Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, divers of his brother travellers failed to keep their distance. Toward this distinguished gentleman they deported themselves with a familiarity and an offhandedness that must have been acutely distasteful to one unaccustomed to moving in a mixed and miscellaneous company.
Accordingly he took steps on the second day out to put them in their proper places. A list was being circulated to get up a subscription for something or other, and almost the very first person to whom this list came in its rounds of the first cabin was the person in question. He took out a gold-mounted fountain pen from his pocket and in a fair round hand inscribed himself thus:
“Bejones of Tuxedo”
There were no initials—royalty hath not need for initials—but just the family name and the name of the town so fortunate as to number among its residents this notable—which names for good reasons I have purposely changed. Otherwise the impressive incident occurred as here narrated.
But those others just naturally refused to be either abashed or abated. They must have been an irreverent, sacrilegious lot, by all accounts. The next man to whom the subscription was carried took note of the new fashion in signatures and then gravely wrote himself down as “Spirits of Niter”; and the next man called himself “Henri of Navarre”; and the third, it developed, was no other than “Cream of Tartar”; and the next was “Timon of Athens”; and the next “Mother of Vinegar”—and so on and so forth, while waves of ribald and raucous laughter shook the good ship from stem to stem.
However, the derisive ones reckoned without their host. For them the superior mortal had a yet more formidable shot in the locker. On the following day he approached three of the least impressed of his temporary associates as they stood upon the promenade deck, and apropos of nothing that was being said or done at the moment he, speaking in a clear voice, delivered himself of the following crushing remark:
“When I was born there were only two houses in the city of New York that had porte-cochères, and I—I was born in one of them.”
Inconceivable though it may appear, the fact is to be recorded that even this disclosure failed to silence the tongues of ridicule aboard that packet boat. Rather did it enhance them, seeming but to spur the misguided vulgarians on and on to further evidences of disrespect. There are reasons for believing that Bejones of Tuxedo, who had been born in the drafty semipublicity of a porte-cochère, left the vessel upon its arrival with some passing sense of relief, though it should be stated that up until the moment of his debarkation he continued ever, while under the eye of the plebes and commoners about him, to bear himself after a mode and a port befitting the station to which Nature had called him. He vanished into the hinterland of France and was gone to take up his duties; but he left behind him, among those who had travelled hither in his company, a recollection which neither time nor vicissitude can efface. Presumably he is still in the service, unless it be that ere now the service has found out what was the matter with it.
I have taken the little story concerning him as a text for this article, not because Bejones of Tuxedo is in any way typical of any group or subgroup of men in our new Army—indeed I am sure that he, like the blooming of the century plant, is a thing which happens only once in a hundred years, and not then unless all the conditions are salubrious. I have chosen the little tale to keynote my narrative for the reason that I believe it may serve in illustration; of a situation that has arisen in Europe, and especially in France, these last few months—a condition that does not affect our Army so much as it affects sundry side issues connected more or less indirectly with the presence on European soil of an army from the United States, like most of the nations having representative forms of government that have gone into this war, we went in as an amateur nation so far as knowledge of the actual business of modern warfare was concerned. Like them, we have had to learn the same hard lessons that they learned, in the same hard school of experience. Our national amateurishness beforehand was not altogether to our discredit; neither was it altogether to our credit. Nobody now denies that we should have been better prepared for eventualities than we were. On the other hand it was hardly to be expected that a peaceful commercial country such as ours—which until lately had been politically remote as it was geographically aloof upon its own hemisphere from the political storm-centres of the Old World, and in which there was no taint of the militarism that has been Germany's curse, and will yet be her undoing—should in times of peace greatly concern itself with any save the broad general details of the game of war, except as a heart-moving spectacle enacted upon the stage of another continent and viewed by us with sympathetic and sorrowing eyes across three or four thousand miles of salt water. Prior to our advent into it the war had no great appeal upon the popular conscience of the United States. Out of the fulness of our hearts and out of the abundance of our prosperity we gave our dollars, and gave and gave and kept on giving them for the succour of the victims of the world catastrophe; but a sense of the impending peril for our own institutions came home to but few among us. Here and there were individuals who scented the danger; but they were as prophets crying in the wilderness; the masses either could not oc would not see it. They would not make ready against the evil days ahead.
So we went into this most highly specialised industry, which war has become, as amateurs mainly. Our Navy was no amateur navy, as very speedily developed, and before this year's fighting is over our enemy is going to realise that our Army is not an amateur army. We may have been greenhorns at the trade wherein Germans were experts by training and education; still we fancy ourselves as a reasonably adaptable breed. But if the truth is to be told it must be confessed that in certain of the Allied branches of the business we are yet behaving like amateurs. After more than a year of actual and potential participation in the conflict we even now are doing things and suffering things to be done which would make us the laughingstock of our allies if they had time or tempter for laughing. I am not speaking of the conduct of our operations in the field or in the camps or on the high seas. I am speaking with particular reference to what might be called some of the by-products.