Perhaps there is only one argument which Germany is now really able to appreciate. That argument has been pointedly, and very effectively, presented for some time past by the writer of these letters, and all his comrades. From this stage onward, it will further be pressed home upon the German by the armies of America, whose potentialities he has laboriously professed to ridicule. It is the argument of high explosive and cold steel; the only argument capable of bringing ultimate conviction to the Wilhelmstrasse that the English-speaking peoples, though they may know nothing of the goose-step, yet are not wont to cry "Kamerad," or to offer surrender to any other people on earth.
I know very well that the writer of these letters had no thought as he wrote—back there in 1916—of any kind of argument or reply to Potsdamed fantasies. But yet I would submit that, all unwittingly, he has furnished in these letters (on America's behalf, as well as Britain's) what should prove for unprejudiced readers outside Germany a singularly telling answer to the Boche's foolish boasts of the Anglo-Saxon inability to produce officers. As a correspondent in the Press recently wrote: "Why, for generations past the English-speaking peoples have been officering the world and all its waters—especially its waters!" And so they have, as all the world outside Germany knows, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego; from the Atlantic round through the Philippines to the golden gate and back.
It is a high sense of honour, horse sense, and sportsmanship, in our Anglo-Saxon sense, that lie at the root of successful leadership. And one of Prussia's craziest illusions was that with us, these qualities were the sole monopoly of the men who kept polo ponies and automobiles!
Only the guns of the Allies and the steel of their dauntless infantrymen can enlighten a people so hopelessly deluded as the Germans of to-day. But for the rest of the world I believe there is much in this little collection of the frank, unstudied writings of an average New Army officer, who, prior to the War, was a clerk in a suburban office, to show that sportsmanship and leadership are qualities characteristic of every single division of the Anglo-Saxon social systems; and that, perhaps more readily than any other race, we can produce from every class and every country in the English-speaking half of the world, men who make the finest possible kind of active service officers; men who, though their commissions may be "Temporary" and their names innocent of a "von," or any other prefix, are not only fine officers, but, permanently, and by nature, gentlemen and sportsmen.
Withal, it may be that I should be falling short of complete fulfilment of a duty which I am glad and proud to discharge, if I omitted to furnish any further information regarding the personality of the writer of these letters. And so, if the reader will excuse yet another page or two of wire entanglement between himself and the actual trenches—the letters, I mean—I will try to explain.
A. J. Dawson,
Captain.
London, 1918.