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of these villages ahorse-fair was in progress, blue-smocked peasants were trottingchunky ponies over the stones. It was like a picture from one of DeMaupassant's tales. In other villages the shawled women sat knittingbehind piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts atilt inthe sun. Again and again I tried to grasp the fact that the greatest ofworld wars was being fought only a few miles away--and failed. 

We had met, indeed, an occasional officer or orderly, huddled in agreatcoat and head against the wind, exercising those wonderful animalsthat are the pride of the British cavalry and which General Sir DouglasHaig, himself a cavalryman, some day hopes to bring into service. Wehad overtaken an artillery train rumbling along toward the east, themen laughing and joking as they rode, as though they were going tomanoeuvres. Farther on, as the soldiers along the highroads and in thetowns grew more and more numerous, they seemed so harmoniously part ofthe peaceful scene that war was as difficult to visualize as ever. Manysat about smoking their pipes and playing with the village children, others were in squads going to drill or exercise--something the Britonnever neglects. The amazing thing to a visitor who has seen the trenchesawash on a typical wet day, who knows that even billeting in cold farmsand barns behind the lines can scarcely be compared to the comforts ofhome, is how these men keep well under the conditions. To say that theyare well is to understate the fact: the ruddy faces and clear eyes andhard muscles--even of those who once were pale London clerks--proclaim atriumph for the system of hygiene of their army. 

Suddenly we came upon a house with a great round hole in its wall, andthen upon several in ruins beside the village street. Meanwhile, at workunder the windswept trees of the highway, were strange, dark men fromthe uttermost parts of the earth, physiognomies as old as the tombs ofPharaoh. It was, indeed, not so much the graven red profiles of priestsand soldiers that came tome at sight of these Egyptians, but the singingfellaheen of the water-buckets of the Nile. And here, too, shovellingthe crushed rock, were East Indians oddly clad in European garb, careless of the cold. That sense of the vastness of the British Empire, which at times is so profound, was mingled now with a knowledge that itwas fighting for its life, marshalling all its resources for Armageddon. 

Saint Eloi is named after the good bishop who ventured to advise KingDagobert about his costume. And the church stands--what is left ofit--all alone on the greenest of terraces jutting out toward the east;and the tower, ruggedly picturesque against the sky, resembles thatof some crumbled abbey. As a matter of fact, it has been a target forGerman gunners. Dodging an army-truck and rounding one of those militarytraffic policemen one meets at every important corner we climbedthe hill and left the motor among the great trees, which are stillfortunately preserved. And we stood for a few minutes, gazing over milesand miles of devastation. Then, taking the motor once more, we passedthrough wrecked and empty villages until we came to the foot of VimyRidge. Notre Dame de Lorette rose against the sky-line to the north. 

Vimy and Notre Dame de Lorette--sweet but terrible names! Only a summerhad passed since Vimy was the scene of one of the bloodiest battles ofthe war. From a distance the prevailing colour of the steep slope isochre; it gives the effect of having been scraped bare in preparationfor some gigantic enterprise. A nearer view reveals a flush of green;nature is already striving to heal. From top to bottom it is pockmarkedby shells and scarred by trenches--trenches every few feet, and betweenthem tangled masses of barbed wire still clinging to the "kniferests" and corkscrew stanchions to which it had been strung. The hugeshell-holes, revealing the chalk subsoil, were half-filled with water. And even though the field had been cleaned by those East Indians I hadseen on the road, and the thousands who had died here buried, bits ofuniform, shoes, and accoutrements and shattered rifles were stickingin the clay--and once we came across a portion of a bedstead, doubtlesstaken by some officer from a ruined and now vanished village to hisdugout. Painfully, pausing frequently to ponder over these remnants, soeloquent of the fury of the struggle, slipping backward at every stepand despite our care getting tangled in the wire, we made our way upthe slope. Buttercups and daisies were blooming around the edges of thecraters. 

