Out To Win | Page 2

have them in America. Such men are not
representative."
The purpose of this book is to tell what America has done, is doing, and,
on the strength of her splendid and accomplished facts, to plead for a
closer friendship between my two countries. As an Englishman who

has lived in the States for ten years and is serving with the Canadian
Forces, I feel that I have a sympathetic understanding of the affections
and aloofnesses of both nations; as a member of both families I claim
the domestic right of indulging in a little plain speaking to each in turn.
In my appeal I leave the fighting men out of the question. Death is a
universal teacher of charity. At the end of the war the men who survive
will acknowledge no kinship save the kinship of courage. To have
answered the call of duty and to have played the man, will make a
closer bond than having been born of the same mother. At a New York
theatre last October I met some French officers who had fought on the
right of the Canadian Corps frontage at the Somme. We got to talking,
commenced remembering, missed the entire performance and parted as
old friends. In France I stayed with an American-Irish Division. They
were for the most part American citizens in the second generation: few
of them had been to Ireland. As frequently happens, they were more
Irish than the Irish. They had learned from their parents the abuses
which had driven them to emigrate, but had no knowledge of the
reciprocal provocations which had caused the abuses. Consequently,
when they sailed on their troop-ships for France they were anti-British
almost to a man--many of them were theoretically Sinn Feiners. They
were coming to fight for France and for Lafayette, who had helped to
lick Britain--but not for the British. By the time I met them they were
marvellously changed. They were going into the line almost any day
and--this was what had worked the change--they had been trained for
their ordeal by British N.C.O.'s and officers. They had swamped their
hatred and inherited bitterness in admiration. Their highest hope was
that they might do as well as the British. "They're men if you like," they
said. In the imminence of death, their feeling for these old-timers, who
had faced death so often, amounted to hero-worship. It was good to
hear them deriding the caricature of the typical Briton, which had
served in their mental galleries as an exact likeness for so many years.
It was proof to me that men who have endured the same hell in a
common cause will be nearer in spirit, when the war is ended, than they
are to their own civilian populations. For in all belligerent countries
there are two armies fighting--the military and the civilian; either can
let the other down. If the civilian army loses its morale, its vision, its
unselfishness, and allows itself to be out-bluffed by the civilian army of

Germany, it as surely betrays its soldiers as if it joined forces with the
Hun. We execute soldiers for cowardice; it's a pity that the same law
does not govern the civilian army. There would be a rapid revision in
the tone of more than one English and American newspaper. A soldier
is shot for cowardice because his example is contagious. What can be
more contagious than a panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated?
Already there are many of us who have a kindlier feeling and certainly
more respect for a Boche who fights gamely, than for a Britisher or
American who bickers and sulks in comfort. Only one doubt as to
ultimate victory ever assails the Western Front: that it may be attacked
in the rear by the premature peace negotiations of the civil populations
it defends. Should that ever happen, the Western Front would cease to
be a mixture of French, Americans, Canadians, Australians, British and
Belgians; it would become a nation by itself, pledged to fight on till the
ideals for which it set out to fight are definitely established.
We get rather tired of reading speeches in which civilians presume that
the making of peace is in their hands. The making may be, but the
acceptance is in ours. I do not mean that we love war for war's sake.
We love it rather less than the civilian does. When an honourable peace
has been confirmed, there will be no stauncher pacifist than the soldier;
but we reserve our pacifism till the war is won. We shall be the last
people in Europe to get war-weary. We started with a vision--the
achieving of justice; we shall not grow weary till that vision has
become a reality. When one has faced up to an ultimate self-denial,