Brothers in arms

by E. Alexander Powell

I believe that we are at heart a people of high ideals. Critics have said of us that our finer sensibilities have been blunted by our extraordinary commercial success, that our earlier ideals have been lost sight of in the business of growing rich, that we prefer the dollar mark to the laurel wreath. It is true that we have drunk too deeply of material success, but, thank God, we have come to our senses before it is too late! We are our true selves once again. We have shown that the altruism which caused us to go to war with Spain that Cuba might be free, which led us to pay for the Philippines, already ours by force of arms, which induced us to return the Boxer indemnity to China, still guides our actions. We have not entered upon this war to avenge our murdered citizens; we have not gone into it for territorial aggrandizement or trade expansion, we have not gone into it to pay our debt to France; we have gone to war from the most unselfish motive that ever actuated a nation—the desire to serve mankind. Our victory—for we never have and we never will enter upon a losing war—will be a victory of morality and right and will assure to all our children a world in which they can live in peace and happiness.

We have been charged with being France-mad. Yet, when you stop to think about it, there is nothing strange in our attachment for the French. We are both idealistic and intensely sentimental peoples. The name of France is indissolubly linked with the early history of this country. The first religion, the first education, the first attempts at government, and the first settlement of that vast middle region which stretches from the Great Lakes to the Gulf were French, and French influence has extended over its entire existence. A son of France, Jacques Cartier, was the first European to step beyond the threshold of the unguessed continent. Our mightiest river was first explored throughout its length by a Frenchman, and the people who dwell to-day upon the lands it waters are geographical descendants of France. At the mouth of this river the metropolis of the South is named after a city in France; a thousand miles upstream another busy city keeps on the lips of thousands the name of a French king; while, still farther to the north, yet a third great hive of industry is named for the détroit on which it stands, though the Frenchman who gave it its name would not understand our pronunciation of it. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Our national capital was planned by a Frenchman, and to the vision of another Frenchman we owe the waterway which links the oceans at Panama. The debt of America to France, though more direct, is no less obvious than France’s debt to America, for the American Revolution inspired the French Revolution, and the spectacle of a free America under Washington’s administration proved a continual stimulus to the French in their own struggle for freedom. It is this solidarity of history, of sentiment, of aspiration which brings the French and ourselves so close together in this supreme struggle for liberty.

Even our national colors are the same: that red, white, and blue which—as some poetic Frenchman has said—symbolizes the rise of democracy from blood, through peace, to Heaven.

There has been much talk of France having been reborn through the agony of this war. Therein we are wrong. It is merely that we Americans have known the French only superficially, and that, in thinking and speaking of them, we have indulged in the careless and inaccurate habit of generalization. We have subscribed to the tradition of the superficiality and frivolity of the French people. We have believed them lacking in seriousness and perseverance, a strange misunderstanding of the race which has produced Richelieu and Talleyrand and Robespierre, La Salle and Marquette and Champlain. We thought them volatile and temperamental, these countrymen of Bossuet and Montesquieu, of Pascal and Corneille. We were wont to say quite patronizingly that French soldiers, though they possessed verve and élan, were not stayers and “last-ditchers”—this of the men of the Marne and Verdun! The trouble has always been not with France, but with ourselves. The France that we knew before this war gave us a broader vision was the France of Rue de la Paix and the Champs Élysées, of Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, of the Louvre and the Luxembourg, of Longchamps and Auteuil, of Poiret and Paquin, of Giro’s and Voisin’s, of the Bon Marché and the Galeries Lafayette, of the Opéra and the Comédie Française, of the Riviera and Trouville and Aix-les-Bains. What have we known of the sober, simple-hearted, industrious, frugal, plain-living, deeply religious people who are the real France? France has not been reborn. It is an affront to her to say it. She has but cast aside the glittering garment which she wore for the gratification of strangers in order to free her sword arm.

If you would understand the spirit which animates the French people, read this letter which was written by a French cook to his wife the day before he was killed in action. It is but a sample of thousands.

My dear Yvonne:—

Do not worry. I have good hope of seeing you again, as well as our Raymond. I beg you to take care of yourself and also of my son, for you know that I should never forgive you if anything should happen to you or to him.

Now, if by chance anything should happen to me,—for, after all, we are in war, and of course we are running some risk,—I hope you will be courageous, and be sure that if I die I put all my confidence in you, and I ask you to live in order to bring up my son to be a man—a man of spirit—and give him a good education as far as your means will permit.

And above all you shall tell him when he is grown up that his father died for him, or at least for a cause which should serve him, as well as all the generations to come.

Now, my dear Yvonne, all this is but a precaution, and I expect to be there to aid you in this task; but as I have said, one never knows what may happen. In any case we are leaving (for the front) all in good spirits and in the firm belief that we shall conquer.