mpossible task, in face of prevailing difficulties, of
caulking them up. No one who was not in France can form any conception
of the practically insurmountable obstacles against which all the
war-work organizations worked; and the larger the work the greater were
the obstacles, naturally. That the Y. M. C. A. and the other similar
agencies made mistakes is not the wonder so much as that they did not
make more. The real marvel is that they did so much efficient work. For
after we get a little farther away from the details and see the work of
these agencies in its broader aspects, when we forget the lapses--which,
after all, though irritating and regrettable, were not major--the record
as a whole will stand as a most signal piece of volunteer service.

What was actually accomplished was nothing short of marvellous; and it
is this fact that must be borne in mind; not the omissions, but the
commissions. And when the American public gets that point of view--as it
will, and, for that matter, is already beginning to do--the work of the
American Y. M. C. A. will no longer suffer for its omissions, but will
amaze and gladden by its accomplishments. As an American officer of high
rank said to Bok at Chaumont headquarters: "The mind cannot take in what
the war would have been without the 'Y.'" And that, in time, will be the
universal American opinion, extended, in proportion to their work, to
all the war-work agencies and the men and women who endured, suffered,
and were killed in their service.

XXXV. At the Battle-Fronts in the Great War

It was in the summer of 1918 that Edward Bok received from the British
Government, through its department of public information, of which Lord
Beaverbrook was the minister, an invitation to join a party of thirteen
American editors to visit Great Britain and France. The British
Government, not versed in publicity methods, was anxious that selected
parties of American publicists should see, personally, what Great
Britain had done, and was doing in the war; and it had decided to ask a
few individuals to pay personal visits to its munition factories, its
great aerodromes, its Great Fleet, which then lay in the Firth of Forth,
and to the battle-fields. It was understood that no specific obligation
rested upon any member of the party to write of what he saw: he was
asked simply to observe and then, with discretion, use his observations
for his own guidance and information in future writing.