It is natural that many of the boys were full of "buck" before they saw the real thing, and were rather scornful of the British and French troops, who had been such a long time "doing nothing," as they said.
"You've been kidding yourselves that you know how to fight," said one of them to an English Tommy. "We've come to show you!"
That was boys' talk, like our "ragging," and was not meant seriously. On the contrary, the companies of the Twenty-seventh Division who went into action with the Australians at Hamel near Amiens—the first time that American troops were in action in France—were filled with admiration for the stolid way in which those veterans played cards in their dugouts before going over the top at dawn. The American boys were tense and strained, knowing that in a few hours they would be facing death. But when the time came they went away like greyhounds, and were reckless of fire.
"They'll go far when they've learned a bit," said the Australians.
They had to learn the usual lessons in the same old way, by mistakes, by tragedy, by lack of care. They overcrowded their forward trenches so that they suffered more heavily than they should have done under enemy shell-fire. They advanced in the open against machine-gun nests and were mown down. They went ahead too fast without "mopping up" the ground behind them, and on the day they helped to break the Hindenburg line they did not clear out the German dugouts, and the Germans came out with their machine-guns and started fighting in the rear, so that when the Australians came up in support they had to capture the ground again, and lost many men before they could get in touch with the Americans ahead. For some time the American transport system broke down, so that the fighting troops did not always obtain their supplies on the field of battle, and there were other errors, inevitable in an army starting a great campaign with inexperienced staff officers. What never failed was the gallantry of the troops, which reached heights of desperate valor in the forest of the Argonne.
The officers were tremendously in earnest. What struck us most was their gravity. Our officers took their responsibility lightly, laughed and joked more readily, and had a boyish, whimsical sense of humor. It seemed to us, perhaps quite wrongly, that the American officers were not, on the whole, of a merry disposition. They were frank and hearty, but as they walked about their billeting area behind the lines some of them looked rather solemn and grim, and our young men were nervous of them. I think that was simply a matter of facial expression plus a pair of spectacles, for on closer acquaintance one found, invariably, that an American officer was a human soul, utterly devoid of swank, simple, straight, and delightfully courteous. Their modesty was at times almost painful. They were over-anxious to avoid hurting the feelings of French or British by any appearance of self-conceit. "We don't know a darned thing about this war," said many of them, so that the phrase became familiar to us. "We have come here to learn."
Well, they learned pretty quickly and there were some things they did not need teaching—courage, endurance, pride of manhood, pride of race. They were not going to let down the Stars and Stripes, though all hell was against them. They won a new glory for the Star-spangled Banner, and it was the weight they threw in and the valor that went with it which, with the French and British armies attacking all together, under the directing genius of Foch, helped to break the German war machine and to achieve decisive and supreme victory.
It would have been better, I think, for America and for all of us, especially for France, if quickly after victory the American troops had gone back again. That was impossible because of holding the Rhine and enforcing the terms of peace. But during the long time that great bodies of American troops remained in France after the day of armistice, there was occasion for the bigness of ideals and achievements to be whittled down by the little nagging annoyances of a rather purposeless existence. Boredom, immense and long enduring, took possession of the American army in France. The boys wanted to go home, now that the job was done. They wanted the victory march down Fifth Avenue, not the lounging life in little French villages, nor even the hectic gayeties of leave in Paris. Old French châteaux used as temporary headquarters suffered from successive waves of occupation by officers who proceeded to modernize their surroundings by plugging old panels for electric light and fixing up telephone-wires through painted ceilings, to the horror of the concierges and the scandal of the neighborhood. In the restaurants and hotels and cinema halls the Americans trooped in, took possession of all the tables, shouted at the waiters who did not seem to know their jobs, and expressed strong views in loud voices (understood by French civilians who had learned English in the war) about the miserable quality of French food and the darned arrogance of French officers. It was all natural and inevitable—but unfortunate. The French were too quick to forget after armistice that they owed a good deal to American troops for the complete defeat of Germany. The Americans were not quite careful in remembering the susceptibilities of a sensitive people. So there were disillusion and irritation on both sides, in a broad and general way, allowing for many individual friendships between French and Americans, many charming memories which will remain on both sides of the Atlantic when the war is old in history.
