Ten years after

by Philip Gibbs

Looking back on that time, trying to recapture its sensations and philosophy, I cannot remember any absolute despair in England and France. By all the rules of the game we had nearly lost—within a hair’s breadth—yet we did not acknowledge that. There was no cry of surrender from either of the nations, which still had a fixed faith that ultimately we should win, somehow. There was something astounding in the stolidity of the British people on the edge of great disaster. To men at the front it seemed ignorance of the extremity of peril. But it was the spirit of the race steadying itself again to fresh ordeals, unyielding in pride; they could not be beaten, it was unthinkable. To hint it was a treachery. If more men were wanted the youngest brothers would follow their older brothers. So it happened. Three hundred thousand boys of eighteen, the last reserves of Great Britain, were shipped over to France to fill up the frightful gap. From the factories which had been pouring out the material of war, not only for the British Army but for all the Allies, all but the most indispensable men were enrolled. The physically unfit, soldiers many times wounded, old crocks, were sent out to the depôts in France.

America Comes In

One new power was almost ready for active service on the side of the Allies. If France could only hold out long enough, this new and arduous weight would be bound to turn the scale at last against German man-power, drained down to its last reserves. The United States Army was pouring into France with great tides of men, magnificent in physique, keen in spirit, and unscarred as yet by the fires of the war. They were untrained, ignorant of lessons that could only be learnt by deadly experience, and their Generals were novices in the organisation and handling of vast masses of troops, as the British had been. They were bound to make ghastly mistakes. They would waste their men as ours had been wasted, by faulty staff work; but sheer weight of numbers and the spirit of brave men would in the long run be irresistible. Had we the time to wait for them?...

We had been waiting long for them—too long as some thought, not realising the diversity of racial views in that great country and knowing little of its historical character and meaning. Vast numbers of its people had come from Europe in the past, distant or recent, to escape—Europe. They had wanted to get away from the very hatreds and rivalries which had led to this monstrous conflict. They desired to live secure, in a civilisation where the common man might work in peace and liberty without being flagged to fight for some Kings’ quarrel or the ambitions of diplomats, or the fever of racial passion. Great numbers of them could not understand what the European quarrel was about when all was said and done. Anyhow, it had nothing to do with them, in the Middle West and the West, though New York seemed to be worried. Many intelligent Americans, shocked to the soul by this breakdown of civilisation in Europe, believed sincerely that the best service they could render the world was to stand on one side, to act finally as arbitrators between the exhausted nations among whom neither side could win—it looked like that—and to lead the stricken peoples back to sanity and peace. German Americans had a natural sympathy with the old fatherland though dismayed by its ruthlessness. Irish Americans still disliked England too much because of bitter and traditional memories to weep tears over her sacrifice or to glow with pride at the splendour of her spirit. Czechs, Slavs, Swedes were utterly neutral. In any case, apart from all racial strains, the war in Europe was enormously distant to the souls of men on isolated farmsteads, or to the crowds in the main streets of little towns west of New York. They elected President Wilson to keep them out of the war, and that strange man, with his mingling of mysticism and practical politics, his moral eloquence, and his autocratic methods, his mental disgust at war and violence, and his belief that the spiritual destiny of the United States was not to be fulfilled in terms of military force, or by any entry into the quarrels of the Old World, made them resist for a long time the strain of almost intolerable pressures, such as the German U-boat war and the rising passion of American opinion, in many classes not neutral, not indifferent to the cause of France and Great Britain, but tortured by shame, impatience, rage, because the Government of the United States refused to call its people to a crusade on the side of right and justice.

