d to it. In forty
days from the declaration of war the United States had adopted
Conscription, which had taken us two years; General Pershing and his
small force had sailed for France within eighty days; and by the end
of June, or within ninety days, America had adopted the blockade
policy of Great Britain, and assented to the full use of that mighty
weapon which was to have so vast an influence on the war. President
Wilson's speech, when he came to Congress for the Declaration of War,
revealed him--and America--to England, then sorely brooding over "too
proud to fight," in an aspect which revived in us all that was kinship
and sympathy, and put to sleep the natural resentments and
astonishments of the preceding years. Nay, we envied America a man
capable of giving such magnificent expression to the passion and
determination of all free nations, in face of the German challenge.

Then came the days of disappointment. Troops arrived at a more
leisurely pace in France than had been hoped. Ships and aeroplanes,
which American enthusiasm in the early weeks of the war had promised
in profusion, delayed their coming; there was congestion on the
American railways, interfering with supplies of all kinds; and the
Weather God, besides, let loose all his storm and snow battalions upon
the Northern States to hamper the work of transport. We in England
watched these things, not realising that our own confidence in the
military prospects and the resisting power of the Allies, was partly
to blame for American leisureliness. It was so natural that American
opinion, watching the war, should split into two phases--one that held
the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America
could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for
another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for
America to make all her own independent plans and form her own
separate army with purely American equipment. English opinion wavered
in the same way. I well remember a gathering in a London house in
November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle
of Cambrai. It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other
American officers and high officials then in London. General Bliss was
the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of
Mr. Page was not far away. The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and
English expectations, terribly depressed, at any rate among those who
knew, by the