Americans who overcame the language difficulty by learning enough to exchange views with the French inhabitants—and there were many—were able to overlook the minor, petty things which divided the two races, and were charmed with the intelligence, spirit, and humor of the French bourgeoisie and educated classes. They got the best out of France, and were enchanted with French cathedrals, mediæval towns, picture-galleries, and life. Paris caught hold of them, as it takes hold of all men and women who know something of its history and learn to know and love its people. Thousands of American officers came to know Paris intimately, from Montmartre to Montparnasse, became familiar and welcome friends in little restaurants tucked away in the side-streets, where they exchanged badinage with the proprietor and the waitresses, and felt the spirit of Paris creep into their bones and souls. Along the Grands Boulevards these young men from America watched the pageant of life pass by as they sat outside the cafés, studying the little high-heeled ladies who passed by with a side-glance at these young men, marveling at the strange medley of uniforms, as French, English, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Italian, Portuguese, and African soldiers went by, realizing the meaning of "Europe" with all its races and rivalries and national traditions, and getting to know the inside of European politics by conversations with men who spoke with expert knowledge about this conglomeration of peoples. Those young men who are now back in the United States have already made a difference to their country's intellectual outlook. They have taught America to look out upon the world with wider vision and to abandon the old isolation of American thought which was apt to ignore the rest of the human family and remain self-contained and aloof from a world policy.
During the months that followed the armistice many Americans of high intellectual standing came to Europe, attracted by the great drama and business of the Peace Conference, and to prepare the way for the reconstruction of civilization after the years of conflict. They were statesmen, bankers, lawyers, writers, and financiers. I met some of them in Paris, Rome, Vienna, London, and other cities of Europe. They were the onlookers and the critics of the new conflict that had followed the old, the conflict of ideas, policy, and passion which raged outside the quiet chamber at Versailles, where President Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and a few less important mortals were redrawing the frontiers of Europe, Asia, and other parts of the globe. From the first, many of these men were frank in private conversation about the hostility that was growing up in the United States against President Wilson, and the distrust of the American people in a league of nations which might involve the United States in European entanglements alien to her interests and without the consent of her people. At the same time, and at that time when there still seemed to be a chance of arriving at a new compact between nations which would eliminate the necessity of world-wide war, and of washing out the blood-stains of strife by new springs of human tolerance and international common sense, these American visitors did not throw down the general scheme for a league of nations, and looked to the Peace Conference to put forward a treaty which might at least embody the general aspirations of stricken peoples. Gradually these onlookers sickened with disgust. They sickened at the interminable delays in the work of the Conference, and the imperialistic ambitions of the Allied powers, and the greedy rivalries of the little nations, at all the falsity of lip-service to high principles while hatred, vengeance, injustice, and sordid interests were in the spirit of that document which might have been the new Charter of Rights for the peoples of the world. They saw that Clemenceau's vision of peace was limited to the immediate degradation and ruin of the Central Powers, and that he did not care for safeguarding the future or for giving liberty and justice and a chance of economic life to democracies liberated from military serfdom. They saw that Lloyd George was shifting his ground continually as pressure was brought to bear on him now from one side of the Cabinet and now from the other, so that his policy was a strange compound of extreme imperialism and democratic idealism, with the imperialist ambition winning most of the time. They saw that Wilson was being hoodwinked by the subtlety of diplomatists who played on his vanity, and paid homage to his ideals, and made a prologue of his principles to a drama of injustice. Our American visitors were perplexed and distressed. They had desired to be heart and soul with the Allies in the settlement of peace. They still cherished the ideals which had uplifted them in the early days of the war. They were resolved that the United States should not play a selfish part in the settlement or profit by the distress of nations who had been hard hit. But gradually they became disillusioned with the statecraft of Europe, and disappointed with the low level of intelligence and morality reflected in the newspaper press of Europe, which still wrote in the old strain of "propaganda" when insincerity and manufactured falsehood took the place of truth. They hardened visibly, I think, against the view that the United States should be pledged by Wilson to the political and economic schemes of the big powers in Europe, which, far from healing the wounds of the world, kept them raw and bleeding, while arranging, not deliberately, but very certainly, for future strife into which America would be dragged against her will. England and France failed to see the American point of view, which seems to me reasonable and sound.