As we drew near the crest the major warned me not to expose myself. "Itisn't because there is much chance of our being shot, " he explained, "but a matter of drawing the German fire upon others. " And yet I found ithard to believe--despite the evidence at my feet--that war existed here. The brightness of the day, the emptiness of the place, the silence--savefor the humming of the gale--denied it. And then, when we had cautiouslyrounded a hummock at the top, my steel helmet was blown off--not by ashrapnel, but by the wind! I had neglected to tighten the chin-strap. 

Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracksrunning across the meadows--the front trenches. Both armies were buriedlike moles in these furrows. The country was spread out before us, like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound risingagainst the green, or a deserted shaft-head. I was gazing at the famousbattlefield of Lens. Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as themajor repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny plain, and thefaintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself. I markedit by a single white tower. And suddenly another white tower, loftierthan the first, had risen up! But even as I stared its substance seemedto change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen. Notuntil then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside thetrenches in front of the city. Occasionally after that there came to myears the muffed report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder-pufflay lightly on the plain, and vanished. But even the presence of these, oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace. 

We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a shelteredcut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gainedat such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the majordescribed to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had takenpart. I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at theSomme. Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his true passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the raregreens and silver-greys of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight--allthat remained of the little church of Notre Dame--more beautiful, moresignificant, perhaps, as a ruin. It reminded the major of the Turners hehad admired in his youth. After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, wherethe graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ranright through them. And here, in this desecrated resting-place of thevillage dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbedwire, death-dealing fragments of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that hadfailed to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written thename of Hans Siebert. Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a greywoollen German tunic from which the buttons had been cut. 

We kept the road to the top, for Notre Dame de Lorette is as steep asVimy. There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battle-field oncemore, and started down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expansecovered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deepditches, dugouts, and pits; gruesome remnants of the battle layhalf-concealed under the grass. We walked slowly, making desperateleaps over the trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treadinggingerly on the "duck board" at the bottom. We stumbled over stick-bombsand unexploded shells. No plough can be put here--the only solution forthe land for years to come is forest. Just before we gained the roadat the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were startled by thesudden flight of a covey of partridges. 

The skies were grey when we reached the banal outskirts of a town wherethe bourgeoise houses were modern, commonplace, save those which hadbeen ennobled by ruin. It was Arras, one of those few magic names, eloquent with suggestions of mediaeval romance and art, intrigue andchivalry; while upon their significance, since the war began, has beensuperimposed still another, no less eloquent but charged with pathos. We halted for a moment in the open space before the railroad station, acomparatively new structure of steel and glass, designed on geometricalcurves, with an uninspiring, cheaply ornamented front. It had been, undoubtedly, the pride of the little city. Yet finding it here hadat first something of the effect of the discovery of anoffice-building--let us say--on the site of the Reims Cathedral. Presently, however, its emptiness, its silence began to have theireffects--these and the rents one began to perceive in the roof. Forit was still the object of the intermittent yet persistent fire ofthe German artillery. One began to realize that by these wounds it hadachieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre imagination of itsprovincial designer. A fine rain had set in before we found the square, and here indeed one felt a certain desolate satisfaction; despite thewreckage there the spirit of the ancient town still poignantly hauntedit. Although the Hotel de Ville, which had expressed adequately thelongings and aspirations, the civic pride of those bygone burghers, wasrazed to the ground, on three sides were still standing the varied yetharmonious facades of Flemish houses made familiar by photographs. Ofsome of these the plaster between the carved beams had been shot away, the roofs blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters were bared to the sky. The place was empty in the gathering gloom of the twilight. The gaietyand warmth of the hut erected in the Public Gardens which houses theBritish Officers' Club were a relief. 

