FOREWORD

BY HON. WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT

Ex-President of the United States

THERE is no part of our people whose opinion on the question of whether we should have a League of Nations, and whether the pending peace treaty should be ratified, ought to have more weight with the Senate of the United States than the four million of boys who were enlisted in the war to defeat Germany. They know why they offered themselves. They know what the national purpose was. They know what their fighting was intended to mean for America and the world. Still more significant is the opinion of the eight hundred thousand of those four millions who were given the place of honor in the trenches and who did the actual fighting. The most sig

nificant of all is the view of the seventy thousand American boys who offered up their lives in the cause, and whose great purpose in making the ultimate sacrifice undoubtedly was to end all wars for the world.

The following pages are the testimony of a witness who was a soldier on the fighting front, with a keen, inquiring, intelligent mind, who speaks with authority as to what our boys intended in this war.

I first heard and met Captain Thomas G. Chamberlain, the author of what follows, on the stage of the Municipal Auditorium in San Francisco. He is a graduate of the University of California where he was a student of political science, and a fellow of his university. His training and study fitted him and induced him to make the inquiries as to the psychology of the American boy soldier, and his varied experience at the front gave him the opportunity. As soon as we heard his first address in San Francisco, we were convinced that we should have his assist ance on the missionary tours of the League

to Enforce Peace in behalf of the Covenant for the League of Nations. We, therefore, invited him to become a colleague on these trips. He has been most active and effective in support of the League ever since.

Captain Chamberlain is a young man of thorough training, of high intelligence, of fine character, a sincere patriot, whose lips have been touched with the gift of eloquence.

I commend the reading of this little book of his.

June 8th, 1919,
Washington, D. C.

WM. H. TAFT.