well. His presence was
dishonourable--contaminating. We filed out and left him sitting humped
in a chair, looking puzzled and pathetic, murmuring, "But I thought I
was among friends."

My last clear-cut recollection is of a chubby young American
Naval Airman standing over him, with clenched fists, passionately
instructing him in the spiritual geography of America. That's one
type of fool; the type who specialises in catastrophe; the type who in
eternally facing up to facts, takes no account of that magic quality,
courage, which can make one man more terrible than an army; the type
who is so profoundly well-informed, about externals, that he ignores
the mightiness of soul that can remould externals to spiritual
purposes. Were I a German, the spectacle of that solitary consumptive
leaving the climate which meant life to him and hastening home to give
just six months of service to his country, would be more menacing than
the loss of an entire corps frontage.

And there's the type who can't forget; he suffers from a fundamental
lack of generosity. The Englishman of this type can't refrain from
quoting such phrases as, "Too proud to fight," whenever opportunity
offers. His American counterpart insists that he is not fighting for
Great Britain, but for the French. He makes himself offensive by
silly talk about sister republics, implying that all other forms of
Government are essentially tyrannic. He never loses an opportunity
to mention Lafayette, assuming that one French man is worth ten
Britishers. A very gross falsehood is frequently on the lips of this
sort of man; he doesn't know where he picked it up and has never
troubled to test its accuracy. I can tell him where it originated; at
Berlin in the bureau for Hun propaganda. Every time he utters it he is
helping the enemy. This falsehood is to the effect that Great Britain
has conserved her man-power; that in the early days she let Frenchmen
do the fighting and that now she is marking time till Americans are
ready to die in her stead. This statement is so stupendously untrue
that it goes unheeded by those who know the empty homes of England or
have witnessed the gallantry of our piled-up dead.

Then there's the jealous fool--the fool who in England will see no
reason why this book should have been published. His line of argument
will be, "We've been in this war for more than three years. We've done
everything that America is doing; because she's new to the game, we're