Our Part in the Great War

Clearing house of the suffering of France, the Maison Blanche is the place where the mutilated of the Grand Army come. As quickly as they are discharged from hospital, they are sent to this Maison Blanche, while completing their convalescence, before they return to their homes. It is here that arms, legs, stumps, hands and the apparatus that operates these members, are fitted to them. They try out the new device. It is to them like a foot asleep to a whole man; a something numb and strange out beyond the responses of the nervous system. It behaves queerly. It requires much testing to make it articulate naturally.

Through the recreation hall, where plays and motion pictures have made gay evenings in time past before the war, file the slow streams of the crippled, backwash of the slaughter to the North. To the soldiers it is a matter of routine, one more item in the long sacrifice. They fit on the member and test it in a businesslike way, with no sentimentalizing. Too many are there in the room, and other hundreds on the pleasant sunny lawns, in like case, for the individual to feel himself the lonely victim. There are no jests – the war has gone too far for superficial gayety – and there is no hint of despair, for France is being saved. The crippled man is sober and long-enduring.

There in that room I saw the war as I have not seen it in five months of active service at the front. For yonder on the Yser we had the dramatic reliefs of sudden bombardment, and flashing aeroplanes. But here were only broken men. There were no whole men at all in the long Salle. The spirit of the men was all that it ever was. But the body could no longer respond. They stood in long line, stripped to the waist or with leg bare waiting their turn with the doctor and the apparatus expert. There is the look of an automaton to an artificial limb, as if the men in their troubled motions were marionettes. And then the imagination, abnormally stimulated by so much suffering, plays other tricks. And it seemed to me as if one were looking in at the window of one of those shameful "Halls of Anatomy" in a city slum, where life-size figures lie exposed with grotesque wounds on the wax flesh. But here was the crackle of the leather straps, and the snapping of the spring at the knee and elbow-joint of the mechanism, and the slow moving up and filing past of the line, as man after man was tested for flexibility. Here is the army of France – here is the whole vast problem flowing through one door and gathered in one room.

American money is helping to reëducate these broken men, teaching them trades. There at the Maison Blanche, our fellow-countrymen have already trained 563 men, and at the Grand Palais 257. As I write this, 701 maimed men are still in course of being trained, and the number in the agricultural school has grown to 90. Altogether 2,000 maimed soldiers have been trained through American help. Most of the money for this work has been raised by the "American Committee for Training in Suitable Trades the Maimed Soldiers of France," of which Mrs. Edmund Lincoln Baylies is Chairman. The president of the society in France in control of this work is B. J. Shoninger, the former president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

Like England in the battle line, we are only at the beginning of our effort. In spots and patches we have responded well. Many are giving all they can. The thirty-five million dollars in money which we have collected for all causes is excellent. (Though England has given more than that to Belgium alone, in addition to financing the war and caring for her own multitude of sufferers.) America has made gifts in goods to the amount of sixty million dollars. Of local relief committees working for France we have over two thousand. There are about forty-five thousand Americans devoting their full time to the service of France as soldiers, drivers, fliers, doctors, nurses, orderlies, and executive officers. There are many thousands in the United States who are using a portion of their strength and leisure to raise money and supplies. As Sydney Brooks said to me:

"Those Americans who believe in our cause are more Pro-Ally than the Allies."

A group of Americans among our millions are aware that Washington wrote:

"All citizens of the United States should be inspired with unchangeable gratitude to France."

Note: For an account of the work of Mrs. Wharton see page 321.

VI

THE SAVING REMNANT

I wish to show in this book three expressions of nationality. I seek to show the fire and vigor of German nationality, and how that force has been misdirected by the handful of imperialistic militarists in control. There has been no instance of a noble force so diverted since the days of the Inquisition, when the vast instinctive power of religion was used by a clever organization to torture and kill. Every instinctive element in our being is at times turned awry. Nationalism suffers just as sex love suffers from the perversions of evil institutions. But the abuse of instinct is no argument for cutting loose from that vital source and seeking to live by intellectual theories, emptied of warm emotional impulse. The remedy is in applying the intellect as a guide and corrective, not in treating instinct as an enemy. The nationalism of the German people will yet vindicate itself and swing true to freedom and justice.

