"That's so; but there need not have been any war at all."
"There needn't, sir; but it made the U.S.A. all the same. The big event of the Franco-Prussian War wasn't the surrender at Sedan; it was the crowning of the German Emperor at Versailles. And in the Civil War—well, it made one nation of the Americans in the same way as the other did of the Germans."
"Well, Lootenant, if wars are just to make nations into one, what was the good of our wars with you?"
Jackson was getting over his self-consciousness, and it was dawning on him that the American Navy has a method of "drawing" very similar to that in use in his own.
"They were a lot of use," he protested. "We sent German troops against you, and you killed lots of them."
There was a general laugh.
"Say, Jackson," came a voice, "this little old country of yours isn't doing much with the Germans now except kill them. Say, she's great! You're doing all the work, and you've kept on telling us you're doing nix. Your papers just talk small, as if your Army was only a Yale-Princetown football crowd, and you were the coon and not the Big Stick of the bunch that's in it."
"Well, you see, we don't like talking about ourselves except to just buck our own people up."
Jackson's tone as he said this was, I regret to say, just what yours or mine would have been. It could only be described as "smug."
"You sure don't. We like to say what we're doing when we come from New York."