Self-proclaimed “good Americans,” who pray that when they die they may go to Paris, are no more the real Americans than is their cafed, boulevarded, liqueured-up artificial, gay night-life Paris—the only Paris they know (specially arranged and operated, by other foreigners, for their particular delectation and benefit!)—the real Paris.
Such Americans, whose self-centered world stands still when their checks are but unhonored scraps of paper, the light of whose eyes fades if their personal baggage is gone, with just one idea of “service”—that fussy, obsequious attendance, which they buy, are they whose screaming Eagles spread their powerful wings on silver and gold coin only. Their “U. S.” forms the dollar-sign. They are the globe-trotting, superficial, frivolous “goers.”
Boys in brown and blue, girls in merciful angels’ white, men and women of scant impedimenta, are the “comers,” to whom—and to whose distant home-fire tenders—“U. S.” means neither Cash nor Country alone, but a suffering humanity’s urgent—US. Bonds of liberty mean, to them, LIBERTY BONDS. Yes “La Fayette, we are here!” Real Americans think, shoot and shout, Pershing for the perishing, “the Yanks are coming over till it’s over, over there!”
FOREWORD
Let the fastidious beware!
Here is no inviting account of a holiday in France.
The fighting author does not apologize for this terrible tale.
He has written literally, unglossed—no glamour, to
Help you understand the horrors of War and Prussian dreadfulness.
This gripping catalogue of catastrophe is by an American.