I try to reveal the nationality of France, in the love of the peasant for the soil of his Patrie, for the house where he was born, and for the sunlight and the equality of his beautiful country. I have shown that there can be no peace as long as other men with other customs invade that soil, burn those homes, and impose their alien ideas.

I have told of what the American tradition of nationality has driven our men and women and our boys to do in France. They see the fight of France as our fight, just as France saw the American Revolution as her struggle. None of this work was done in vague humanitarianism. These men and women and boys are giving of their best for a definite aim. They are giving it to the American cause in France. France is defending the things that used to be dear to us, and our fellow-countrymen who are of the historic American tradition are standing at her side.

In recent years, our editors and politicians have been busy in destroying our historic tradition and creating a new tradition, by means of which we are to obtain results without paying the price. Neutrality is the method, and peace and prosperity are the rewards. I have collected many expressions of this new conception of Americanism. One will suffice.

Martin H. Glynn, temporary chairman of the National Democratic Convention, in renominating Woodrow Wilson for president, said:

"Neutrality is America's contribution to the laws of the world… The policy of neutrality is as truly American as the American flag… The genius of this country is for peace. Compared with the blood-smeared pages of Europe, our records are almost immaculate. To-day prosperity shines from blazing furnaces and glowing forges. Never was there as much money in our vaults as to-day… When the history of these days comes to be written, one name will shine in golden splendor upon the page that is blackened with the tale of Europe's war, one name will represent the triumph of American principles over the hosts of darkness and of death. It will be the name of the patriot who has implanted his country's flag on the highest peak to which humanity has yet aspired: the name of Woodrow Wilson."

It was in protest against this neutrality, this reveling in fat money vaults, this assumption that prosperity is greater than sacrifice, that these young men of whom I have told have gone out to be wounded and to die. This mockery of the "blackened page" and "blood-smeared pages" of Europe has stung many thousands of Americans into action. The record of their service is a protest against such gloating. These fighters and rescuers and workers would not have served Germany with an equal zest. Neutrality between France and Germany is impossible to them. Those who fail to see the difference between France and Germany in this war are not of our historic American tradition.

Meanwhile our friends at home, very sincere and gifted men, but mistaken, I believe, in their attitude toward nationality, are summoning America to an artistic rebirth, so that "the new forces in our arts may advance." They write: "The soldier falls under the compulsion of the herd-instinct and is devoted by his passion to a vision out of which destruction and death are wrought." To one who has heard the guns of Verdun, this piping is somewhat scrannel. Art is not something that exists in a vacuum beyond space and time, and good and evil. Art is the expression of a belief in life, and that belief takes varying forms, according to the place and age in which it falls. It may be the expression of a surge of national feeling, as in Russian music. It may be the response to a rediscovery of ancient beauty, as in the Renaissance. It may be the quickening received from fresh discoveries of territory and strange horizons, such as touched the Elizabethans. In America we have long tried by artificial stimulants to revive art. We have omitted the one sure way, which is a deep nationality, achieved by sacrifice, a reassertion of national idealism. Out of that soil will spring worthy growths, which the thin surface of modern fashionable cosmopolitanism can never nourish. The sense of the true America has laid hold of these young men of ours in France. By living well they create the conditions of art. The things they do underlie all great expression. Already they are writing with a tone and accent which have long gone unheard in our America.

My lot has cast me with young men at their heroic moment. For the first months of the war it was with Belgian boys, later with French sailors, finally with these young Americans. They have made me impatient of our modern cosmopolitan American who, in the words of Dostoievski, "Can be carried off his feet, positively carried off his feet, by noble ideals, but only if they come of themselves, if they fall from heaven for him, if they need not be paid for."