The experiences of the next day will remain for ever in my memoryetched, as it were, in sepia. My guide was a younger officer who hadseen heroic service, and I wondered constantly how his delicate framehad survived in the trenches the constant hardship of such weatheras now, warmly wrapped and with the car-curtains drawn, we faced. Theinevitable, relentless rain of that region had set in again, the rainin which our own soldiers will have to fight, and the skies were of adarkness seldom known in America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we came, in that devastated districtnear the front, to an expanse where many monsters were clumsilycavorting like dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from theroad others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn forexercise. These were the far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chiefmahout--as I was inclined to call him--was a cheerful young giant ofcolonial origin, who has often driven them serenely across No Man's Landand into the German trenches. He had been expecting us, and led mealong a duck board over the morass, to where one of these leviathanswas awaiting us. You crawl through a greasy hole in the bottom, and theinside is as full of machinery as the turret of the Pennsylvania, andyou grope your way to the seat in front beside that of the captain andconductor, looking out through a slot in the armour over a waste ofwater and mud. From here you are supposed to operate a machine gun. Behind you two mechanics have started the engines with a deafening roar, above which are heard the hoarse commands of the captain as he grinds inhis gears. Then you realize that the thing is actually moving, thatthe bosses on the belt have managed to find a grip on the slime--andpresently you come to the brink of what appears, to your exaggeratedsense of perception, a bottomless chasm, with distant steep banks onthe farther side that look unattainable and insurmountable. It is an oldGerman trench which the rains have worn and widened. You brace yourself, you grip desperately a pair of brass handles in front of you, whileleviathan hesitates, seems to sit up on his haunches, and then gentlyburies his nose in the pasty clay and paws his way upward into the fieldbeyond. It was like sitting in a huge rocking-chair. That we might havehad a bump, and a bone-breaking one, I was informed after I had left thescene of the adventure. It all depends upon the skill of the driver. Themonsters are not as tractable as they seem. 

That field in which the tanks manoeuvre is characteristic of the wholeof this district of levelled villages and vanished woods. Imagine acontinuous clay vacant lot in one of our Middle Western cities on therainiest day you can recall; and further imagine, on this limitlesslot, a network of narrow-gauge tracks and wagon roads, a scattering ofcontractors' shanties, and you will have some idea of the daily life andsurroundings of one of oar American engineer regiments, which is runninga railroad behind the British front. Yet one has only to see these menand talk with them to be convinced of the truth that human happiness andeven human health thanks to modern science--are not dependent upon anexistence in a Garden of Eden. I do not mean exactly that these menwould choose to spend the rest of their existences in this waste, butthey are happy in the consciousness of a job well done. It was reallyinspiring to encounter here the familiar conductors and brakemen, engineers and firemen, who had voluntarily, and for an ideal, left theirhomes in a remote and peaceful republic three thousand miles away, tofind contentment and a new vitality, a wider vision, in the difficultand dangerous task they were performing. They were frequently underfire--when they brought back the wounded or fetched car-loads ofmunitions to the great guns on the ridiculous little trains of flatcars with open-work wheels, which they named--with American humour--theFederal Express and the Twentieth Century Limited. And their officerswere equally happy. Their colonel, of our regular Army Engineer Corps, was one of those broad-shouldered six-footers who, when they walk thestreets of Paris, compel pedestrians to turn admiringly and give one anew pride in the manhood of our nation. Hospitably he drew us out ofthe wind and rain into his little hut, and sat us down beside the stove, cheerfully informing us that, only the night before, the gale hadblown his door in, and his roof had started for the German lines. In aneighbouring hut, reached by a duck board, we had lunch with him and hisofficers baked beans and pickles, cakes and maple syrup. The Americanfood, the American jokes and voices in that environment seemed strangeindeed! But as we smoked and chatted about the friends we had in common, about political events at home and the changes that were taking placethere, it seemed as if we were in America once more. The English officerlistened and smiled in sympathy, and he remarked, after our reluctantdeparture, that America was an extraordinary land. 

