at adult citizens in America may be incapable of
realising that obvious context.

I set these things down plainly. There is a very strong disposition in
all the European countries to believe America fundamentally indifferent
to the rights and wrongs of the European struggle; sentimentally
interested perhaps, but fundamentally indifferent. President Wilson
is regarded as a mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of
Europeans. There is a very widespread disposition to treat America
lightly and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it
to me recently, "hasn't the heart to do anything great or the guts to do
anything wicked." There is a strong undercurrent of hostility therefore
to the idea of America having any voice whatever in the final settlement
after the war. It is not for a British writer to analyse the appearance
that have thus affected American world prestige. I am telling what I
have observed.

Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.

X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain
munitions organisation. He took from his pocket a picture postcard that
had been sent him by a well-meaning American acquaintance from America.
It bore a portrait of General Lafayette, and under it was printed the
words, "General Lafayette, _Colonel in the United States army._"

"Oh! These Americans!" said X with a gesture.

And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train stopped at
some intermediate station alongside of another train of wounded
men. Exactly opposite our compartment was a car. It arrested our
conversation. It was, as it were, an ambulance _de grand luxe_; it was a
thing of very light, bright wood and very golden decorations; at one end
of it was painted very large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the
other fair-sized letters of gold proclaimed--I am sure the lady will
not resent this added gleam of publicity--"Presented by Mrs. William
Vanderbilt."

My companions were French writers and French military men, and they were
discussing with very keen interest that persistent question, "the ideal
battery." But that ambulance sent a shaft of light into our carriage,
and we stared together.

Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us, without any
excess of admiration:

"_America!_"

Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth.

We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little pause
the previous quest