My Second Year of the War

Author of The Last Shot, The Old Blood, My Year of the Great War, etc.
NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY 1917
Copyright, 1917 By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
How America fails to realize the war—Difficulties of realization—Uncle Sam is sound at heart—In London again—A Chief of Staff who has risen from the ranks—Sir William Robertson takes time to think—At the front—Kitchener's mob the new army—A quiet headquarters—Sir Douglas Haig—His office a clearing house of ideas—His business to deal in blows— The Spirit that quickeneth.
I've never kept up my interest so long in anything as in this war, said a woman who sat beside me at dinner when I was home from the front in the winter of 1915-16. Since then I have wondered if my reply, Admirable mental concentration! was not ironic at the expense of manners and philosophy. In view of the thousands who were dying in battle every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was superficial and in keeping with the riotous joy of living and prosperity which strikes every returned American with its contrast to Europe's self-denial, emphasized by such details gained by glimpses in the shop windows of Fifth Avenue as the exhibit of a pair of ladies' silk hose inset with lace, price one hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, she was knitting socks or mufflers, I forget which, for the Allies. Her confusion about war news was common to the whole country, which heard the special pleading of both sides without any cross-questioning by an attorney. She remarked how the Allies' bulletins said that the Allies were winning and the German bulletins that the Germans were winning; but so far as she could see on the map the armies remained in much the same positions and the wholesale killing continued. Her interest, I learned on further inquiry, was limited and partisan. When the Germans had won a victory, she refused to read about it and threw down her paper in disgust.
There was something human in her attitude, as human as the war itself. It was a reminder of how far away from the Mississippi is the Somme; how broad is the Atlantic; how impossible it is to project yourself into the distance even in the days of the wireless. She was moving in the orbit of her affairs, with its limitations, just as the soldiers were in theirs. Before the war luxury was as common in Paris as in New York; but with so ghastly a struggle proceeding in Europe it seemed out of keeping that the joy of living should endure anywhere in the world. Yet Europe was tranquilly going its way when the Southern States were suffering pain and hardship worse than any that France and England have known. Paris and London were dining and smiling when Richmond was in flames.