destroyers--by the first-hand teachings of the Huns
themselves, it generally leaves a man in something like the proper state
of mind for the task in hand. Not that I really think any of the
Americans, when they have the chance, as happens every now and then,
will carry out all the little plans they claim to be maturing,
but--well, if I was an exponent of the U-boat branch of German kultur,
and my _unterseeboot_ was depth-charged by a British and an American
destroyer, and I came sputtering up to the surface midway between them,
I don't think I would strike out for the lifebuoy trailing over the
quarter of the one flying the Stars and Stripes. I may be wrong, but
somehow I have the feeling that the Briton--be he soldier, sailor, or
civilian--hasn't quite the same capacity as the Yank for keeping up the
temperature of his passion, for feeling "mad clean through."

Joining another group bunched in the lee of a tier of meat-safes, I
chanced upon a debate which threw an illuminative beam on the feelings
of what might once have been classified as hyphenated Americans. At
first the whole six or eight of them, in all harmony and unanimity, had
been engaged in cursing Sinn Feiners, with whom it appeared they had
been having considerable contact--physical and otherwise--in the course
of the last few months. Then one of the more rabid of them on this
particular subject--he and one of his mates had been waylaid and beaten
by a dozen hulking young Irishmen who resented the attentions the
Yankees were receiving from the local girls--threw a bone of dissension
into the ring by declaring that a Sinn Feiner was as bad as a Hun and
ought to be treated the same way.

The most of them could hardly bring themselves to agree to this, but in
the rather mixed argument which followed it transpired that the lad who
had led the attack on Sinn Fein was named Morarity and had been born in
Cork, and that the one who maintained that nothing on two legs, not even
a Sinn Feiner, was as "ornery as a Hun," was named Steinholz, and had
been born in St. Louis of German parents.

The wherefore of this they explained to me severally presently, when it
turned out that their views--as regards their duties as Americans--were
precisely similar. Like all good Yankees, they said, they had it in for
both the Hun and the Sinn Feiner; but, because each of them had a _name_
to live down, he felt it incumbent on himself to out-strafe his mates in
the direction from