All the old stock in America, or nearly all, millions of people in little American homes who read English books, whose minds were soaked in English history, whose ancestors had sprung from English and Scottish soil, panted for their deliverance from a neutrality which was a fraud and a shame in their hearts. They were not neutral. They never had been. They were all for England. Millions of others—remembering Lafayette, and filled with a deep sentiment for France, an enormous admiration for French heroism—enraged against Germany for the ruin she had made in France—loathed the policy of President Wilson, which seemed to them cowardly, selfish and unworthy. The pressure on Wilson became stronger and more insistent. Germany helped them in every possible way by deliberate insult, by methods of sea warfare outside the traditional code of common humanity; by plots, incendiarism, and sabotage within the United States itself in order to check the supplies of stores and ammunition addressed to England and France. When war was finally declared by the United States in the spring of 1917, the American people, apart from small minorities, were no longer neutral or indifferent, and a tidal wave of enthusiasm for service swept over all barriers and oppositions from coast to coast. It rose higher and higher as the months passed, reaching to a spiritual exaltation, unlike any emotion that had ever possessed that nation before. It had different motives, different manifestations from those which possessed the peoples of Europe engaged in the war. The Americans were not conscious of self-interest. There was no sense of menace against them such as Great Britain had partly felt. There was nothing they desired to gain for themselves. It was a crusade on behalf of civilisation. It was also unconsciously a desire in the American mind to prove that in spite of all their material wealth, their comfort of life, their peace and security, they were ready to suffer, to make sacrifice, to spend their energy, and their dollars, to give their manhood and their courage for a spiritual ideal. The United States would prove to the world that it had a national soul. It would prove to itself that all the different strains of race within its citizenship had been merged and moulded into a national unity, responsive to the call of patriotism, disciplined by a common code, obedient to the voice of the State speaking for the whole people.

The very suspicion that certain sections of American citizens might be cold to this enthusiasm, even disloyal to the State, made American patriotism more self-conscious, demonstrative, and vociferous than in European nations where it was taken for granted. There was a spreading intolerance of the mass mind because of the need of unity. A nonconformist to this enthusiasm was marked down as a traitor or a shirker. Every American citizen, man, woman and child, had to prove allegiance to the state at war by some kind of service and self sacrifice, in work or dollars or both. Woe betide all pacifists, conscientious objectors, or indifferentists. American methods of work, business organisation, industrial energy, dollar “drives,” were all diverted from peace to war. Financiers, industrial magnates, engineers, organisers, gave their service to the State and “speeded up” the war machine. The entire manhood of the nation was mobilised, drilled, equipped with an utter disregard of cost, and with driving zeal. It was a terrific demonstration of force, physical, moral, emotional, set in motion by generous impulses and terrific in potentiality.

In France and Flanders I saw the arrival of the first American troops, and then the following tide of men, behind the lines of the fighting front. It seemed to me then, as it does now, a miracle of history. After three hundred years the New World had come to the rescue of the Old. They marched over fields like those of Agincourt and Crecy where our bowmen and pikemen had fought before America was on the map of the world. And yet those men of the United States Army, different in type from ours, belonging to a different civilisation, spoke the English tongue, and no difference of accent could break our sense of kinship with them. Even though they did not all spring from our stock and blood they were in some way heirs of our tradition, our code of law, our root ideas. We watched them pass behind the lines with a sense of comfort and a kind of wonderment. They were magnificent men, untouched as yet by the strain of war, marvellously fresh, like our first youth which was now dead. Their numbers grew and grew. One came across their camps everywhere, but one question was like a sharp sword in one’s brain: Had they come in time? The Germans were on the Marne again. Paris was being shelled. Marshal Foch had no reserves. In a few days, if the Germans made another thrust, Paris might be surrendered and the spirit of France broken, and the British army involved in general defeat. Such things were unuttered. They were thrust aside even from one’s own mind. But they kept one’s brain on the rack.

The Counter-Attack

Then Foch attacked. As rapidly as his line of blue men had come up to strengthen the British Front after the German break-through—I shall never forget the ride of the French Cavalry, on lean horses wet with sweat, and the hurried tide of blue transport waggons, driven by coal-black negroes, and the endless line of guns with dusty, sullen gunners coming to support us when our men had fought back for three frightful weeks—he withdrew them from our Front. They vanished like a dream army. English and Scottish Divisions were entrained for the French Front. Our own lines were thin and weak. Foch was taking the ultimate risks. American infantry and American Marines were put in at Chateau Thierry for their baptism of blood. French infantry, withdrawn from other parts of the line, left almost without defence, were rushed to the Marne. The German salient thrust out like a battering ram, pointing to Paris, was attacked on both sides, at its junctions with the main line. It was pierced and broken. The enemy was panic-stricken and thrown into a mad disorder.

“Who attacked?” asked German prisoners.