The reason why pacifism is ineffectual is because it is an intellectual theory, which does not build on instinct. A man's love of his home and his nation is an instinctive thing, full of rich emotional values and moving with the vital current of life itself. Our pacifists would clear their thinking if they came under shell-fire. All that is sound in modern radical thought has been strengthened by this war. The democratic movement in England has become an overwhelming force. But the unsound elements in radical thought, those elements introduced by intellectual theorists who scheme a world distasteful to average human nature, have been burned away in the fire. One of those unsound elements was the theory of pacifism and cosmopolitanism. Many Americans have no belief in the idea of our country. They are busy with the mechanics of life. Any person who is not "getting results" is felt by them to be ineffectual. In that absorption in material gain, they have laid hold of a doctrine which would justify them in their indifference to profounder values. It is so that we have weakened our sense of nationality.

The nation is a natural "biological group," whose members have an "instinctive liking" for each other and "act with a common purpose." The instinctive liking is created by common customs and a shared experience. This experience, expressed in song and legislative enactment and legend, becomes known as the national tradition, and is passed on from generation to generation in household heroes, such as Lincoln, and famous phrases such as "Government of the people." That instinctive liking, created by the contacts of a common purpose and rooted in a loved tradition, is gradually being weakened in our people by importations of aliens, who have not shared in a common experience, and have not inherited our tradition. It is not possible to blend diverse races into a nation, when members of one race plot against our institutions in the interests of a European State, and members of another race extract wealth from our industry and carry it home to their own people. Instinctive liking is not so nourished. A common purpose is not manifested in that way. We have not touched the imagination of these newcomers. It requires something more than "big chances" to lay hold of the instinctive life of peasants. Our lax nationalism never reaches the hidden elements of their emotion to make them one in the deeper life of the State. Skyscrapers and hustling and easy money are excellent things, but not enough to call out loyalty and allegiance.

These changing conditions of our growth have blotted out from memory the old historic experience and substituted a fresher, more recent, experience. Forty years of peace and commercial prosperity have created a new American tradition, breeding its own catch words and philosophy. The change has come so quietly, and yet so completely, that Americans to-day are largely unaware that they are speaking and acting from different motives, impulses and desires than those of the men who created and established the nation. The types of our national heroes have changed. We have substituted captains of industry for pioneers, and smart men for creative men. Our popular phrases express the new current of ideas. "Making good," "neutrality," "punch," "peace and prosperity": these stir our emotional centers. We used to be shaken and moved when the spirit of a Kossuth or Garibaldi spoke to us. But to-day we receive the appeal of Cardinal Mercier, and are unmoved. We no longer know the great accent when we hear it.

So we must look to the young to save us. Henry Farnsworth was a Boston man, twenty-five years old. He died near Givenchy, fighting for France.

"I want to fight for France," he had said, "as the French once fought for us."

Our American workers are aiding France because she defends our tradition, which is also hers, a tradition of freedom and justice, practiced in equality. In her version of it, there are elements of intellectual grace, a charm, a profundity of feeling expressed with a light touch, bits of "glory," clothed in flowing purple, which are peculiar to the Latin temperament. But the ground plan is the same. Our doctors and nurses of the American Hospital, our workers in the hostels and the Clearing House, our boys in the American Field Service, are not alone saving the lives of broken men of a friendly people. They are restoring American nationality.

SECTION II

WHY SOME AMERICANS ARE NEUTRAL

I

NEUTRALITY: AN INTERPRETATION OF THE MIDDLE WEST

"The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by the British Dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets … will have fifty millions of people within fifty years, if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more than one-third of the country owned by the United States – certainly more than one million of square miles. A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it."

(Lincoln's Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862.)

