"What we are seeing," he said, "is the greatest thing that has happened in history since the Norman Conquest. It is the arrival of America in Europe. Those boys are coming to fulfill the destiny of a people which for three hundred years has been preparing, building, growing, for the time when it will dominate the world. Those young soldiers will make many mistakes. They will be mown down in their first attacks. They will throw away their lives recklessly, because of their freshness and ignorance. But behind them are endless waves of other men of their own breed and type. Germany will be destroyed because her man-power is already exhausted, and she cannot resist the weight which America will now throw against her. But by this victory, which will leave all the old Allies weakened and spent and licking their wounds, America will be the greatest power in the world, and will hold the destiny of mankind in her grasp. Those boys slogging through the dust are like the Roman legionaries. With them marches the fate of the world, of which they are masters."
"A good thing or a bad?" I asked my friend.
He made a circle in the dust with his trench stick, and stared into the center of it.
"Who can tell?" he said, presently. "Was it good or bad that the Romans conquered Europe, or that afterward they fell before the barbarians? Was it good or bad that William and his Normans conquered England? There is no good or bad in history; there is only change, building-up, and disintegrating, new cycles of energy, decay, and rebirth. After this war, which those lads will help to win, the power will pass to the west, and Europe will fall into the second class."
Those were high views. Thinking less in prophecy, getting into touch with the actual men, I was struck by the exceptionally high level of individual intelligence among the rank and file, and by the general gravity among them. The American private soldier seemed to me less repressed by discipline than our men. He had more original points of view, expressed himself with more independence of thought, and had a greater sense of his own personal value and dignity. He was immensely ignorant of European life and conditions, and our Tommies were superior to him in that respect. Nor had he their easy way of comradeship with French and Flemish peasants, their whimsical philosophy of life which enabled them to make a joke in the foulest places and conditions. They were harder, less sympathetic; in a way, I think, less imaginative and spiritual than English or French. They had no tolerance with foreign habits or people. After their first look round they had very little use for France or the French. The language difficulty balked them at the outset and they did not trouble much to cope with it, though I remember some of the boys sitting under the walls of French villages with small children who read out words in conversation-books and taught them to pronounce. They had a fierce theoretical hatred of the Germans, who, they believed, were bad men, in the real old-fashioned style of devil incarnate, so that it was up to every American soldier to kill Germans in large numbers. It was noticeable that after the armistice, when the American troops were billeted among German civilians, that hatred wore off very quickly, as it did with the English Tommies, human nature being stronger than war passion. Before they had been in the fighting-line a week these "new boys" had no illusions left about the romance or the adventure of modern war. They hated shell-fire as all soldiers hate it, they loathed the filth of the trenches, and—they were very homesick.
I remember one private soldier who had fought in the American-Spanish war and in the Philippines—an old "tough."
"Three weeks of this war," he said, "is equal to three years of all others."
But he and "the pups," as he called his younger comrades, were going to see it through, and they were animated by the same ideals with which the French and British had gone into the war.
"This is a fight for civilization," said one man, and another said, "There'll be no liberty in the world if the Germans win."