Lafayette, We Come! / The Story of How a Young Frenchman Fought for Liberty in America and How America Now Fights for Liberty in France

by Rupert Sargent Holland

More than that, we must do our part in building ships to provision our allies, ships that should replace those the pirates of the sea were sinking daily. And we must feed not only our own people, but the people of starving countries, and particularly the people of Belgium, whom we had helped since the war began. Here in the broad and fertile land that lay between the two oceans was to be the granary and factory and training-camp that were to make liberty victorious. The nation turned to its new task with the same indomitable energy that had conquered the wilderness in the days of the pioneers.

At the call of the love of country men instantly volunteered. Congress passed the Conscription Act, and young men who had dreamed of peaceful occupations went to be trained as soldiers. Ceaselessly, tirelessly the great work went on. Americans landed in France to reinforce the volunteers who were already there as engineers, as motor-drivers, as aviators. Railroads had to be built, and docks and factories; the most skilled men in every line of work hurried to be in the vanguard. Then General Pershing reached France as commander-in-chief of the vast American army that was to come. As we had received Joffre so France now welcomed Pershing. And he went to Lafayette’s tomb and laid a wreath upon it, declaring that America had come to the aid of France.

Great armies are not built in a day, nor are gigantic fleets of merchant ships. Mistakes must always be made, and there are always critics. But in spite of critics and mistakes the American government, and under it the people, went on with the work in hand. Men became skilled soldiers and ships were launched, and at the end of the first year after our entrance into the war our troops were in the trenches, fighting side by side with their allies, and a steady stream of more troops flowed day by day from west to east. America had already thrown the first part of her power into the conflict and given earnest of the greater power to come.

Americans have already given their lives for freedom. First there were the eager, intrepid young spirits who volunteered as flying-men, in the French Foreign Legion, in the regiments of England, in the driving of ambulances at the call of mercy. How gloriously their sacrifices will live in the pages of history and in the hearts of their countrymen! And then there have been men of the first American army, such men as the private soldiers Hay, Enright, and Gresham, above whose graves in France is the inscription “Here lie the first soldiers of the Illustrious Republic of the United States who fell on French soil for Justice and Liberty November 3, 1917.” Truly have they proved the truth of the Latin motto, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

What is the lesson of Lafayette, of Washington, of Lincoln, of all men who have put the ideal of justice and liberty above their material wants, of the men who have fought in France and in all parts of the world for the cause of freedom? The lesson is simply this, that service and self-sacrifice for others is the noblest goal of man, that life is given us not to keep but to spend, and that to follow the teachings of Christ is the only road to happiness for men or nations.

“Where there is no vision the people perish.” History is filled with instances of the truth of that; the greatest empires of the world became decadent, were defeated by enemies, and vanished from the earth when their rulers and people saw no vision beyond wealth and power. Nineveh and Babylon and Troy, Byzantium, Persia, the Macedonia of Alexander the Great, Carthage and Imperial Rome all fell because gold and possessions had blinded their eyes. Material power, and the wealth that often goes with it, has been as dangerous to nations as it has been to individual men. It is only too apt to lead to the greed for greater and greater power, to bend other peoples to its will, to magnify itself at the expense of everything else in the world. It is easy for power to make nations forget their dreams of nobler things, of freedom and justice, of the rights of men everywhere to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Strength is a splendid thing, but it must be used to help other and weaker people, not to aggrandize oneself.

That the great nations of the ancient world forgot, and that such empires as the Ottoman Turks and Austria-Hungary have never known. Has the Turk ever held any vision of helping other peoples? Have the rulers of Austria ever cared for the welfare of their subject races? The history of both empires shows that the men in power have thought only of themselves. And what vision those countries have ever known has been that of a few devoted patriots who struggled for liberty and were suppressed.

Now in the past century Germany has been blinded by her growing power. Her rulers lost their vision, they made might their God; then her people were tempted, as Satan tempted Christ with a prospect of the world’s dominion, and the people fell and were blinded, and so the spirit perished in them as it has perished in other and greater peoples. They talked of German “culture,” of the blessings of German civilization; and they wanted to thrust it by force on the rest of the world, not for the good of that world, but for the glory of Germany alone. Their God became the God of the savage tribe, a God who belonged to them and to them only.

There are times when all peoples are apt to forget the vision, times when ease and plenty wrap them about. Few men are like Lafayette, who from youth to old age hold fast to their ideals, no matter what comes. Then, in a time of stress, the question is put to them: What will you do? Take the easy road of blindness or follow the rough road of vision? Belgium had her choice; she chose to lose all her worldly possessions rather than lose her soul. France had her choice, and England and Italy: to each the vision of liberty was greater than safety of life. And as each has had to pay in countless suffering so the soul of each nation has risen to greater heights. Their people do not perish like the blind; they have seen the vision of a more Christlike world when the tyrants have been destroyed.

America had her choice. Under all the power and wealth that her hundred years and more had brought her she had kept her vision; she too knew that liberty is priceless, immeasurably above all things else in the world. And this is the America that we all love. For unless we would go the way of the great nations of the old world, the nations that have perished in their blindness, we must have ever in mind the sacred duty to set and keep all men free. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And lasting peace comes only with liberty to men and nations.