The war and the election together have revealed a growing separation between the ideas of the East and those of the West. This separation is largely the fault of the East, which prefers to do its thinking in terms of its own industrial welfare. The life of the West is a healthier life. There is better balance between industry and agriculture, more recognition of the value of social equality, more open-mindedness to new ideas, greater readiness to put them into practice. The East has been slow to recognize this moral leadership of the newer country. It has greeted the men and their ideas with caustic humor and sometimes with an almost malignant bitterness. This has not weakened the men nor crushed their ideas, but it has lessened good will. It has led the West to distrust a policy which has the endorsement of the East.

The German Kaiser said to a distinguished Frenchman whom I know:

"America once divided between North and South. It would not be impossible now to separate America, the East from the West."

It is time for the East to waken itself from its selfish sleep, and bend its mind to an understanding of the American community. In the matter of foreign policy, it is wiser than the Middle West, but in order to make its ideas prevail it will have to work by sympathetic coöperation. It will have to prove that its notion of foreign policy is not based on self-interest, but is a wise program for the American nation.

I have shown that a section of America of the Civil War traditions is intensely Pro-Ally, and has proved it in speech and action. The new America, spreading out over the immense areas of the Middle West, is neutral. It is neutral because it does not know the facts. I am sometimes told in Europe that it is the chink of our money that has made my country deaf. But our neutral people are our earnest Middle Westerners, hard-working and humanitarian. The Middle West has not given money, and it is warm-hearted. It has not taken sides, and it is honest. This neutrality is in part the result of the Allied methods of conducting the war. In England and France, there has been an unconscious disregard of neutral opinion, an indifference in the treatment of its representatives, an unwillingness to use the methods of a democracy in appealing to a democracy. A Government report, issued by a belligerent power, has little effect on a community three thousand miles away. But the first-hand accounts, sent by its own writers, who are known to be accurate and impartial, have wide effect. It is unfortunate that through the first two years of the war, more news was given to American journalists by Germany than by England and France.

There is need that some one should speak the truth about the foreign policy of the Allies. For that foreign policy has been a failure in its effect on neutrals. The successful prosecution of a war involves three relationships:

(1) The enemy.

(2) The Allies.

(3) The Neutrals.

The first two relationships have long been realized. The third – that of relationship toward neutrals – has never been realized. It is not fully realized to-day. The failure to realize it led America and England into the fight of 1812. It led to the Mason and Slidell case between England and America in the Civil War. The importance of winning neutral good will and public opinion is not, even to-day, included in the forefront of the national effort. It is still spoken of as a minor matter of giving "penny-a-liner" journalists "interviews." England has steered her way through diplomatic difficulties with neutral governments. But that is only one-half the actual problem of a foreign policy. The other half is to win the public opinion of the neutral people, because there is no such thing finally as neutrality.2 Public opinion turns either Pro or Anti, in the end. At present about thirty per cent of American public opinion is Pro-Ally. Ten per cent is anti-British, ten per cent anti-Russian, ten per cent Pro-German, and forty per cent neutral. The final weight will rest in whichever cause wins the forty per cent neutral element. That element is contained in the Middle West. The failure in dealing with America has been the failure to see that we needed facts, if we were to come to a decision. Our only way of getting facts is through the representatives whom we send over.

A clear proof that the cause of the Allies has not touched America except on the Atlantic Seaboard lies in the exact number of men from the Eastern Universities who have come across to help France, as compared with the number from the Middle Western institutions of learning. For instance, in the American Field Ambulance Service Harvard has 98 men, Princeton, 28, Yale 27, Columbia 9, Dartmouth 8. These are Eastern institutions. From the Middle West, with the exception of the University of Michigan, which has sent several, there is occasionally one man from a college. The official report up to the beginning of 1916 shows not a man from what many consider the leading University of America, the State University of Wisconsin, and less than six from the entire Middle West. There is no need of elaborating the point. The Middle West has not been allowed to know the facts.

Because my wife told her friends in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the facts of the war, three men have come four thousand miles to help France. One is Robert Toms, General Manager of the Marion Water Works, one is Dr. Cogswell, a successful physician, one is Verne Marshall, Editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Each man of the three is a successful worker, and gave up his job. These three men are as significant as the 98 college boys from Harvard.