He directed our chauffeur to Bapaume, across that wilderness which theGermans had so wantonly made in their retreat to the Hindenburg line. Nothing could have been more dismal than our slow progress in the steadyrain, through the deserted streets of this town. Home after home hadbeen blasted--their intimate yet harrowing interiors were revealed. Theshops and cafes, which had been thoroughly looted, had their wallsblown out, but in many cases the signs of the vanished and homelessproprietors still hung above the doors. I wondered how we should feel inNew England if such an outrage had been done to Boston, for instance, or little Concord! The church, the great cathedral on its terrace, thebishop's house, all dynamited, all cold and wet and filthy ruins! It wasdismal, indeed, but scarcely more dismal than that which followed; forat Bapaume we were on the edge of the battle-field of the Somme. And Ichanced to remember that the name had first been indelibly impressed onmy consciousness at a comfortable breakfast-table at home, where I satlooking out on a bright New England garden. In the headlines and columnsof my morning newspaper I had read again and again, during the summer of1916, of Thiepval and La Boisselle, of Fricourt and Mametz and the Boisdes Trones. Then they had had a sinister but remote significance; now Iwas to see them, or what was left of them!

As an appropriate and characteristic setting for the tragedy which hadhappened here, the indigo afternoon could not have been better chosen. Description fails to do justice to the abomination of desolation ofthat vast battle-field in the rain, and the imagination, refuses toreconstruct the scene of peace--the chateaux and happy villages, theforests and pastures, that flourished here so brief a time ago. In myfancy the long, low swells of land, like those of some dreary sea, werefor the moment the subsiding waves of the cataclysm that had rolledhere and extinguished all life. Beside the road only the blood-redsoil betrayed the sites of powdered villages; and through it, in everydirection, trenches had been cut. Between the trenches the earth wastorn and tortured, as though some sudden fossilizing process, in itsmoment of supreme agony, had fixed it thus. On the hummocks were graves, graves marked by wooden crosses, others by broken rifles thrust in theground. Shattered gun-carriages lay in the ditches, modern cannon thathad cost priceless hours of skilled labour; and once we were confrontedby one of those monsters, wounded to the death, I had seen that morning. The sight of this huge, helpless thing oddly recalled the emotions I hadfelt, as a child, when contemplating dead elephants in a battle pictureof the army of a Persian king. 

Presently, like the peak of some submerged land, we saw lifted out ofthat rolling waste the "Butt" of Warlencourt--the burial-mound of thismodern Marathon. It is honeycombed with dugouts in which the Germans whoclung to it found their graves, while the victorious British army sweptaround it toward Bapaume. Everywhere along that road, which runs like anarrow across the battle-field to Albert, were graves. Repetition seemsthe only method of giving an adequate impression of their numbers; andnear what was once the village of Pozieres was the biggest grave of all, a crater fifty feet deep and a hundred feet across. Seven months theBritish sappers had toiled far below in the chalk, digging the passageand chamber; and one summer dawn, like some tropical volcano, it hadburst directly under the German trench. Long we stood on the slipperyedge of it, gazing down at the tangled wire and litter of battle thatstrewed the bottom, while the rain fell pitilessly. Just such rain, saidmy officer-guide, as had drenched this country through the long wintermonths of preparation. "We never got dry, " he told me; and added witha smile, in answer to my query: "Perhaps that was the reason we nevercaught colds. "

When we entered Albert, the starting point of the British advance, therewas just light enough to see the statue of the Virgin leaning far aboveus over the street. The church-tower on which it had once stood erecthad been struck by a German shell, but its steel rod had bent and notbroken. Local superstition declares that when the Virgin of Albert fallsthe war will be ended. 

