Frederick Palmer
My Second Year of the War
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066194697
Table of Contents
BACK TO THE FRONT
How America fails to realize the war—Difficulties of realization—Uncle Sam is sound at heart—In London again—A Chief of Staff who has risen from the ranks—Sir William Robertson takes time to think—At the front—Kitchener's mob the new army—A quiet headquarters—Sir Douglas Haig—His office a clearing house of ideas—His business to deal in blows—"The Spirit that quickeneth."
"I've never kept up my interest so long in anything as in this war," said a woman who sat beside me at dinner when I was home from the front in the winter of 1915–16. Since then I have wondered if my reply, "Admirable mental concentration!" was not ironic at the expense of manners and philosophy. In view of the thousands who were dying in battle every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was superficial and in keeping with the riotous joy of living and prosperity which strikes every returned American with its contrast to Europe's self-denial, emphasized by such details gained by glimpses in the shop windows of Fifth Avenue as the exhibit of a pair of ladies' silk hose inset with lace, price one hundred dollars.
Meanwhile, she was knitting socks or mufflers, I forget which, for the Allies. Her confusion about war news was common to the whole country, which heard the special pleading of both sides without any cross-questioning by an attorney. She remarked how the Allies' bulletins said that the Allies were winning and the German bulletins that the Germans were winning; but so far as she could see on the map the armies remained in much the same positions and the wholesale killing continued. Her interest, I learned on further inquiry, was limited and partisan. When the Germans had won a victory, she refused to read about it and threw down her paper in disgust.
There was something human in her attitude, as human as the war itself. It was a reminder of how far away from the Mississippi is the Somme; how broad is the Atlantic; how impossible it is to project yourself into the distance even in the days of the wireless. She was moving in the orbit of her affairs, with its limitations, just as the soldiers were in theirs. Before the war luxury was as common in Paris as in New York; but with so ghastly a struggle proceeding in Europe it seemed out of keeping that the joy of living should endure anywhere in the world. Yet Europe was tranquilly going its way when the Southern States were suffering pain and hardship worse than any that France and England have known. Paris and London were dining and smiling when Richmond was in flames.
War can be brought home to no community until its own sons are dying and risking death. In nothing are we so much the creatures of our surroundings as in war. For the first few weeks when I was at home, a nation going its way in an era of prosperity had an aspect of vulgarity; peace itself was vulgar by contrast with the atmosphere of heroic sacrifice in which I had lived for over a year. I asked myself if my country could ever rise to the state of exaltation of France and England. Though first thought, judging by superficial appearances alone, might have said "No," I knew that we could if there ever came a call to defend our soil—a call that could be brought home to the valleys of the Hudson and the Mississippi as a call was brought home to the valleys of the Somme, the Meuse and the Marne.
Many Americans had returned from Europe with reports of humiliation endured as a result of their country's attitude. Shopkeepers had made insulting remarks, they said, and in some instances had refused to sell goods. They had been conscious of hostility under the politeness of their French and English friends. A superficial confirmation of their contention might be taken from the poster I noticed on my way from Paddington Station to my hotel upon my arrival in England. It advertised an article in a cheap weekly under the title of "Uncle Sham."
I took this just as seriously as I took a cartoon in a New York evening paper of pro-German tendencies on the day that I had sailed from New York, which showed John Bull standing idly by and urging France on to sacrifices in the defense of Verdun. It was as easy for an American to be indignant at one as for an Englishman at the other, but a little unworthy of the intelligence of either. I was too convinced that Uncle Sam, who does not always follow my advice, is sound at heart and a respectable member of the family of nations to be in the least disturbed in my sense of international good will. If I had been irritated I should have contributed to the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed which makes bad blood between peoples.
I knew, too, from experience, as I had kept repeating at home, that when the chosen time arrived for the British to strike, they would prove with deeds the shamelessness of this splash of printer's ink and confound, as they have on the Somme, the witticism of a celebrated Frenchman who has since made his apology for saying that the British would fight on till the last drop of French blood was shed. Besides, on the same day that I saw the poster I saw in a British publication a reproduction of a German cartoon—exemplifying the same kind of vulgar facility—picturing Uncle Sam being led by the nose by John Bull.
Thinking Englishmen and Frenchmen, when they pause in their preoccupation of giving life and fortune for their cause to consider this extraneous subject, realize the widespread sympathy of the United States for the Allied cause and how a large proportion of our people were prepared to go to war after the sinking of the Lusitania for an object which could bring them no territorial reward. If we will fight only for money and aggrandizement, as the "Uncle Sham" style of reasoners hold, we should long ago have taken Mexico and Central America. Personally, I have never had anyone say to me that I was "too proud to fight," though if I went about saying that I was ashamed of my country I might; for when I think of my country I think of no group of politicians, financiers, or propagandists, no bureaucracy or particular section of opinion, but of our people as a whole. But unquestionably we were unpopular with the masses of Europeans. A sentence taken out of its context was misconstrued into a catch-phrase indicating the cravenness of a nation wedded to its flesh-pots, which pretended a moral superiority to others whose passionate sacrifice made them supersensitive when they looked across the Atlantic to the United States, which they saw profiting from others' misfortunes.
By living at home I had gained perspective about the war and by living with the war I have gained perspective about my own country. At the front I was concerned day after day with the winning of trenches and the storming of villages whose names meant as little in the Middle West as a bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at the front. After some months of peace upon my return to England I resented passport regulations which had previously been a commonplace; but soon I was back in the old groove, the groove of war, with war seeming as normal in England as peace seemed in the United States.
In London, recruiting posters with their hectic urgings to the manhood of England to volunteer no longer blanketed the hoardings and the walls of private buildings. Conscription had come. Every able-bodied man must now serve at the command of the government. England seemed to have greater dignity. The war was wholly master of her proud individualism, which had stubbornly held to its faith that the man who fought best was he who chose to fight rather than he who was ordered to fight.
There was a new Chief of Staff at the War Office, Sir William Robertson, who had served for seven years as a private before he received his commission as an officer, singularly expressing in