What took place in that little Iowa group will take place throughout the whole vast Middle Western territory, when the Allies are willing to use the only methods that avail in a modern democracy – namely, the use of public opinion, publicity, and the periodicals, – by granting facilities for information to the representatives of a democracy when they come desiring to know the truth. Constantly, one is met in London and Paris when seeking information on German atrocities, German frightfulness, German methods:

"But surely your people know all that."

How can they know it? Our newspaper men have rarely been permitted access to the facts by the Allies. But to every phase of the war they have been personally conducted by the German General Staff. It has been as much as our liberty was worth, and once or twice almost as much as our life was worth, to endeavor to build up the Pro-Ally case, so constant have been the obstacles placed in our way. Much of the interesting war news, most of the arresting interviews, have come from the German side. The German General Staff has shown an understanding of American psychology, a flexibility in handling public opinion. The best "stories" have often come out of Germany, given to American correspondents. Their public men and their officers, including Generals, have unbent, and stated their case. An American writer, going to Germany, has received every aid in gathering his material. A writer, with the Allies, is constantly harassed. This is a novel experience to any American journalist whose status at home is equal to that of the public and professional men, whose work he makes known and aids. My own belief for the first twenty-two months of work in obtaining information and passing it on to my countrymen was that such effort in their behalf was not desired by France and England, that their officials and public men would be better pleased if we ceased to annoy them. I was thoroughly discouraged by the experience, so slight was the official interest over here in having America know the truth.

This foreign policy, which dickers with the State Department, but neglects the people, is a survival of the Tory tradition. One of the ablest interpreters of that tradition calls such a foreign policy – "the preference for negotiating with governments rather than with peoples." But the foreign policy of the United States is created by public opinion. Negotiation with the State Department leaves the people, who are the creators of policy, cold and neutral, or heated and hostile, because uninformed. If the Allied Governments had released facts to the representatives of American public opinion, our foreign policy of the last two years might have been more firm and enlightened, instead of hesitant and cloudy. As a people we have made no moral contribution to the present struggle, because in part we did not have the fact-basis and the intellectual material on which to work.

If a democracy, like England, is too proud to present its case to a sister democracy, then at that point it is not a democracy. If it gives as excuse (and this is the excuse which officials give) that the military will not tolerate propaganda, then the Allies are more dominated by their military than Germany. Of course the real reason is neither of these. The real reason is that England and France are unaware of the situation in our Middle West.

The Middle West is a hard-working, idealistic, "uncommercialized" body of citizens, who create our national policy. It has some of the best universities in America – places of democratic education, reaching every group of citizen in the State, and profoundly influential on State policy. Such Universities as the State Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan are closely related to the life of their community, whereas Yale University could not carry a local election in New Haven. What the late Professor Sumner (of Yale) thought, was of little weight at the Capitol House at Hartford, Conn. What John R. Commons (Professor at the State University of Wisconsin) thinks, has become State law. The Middle West has put into execution commission government in over 200 of its cities, the first great move in the overthrow of municipal graft. It practices city-planning. Many of its towns are models. Our sane radical movements in the direction of equality are Middle-Western movements. To curse this section as money-grubbing, uninspired, and to praise the Harvard-Boston Brahmins, the Princeton-Philadelphia Tories, and the Yale-New York financial barons, as the hope of our country, is to twist values. Both elements are excellent and necessary. Out of their chemical compounding will come the America of the future. The leaders of the Middle West are Brand Whitlock, Bryan, La Follette, Herbert Quick, Henry Ford, Booth Tarkington, Edward Ross, John R. Commons, William Allen White, The Mayos, Orville Wright. Not all of them are of first-rate mentality. But they are honest, and their mistakes are the mistakes of an idealism unrelated to life as it is. The best of them have a vision for our country that is not faintly perceived by the East. Their political ideal is Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman expressed what they are trying to make of our people. The stories of O. Henry describe this type of new American.