perhaps, with peculiar
heroism at Verdun. Already the American Flying Squadron has earned
a veteran's reputation for its daring. The report of the sacrificial
courage of these pioneers had travelled to every State in the Union;
their example had stirred, shamed and educated the nation. It is to
these knight-errants--very many of them boys and girls in years--to
the Mrs. Whartons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the Thaws that I
attribute America's eager acceptance of Calvary, when at last it
was offered to her by her Statesmen. From an anguished horror to
be repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in whose heart lay
hidden the treasure-trove of national honor.

The individual American soldier is inspired by just as altruistic
motives as his brother-Britisher. Compassion, indignation, love of
justice, the determination to see right conquer are his incentives.
You can make a man a conscript, drill him, dress him in uniform, but
you cannot force him to face up to four years to do his job unless the
ideals were there beforehand. I have seen American troop-ships come
into the dock with ten thousand men singing,

"Good-bye, Liza,
I'm going to smash the Kaiser."

I have been present when packed audiences have gone mad in reiterating
the American equivalent for _Tipperary_, with its brave promise,

"We'll be over,
We're coming over,
And we won't be back till it's over, over there."

But nothing I have heard so well expresses the cold anger of the
American fighting-man as these words which they chant to their
bugle-march, "We've got four years to do this job."

II

WAR AS A JOB

I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch three separate nations
facing up to the splendour of Armageddon--England, France, America.
The spirit of each was different. I arrived in England from abroad the
week after war had been declared. There was a new vitality in the
air, a suppressed excitement, a spirit of youth and--it sounds
ridiculous--of opportunity. The England I had left had been wont to
go about with a puckered forehead; she was a victim of
self-disparagement. She was like a mother who had borne too many
children and was at her wits' end to know how to feed or manage them.
They were getting beyond her control. Since the Boer War there had
been a growing tendency in the Press to under-rate all English effort
and to over-praise to England's discredit the superior pushfulness
of other nations. This me