A Straight Deal | Page 9

neutrality, while our chosen leaders were still
misleading us.
Do you remember those unearthly years? The explosions, the plots, the
spies, the Lucitania, the notes, Mr. Bryan, von Bernstorff, half our
country--oh, more than half!--in different or incredulous, nothing
prepared, nothing done, no step taken, Theodore Roosevelt's and
Leonard Wood's almost the only voices warning us what was bound to
happen, and to get ready for it? Do you remember the bulletin boards?
Did you grow, as I did, so restless that you would step out of your
office to see if anything new had happened during the last sixty
minutes--would stop as you went to lunch and stop as you came back?
We knew from the faces of our friends what our own faces were like. In
company we pumped up liveliness, but in the street, alone with our
apprehensions--do you remember? For our future's sake may everybody
remember, may nobody forget!
What the news was upon a certain forenoon memorable to me, I do not
recall, and this is of no consequence; good or bad, the stream of by-
passers clotted thickly to read it as the man chalked it line upon line
across the bulletin board. Citizens who were in haste stepped off the
curb to pass round since they could not pass through this crowd of
gazers. Thus this on the sidewalk stood some fifty of us, staring at

names we had never known until a little while ago, Bethincourt,
Malancourt, perhaps, or Montfaucon, or Roisel; French names of small
places, among whose crumbled, featureless dust I have walked since,
where lived peacefully a few hundred or a few thousand that are now a
thousand butchered or broken-hearted. Through me ran once again the
wonder that had often chilled me since the abdication of the Czar which
made certain the crumbling of Russia: after France, was our turn
coming? Should our fields, too, be sown with bones, should our little
towns among the orchards and the corn fall in ashes amongst which
broken hearts would wander in search of some surviving stick of
property? I had learned to know that a long while before the war the
eyes of the Hun, the bird of prey, had been fixed upon us as a juicy
morsel. He had written it, he had said it. Since August, 1914, these
Pan-German schemes had been leaking out for all who chose to
understand them. A great many did not so choose. The Hun had wanted
us and planned to get us, and now more than ever before, because he
intended that we should pay his war bills. Let him once get by England,
and his sword would cut through our fat, defenseless carcass like a
knife through cheese.
A voice arrested my reverie, a voice close by in the crowd. It said,
"Well, I like the French. But I'll not cry much if England gets hers.
What's England done in this war, anyway?"
"Her fleet's keeping the Kaiser out of your front yard, for one thing,"
retorted another voice.
With assurance slightly wobbling and a touch of the nasal whine, the
first speaker protested, "Well, look what George III done to us. Bad as
any Kaiser."
"Aw, get your facts straight!" It was said with scornful force. "Don't
you know George III was a German? Don't you know it was Hessians--
they're Germans--he hired to come over here and kill Americans and do
his dirty work for him? And his Germans did the same dirty work the
Kaiser's are doing now. We've got a letter written after the battle of
Long Island by a member of our family they took prisoner there. And
they stripped him and they stole his things and they beat him down

with the butts of their guns--after he had surrendered, mind--when he
was surrendered and naked, and when he was down they beat him some
more. That's Germans for you. Only they've been getting worse while
the rest of the world's been getting better. Get your facts straight, man."
A number of us were now listening to this, and I envied the historian
his ingenious promptness--I have none--and I hoped for more of this
timely debate. But debate was over. The anti-Englishman faded to
silence. Either he was out of facts to get straight, or lacked what is so
pithily termed "come-back." The latter, I incline to think; for
come-back needs no facts, it is a self-feeder, and its entire absence in
the anti-Englishman looks as if he had been a German. Germans do not
come back when it goes against them, they bleat "Kamerad!"--or
disappear. Perhaps this man was a spy--a poor one, to be sure--yet
doing his best for his Kaiser: slinking about, peeping, listening, trying
to wedge the Allies apart, doing his little bit towards