IV

I come home impressed with the fact that Britain has learned more fromthis war than any other nation, and will probably gain more by thatknowledge. We are all wanting, of course, to know what we shall get outof it, since it was forced upon us; and of course the only gain worthconsidering--as many of those to whom its coming has brought home thefirst glimmerings of social science are beginning to see--is preciselya newly acquired vision of the art of self-government. It has beenunfortunately necessary--or perhaps fortunately necessary--for thegreat democracies to turn their energies and resources and the inventiveingenuity of their citizens to the organization of armies and indeed ofentire populations to the purpose of killing enough Germans toremove democracy's exterior menace. The price we pay in human life isappallingly unfortunate. But the necessity for national organizationsocializes the nation capable of it; or, to put the matter more truly, if the socializing process had anticipated the war--as it had in GreatBritain--the ability to complete it under stress is the test ofa democratic nation; and hence the test of democracy, since thesocializing process becomes international. Britain has stood the test, even from the old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it isapparent that no democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it issocialized. After the war she will probably lead all other countries ina sane and scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that notin spite of her liberalism, but because of it, she has met militaryGermany on her own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone herone better. In 1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a merehandful of men whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave menand brave officers, indeed! But at present it is a war organizationof an excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no spaceto enter into a description of the amazing system, of the network ofarteries converging at the channel ports and spreading out until itfeeds and clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him withnewspapers and tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentmentcompatible with the conditions under which he has to live. The number ofshells flung at the enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns thatfire them. I should like to tell with what swiftness, under the stressof battle, the wounded are hurried back to the coast and even to Englanditself. I may not state the thousands carried on leave every day acrossthe channel and back again--in spite of submarines. But I went one daythrough Saint Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau, past the rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on thedowns, formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into anordered Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English, Irish, and Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earthmingle there with Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians inqueer fur caps who work in the bakeries. 

I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobilefactory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves ofbread. This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundredthousand loaves made from the wheat of western Canada! Of all sightsto be seen in this place, however, the reclamation "plant" is the mostwonderful. It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, froma pair of officer's field-glasses to a nine-inch howitzer carriage ismended here--if it can be mended. Here, when a battle-field is cleared, every article that can possibly be used again is brought; and themanager pointed with pride to the furnaces in his power-house, whichformerly burned coal and now are fed with refuse--broken wheels ofgun-carriages, sawdust, and even old shoes. Hundreds of French girls andeven German prisoners are resoling and patching shoes with the aidof American machinery, and even the uppers of such as are otherwisehopeless are cut in spirals into laces. Tunics, breeches, and overcoatsare mended by tailors; rusty camp cookers are retinned, and in thefoundries the precious scraps of cast iron are melted into braziers tokeep Tommy in the trenches warm. In the machine-shops the injured gunsand cannon are repaired. German prisoners are working there, too. At adistance, in their homely grey tunics, with their bullet-shaped headsclose-cropped and the hairs standing out like the needles of a cylinderof a music-box, they had the appearance of hard citizens who had becomerather sullen convicts. Some wore spectacles. A closer view revealedthat most of them were contented, and some actually cheerful. None, indeed, seemed more cheerful than a recently captured group I saw later, who were actually building the barbed-wire fence that was to confinethem. 

My last visit in this town was to the tiny but on a "corner lot, " inwhich the Duchess of Sutherland has lived now for some years. As we hadtea she told me she was going on a fortnight's leave to England; and noTommy in the trenches could have been more excited over the prospect. Her own hospital, which occupies the rest of the lot, is one of thosemarvels which individual initiative and a strong social sense such ashers has produced in this war. Special enterprise was required to savesuch desperate cases as are made a specialty of here, and all thatmedical and surgical science can do has been concentrated, withextraordinary success, on the shattered men who are brought to herwards. That most of the horrible fractures I saw are healed, andhealed quickly--thanks largely to the drainage system of our own DoctorCarrel--is not the least of the wonders of the remarkable times in whichwe live. 

The next day, Sunday, I left for Paris, bidding farewell regretfullyto the last of my British-officer hosts. He seemed like an old, oldfriend--though I had known him but a few days. I can see him now as hewaved me a good-bye from the platform in his Glengarry cap and shorttunic and plaid trousers. He is the owner of a castle and some seventysquare miles of land in Scotland alone. For the comfort of his nation'sguests, he toils like a hired courier. 

 ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:

 American religion as set forth by William James Be useful! Privilege of making blunders Rising every time you fall (Confucius on greatness) Sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant The English do not advertise their sorrows