The writer has introduced this "Temporary Gentleman" to many good fellows in England, France, and Flanders, and is very anxious to introduce him on a really friendly footing to all his brothers-in-arms across the Atlantic; from New York to San Francisco, and from Quebec to Vancouver Island, also. But how best to do it? It really is no very easy matter, this, to present one simple, very human unit of the New Armies, to a hundred millions of people.
"Dear America: Herewith please find one slightly damaged but wholly decent 'Temporary Gentleman' who you will find repays consideration."
I think that is strictly true, and though, in a way, it covers the ground, it does not, somehow, seem wholly adequate; and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the critics might find in it ground for severe comments. But it is just what I mean; and I would be well content that all the kindly men and women of America should just find out about this "Temporary Gentleman" for themselves, and form their own opinion, rather than that I should set down things about him in advance. If these letters of his do not commend him to America's heart and judgment, I am very sure no words of mine would stand any chance of doing so. Yes, for my part, warmly anxious as I am for America to know him, and to feel towards him as folk do in France and Flanders and Britain, I am perfectly prepared to let him stand or fall upon his own letters, which certainly discover the man to you, whatever you may think of him.
Withal, in case it may interest any among the millions of American families from which some member has gone out to train and to fight, to save the Allied democracies of the world from being over-ridden by the murderous aggression of its remaining autocracies, I take pleasure in testifying here to the fact that among the officers now serving in Britain's New Armies (as among those who, whilst serving, have passed to their long rest) are very many thousands who are just for all the world like the writer of these letters. I have watched and spoken with whole cadet-training battalions of them, seen them march past in column of fours, chins well up, arms aswing, eyes front, and hearts beating high with glad determination and pride—just because their chance has nearly come for doing precisely what the writer of these letters did: for treading the exact track he blazed, away back there in 1915; for the right to offer the same sort of effort he made, for God and King and Country; to guard the Right, and avenge the Wrong, and to shield Christendom and its liberties from a menace more deadly than any that the world's admitted barbarians and heathens ever offered.
I know there are very many thousands of them who are just like this particular "Temporary Gentleman,"—even as there must be many thousands of his like in America,—because there have been so many among those with whom I have lived and worked and fought, in the trenches. And it does seem to me, after study of the letters, that this statement forms something of a tribute to the spirit, the efficiency, and the devotion to their duty, of the whole tribe of the Temporary Officers.
Their lost sense of humour (withered out of existence, I take it, by the poison gas of Prussian Kultur) would seem to have made the German nation literally incapable of forming an approximately correct estimate of the capacities of any people outside the confines of their own machine-made, despotically ordered State, in which public sentiment and opinion is manufactured from "sealed pattern" recipes kept under lock and key in Potsdam and the Wilhelmstrasse. Their blunders in psychology since July, 1914, would have formed an unparalleled comedy of errors, if they had not, instead, produced a tragedy unequalled in history. With regard to America alone, the record of their mistakes and misreadings would fill a stout volume. In the earlier days of the War, I read many German statements which purported (very solemnly) to prove:
(a) That in the beginning of the War they killed off all the British officers.
(b) That the British officer material had long since been exhausted.
(c) That, since it was impossible for the British to produce more officers, they could not by any effort place a really big Army in the field.
And the queer thing is that German machine-made illusions are of cast-iron. They "stay put"; permanently. During 1917 I read again precisely the same fatuous German statement regarding America and her inability to produce an army, that one read in 1914 and 1915 about Britain. The British New Armies (which Germany affirmed could never seriously count) have succeeded in capturing nearly three times as many prisoners as they have lost, and more than four times as many guns. From 1916 onward they steadily hammered back the greatest concentrations of German military might that Hindenburg could put up, and did not lose in the whole period as much ground as they have won in a single day from the Kaiser's legions. Yet still, in 1917, the same ostrich-like German scribes, who vowed that Britain could not put an army in the field because they could never officer it, were repeating precisely the same foolish talk about America and her New Armies.