Leaves in the Wind

by A. G. Gardiner

ON THE AMERICAN SOLDIER

I hope the young American soldier, with whom we are becoming so familiar in the street, the tube and the omnibus, has found us as agreeable as we have found him. We were not quite sure whether we should like him, but the verdict is very decisively in the affirmative. It has been my fortune to know many Americans in the past, but they were for the most part selected Americans, elderly persons, statesmen, writers, diplomatists, journalists, and so on. Not having been in America I had not realised what the plain, average citizen, especially the young citizen, was like. Now he is here, walking our streets and rubbing shoulders with us in sufficient numbers for a general impression to be taken. It is a pleasant impression. I like the air of plenty that he carries with him, the well-nourished body, the sense of ease with himself and the world, the fund of good nature that he seems to have at command, the frankness of bearing, and, what was least expected, the touch of self-conscious modesty that is rarely absent.

If I may say so without offending him, he seems extraordinarily English. Physically he is rather bulkier than the average English youth, and his accent distinguishes him; but these differences only serve to sharpen the impression that he is one of ourselves who has been away somewhere—in a civilised land, where the larder is full, the schools plenty, and the family life homely and cordial. It is very rare that you see what you would call a foreign face in the uniform. This is singular in view of the mighty stream of immigration from Continental countries that has been flowing for three-quarters of a century into the melting pot of the United States; but I do not think the fact can be doubted. The blood is more mixed than ours, but the main current is emphatically British.

Perhaps the difference that is observable could be expressed by saying that the American is not so much reminiscent of ourselves as of our forebears. He suggests a former generation rather than this. We have grown sophisticated, urban, and cynical; he still has the note of the country and of the older fashions that persist in the country. Lowell long ago pointed out that many of the phrases which we regarded as American slang were good old East Anglian words which had been taken out by the early settlers in New England and persisted there after they had been forgotten by us. And in the same way the moral tone of the American to-day is like an echo from our past. He preserves the fervour for ideals which we seem to have lost. There is something of the revivalist in him, something elemental and primitive that responds to a moral appeal.

It is this abiding strain of English Puritanism which is responsible for the tidal wave of temperance that has swept the United States. Already nearly half the States have gone "bone dry," and it is calculated that, perhaps in two years, certainly in five, with the present temper in being, the whole of the Union will have banished the liquor traffic. A moral phenomenon of this sort might have been possible in the England of two or three generations ago; it is unthinkable in the moral atmosphere of to-day. The industrial machine has dried up the spring of moral enthusiasm. It will only return by a new way of life. Perhaps the new way of life is beginning in the allotment movement which is restoring to us the primal sanities of nature. We may find salvation in digging.

It is sometimes said that the American is crude. It would be truer to say that he is young. He has not suffered the disenchantment of an old and thoroughly exploited society. We have the qualities of a middle aged people who have lost our visions and are rather ashamed to be reminded that we ever had any. But a youthful ardour and buoyancy is the note of the American. He may think too much in the terms of dollars, but he has freshness and vitality, faith in himself, a boyish belief in his future and a boyish zest in living. His good temper is inexhaustible, and he has the easy-going manner of one who has plenty of time and plenty of elbow-room in the world.

For contrary to the common conception of him as a hurrying, bustling, get-on-or-get-out young man, he is leisurely both in speech and action, cool and unworried, equable of mood, little subject to the extremes of emotion, bearing himself with a solid deliberateness that suggests confidence in himself and inspires confidence in him. You feel that he will neither surprise you, nor let you down.

Not the least noticeable of his qualities is his accessibility. The common language, of course, is a great help, and the common traditions also. You are rarely quite at home with a man who thinks in another language than your own. The Tower of Babel was a great misfortune for humanity. But it is not these things which give the American his quality of immediate and easy intercourse. There is no ice to break before you get at him. There is no baffling atmosphere of doubt and hesitancy to get through; no fencing necessary to find out on what social footing you are to stand. You are on him at once—or rather he is on you. He comes into the open, without reserves of manner, and talks "right ahead" with the candour and ease of a man who is at home in the world and at home with you. He is free alike from intellectual priggishness and social aloofness. He is just a plain man talking to a plain man on equal terms.

It is the manner of the New World and of a democratic society in which the Chief of the State is plain Mr. President, who may be the ruler of a continent this year and may go back to his business as a private citizen next year. It is illustrated by the tribute which Frederick Douglass, the negro preacher, paid to Lincoln. "He treated me as a man," said Douglass after his visit to the President. "He did not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the colour of our skins." It is a fine testimony, but I do not suppose that Lincoln had to make any effort to achieve such a triumph of good manners. He treated Douglass as a man and an equal because he was a man and an equal, and because the difference in the colour of their skins had no more to do with their essential relationship than the difference in the colour of their ties or the shape of their boots.

The directness and naturalness of the American is the most enviable of his traits. It gives the sense of a man who is born free—free from the irritating restraints, embarrassments and artificialities of a society in which social caste and feudal considerations prevail as they still prevail in most European countries. Perhaps Germany is the most flagrant example. It used to be said by Goethe that there were twenty-seven different social castes in Germany, and that none of them would speak to the caste below. And Mr. Gerard's description of the Rat system suggests that the stratification of society has increased rather than diminished since the days of Goethe.

The disease is not so bad in this country; but we cannot pretend that we have the pure milk of democracy. No people which tolerates titles, and so deliberately sets up social discriminations in its midst and false idols for its worship, can hope for the free, unobstructed intercourse of a real democracy like that of America. It was said long ago by Daniel O'Connell that "the Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth." It is a caricature, of course, but there is truth in it. We are icy because we are uncertain about each other—not about each other as human beings, but about each other's social status. We have got the spirit of feudalism still in our bones, and our public school system, our titles, and our established Church system all tend to keep it alive, all work to cut up society into social orders which are the negation of democracy.

And as if we had not enough of the abomination, we are imitating the German Rat system with the grotesque O.B.E. We shall get stiffer than ever under this rain of sham jewellery, and shall not be fit to speak to our American friends. But we shall still be able to admire and envy the fine freedom and human friendliness which is the conspicuous gift of these stalwart young fellows who walk our streets in their flat-brimmed hats.

Perhaps when the account of the war is made up we shall find that the biggest credit entry of all is this fact that they did walk our streets as comrades of our own sons. For over a century we two peoples, talking the same language and cherishing the same traditions of liberty, have walked on opposites sides of the way, remembering old grudges, forgetting our common heritage, forgetting even that we gave the world its first and its grandest lead in peace by proclaiming the disarmament of the Canadian-United States frontier. Now the grudges are forgotten, and we have found a reconciliation that will never again be broken, and that will be the corner-stone of the new world-order that is taking shape in the furnace of these days.