grafter and poltroon, battening upon the world's woe and cursed from every side. . . . On the whole, she thought, Europe was best left to the God that watches over the afflicted and cares for drunken men in the murderous traffic of city streets.

...

Then lust of cruelty, America feared, was a very real passion. Witness the Turk with his victims-say at Trebizond on the Black Sea, where a whole nation was to be destroyed. They were taken out in shiploads and scuttled in a wholesale way. . . . Cruelty! The child with a worm, the boy with a wounded bird-what flower of evil blossomed here in dark abysses of our nature? It was no sacred flame that moved the white hunter in Uganda and made him drop the elephant-gun for a Service rifle and the greatest game of all, which was the killing of men. Why, the very curates "had to be held down," as the Bishop of London announces. "I should like to get back quick," Charles Lister wrote from Gallipoli. "I've seen just enough to tantalize. . . . And there's no sound like the scream of enemy shrapnel through the sky." Or hear another paladin-young Julian Grenfell, "when the burning moment breaks"

"And all things else are out of mind

And only Joy-of-Battle takes

Him by the throat, and makes him blind."

Such is the lure of war. This fever was not infectious in the United States, though sporadic cases were to be found: I mean American volunteers in the French and Canadian Armies. "It is well that war is so terrible," mused Lee, the Confederate leader; "otherwise we'd grow too fond of it." Washington himself could revel in the bullet's song "There is something charming in the sound!" It is an acquired taste which present-day America had thought outgrown in a more enlightened age.

She tried to understand it-to say of modern war what Shelley said of the Medusa's head: "Its beauty and its horror are divine." But only the horror emerged. Messrs. Swing and Swope, America's privileged correspondents, wrote of trench scenes discreetly glozed over by their European rivals. The dry-land drowning of the gassed Canadians, for example. The wild-beast rattle of their end; their purple faces and starting eyes with blood and tissue welling from dying mouths in torment that broke down the veteran nurse and surgeon. Here was Science enlisted in the war; it was the wraith of Science that hovered at sundown over the gas-graveyard of Poperinghe.

There came a time when America yawned over the war. News from the Great Ditch became drab and samely. So did cries from the sea where ships were shattered and the crews took to leaky boats amid German jeers. There was no longer a public for wolfish fights between the wounded and the dying out there in No Man's Land. Nor for the suicide of crazed men who exposed themselves deliberately on the parapet "to get it over." Haggard scenes in the dug-out hospital ceased to fascinate the American reader, with sweating surgeons cutting and hacking amid eerie screams or the cigarette-smoke of resignation from rows of stretchers on the floor.

There were ghouls that robbed the dead, it seems. There was a crash and din of shells that robbed the living of their reason, so that they bombed or shot the pals at their side until these in turn destroyed them, as they might the swarming vermin of the trench. There were few horrors left in the inkwell when the American reporter was done, so adept was he in sounding the horrid crannies of our nature.

Custom can (and does) brass us all with ease. The widow's tears are quickly dried; her mourning passes from harsh crêpe to dull decorous silks and serge, to shine

at last in pearl and gold. It is the way of the world; it was America's way when she knew the worst of war that her Swings and Swopes could tell her. And then, like Tommy in the trench, she developed a talent for forgetting. From over the water I caught the carol of Prosperity; it was care-free as a dug-out serenade:

"The Bells of Hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me."

The stupidity of war became a fluent theme when the horror of it no longer made the American cables burn. "Who's going to profit?" was a query that rose from President and car-conductor. "The Cause," they were told, was in every case "My Country." O the consecrated curse that put the State before humanity and made of each nation's flag a shroud that meant more than diadem and robe to those damn-fool patriots! So this was the lay-religion of the Old World? It put America in mind of a noble fane reared in a pagan land; the light of it streaming vainly, like a lamp in a sepulchre.

"When shall I do a decent day's work?" asked the pruner of vines of a New York reporter on the Marne. When would his mother do a decent day's work?-that patient soul in lace cap and clogs. She was now stamping steel and filling endless shell-maws out of dread alembicssticky stuff brewed pour les Boches by the learned Turpin, and tried upon silly sheep in waste places of the Saône. America mourned with the peasants of France, who saw the very earth defiled by stinking warrens in zigzag rowsthousands of miles of them, with deep galleries here and there in which half a division could assemble and defy the guns. Then there were enormous craters and shell-pits in which you could hide a house. The patient fields were turned inside out; the vineyard churned to chalk by ceaseless drum-fire, and little homes ground to dust

and rubble under the leprous moons of war. . . . Look! There was the white-haired curé trying to trace where his village street had been.

"We must send over implements," America said in her cheery way. "We'll ship you a lot of frame houses. We'll renew your farm-stock, too-we'll send you seeds and pigs and poultry." It was no use. The top-soil of the Somme was swept away. Just as it was an army's job to make them, so it would be an army's job to level these lunar landscapes, scooped out as they were and heaped up like a frozen sea. They might grow forest seedlings-beech, and the like. But God help the cultivator who tried to wring a living from vengeful hectares in les régions actuellement liberées de l'ennemi—say, in the Oise, the Meuse, the Vosges, or Meurthe-et-Moselle.

This slaughter of the soil was a phase that shocked America in a new way. It was abhorrent to every instinct of the United States, now thrilling with regret that she had any art or part or profit in this crazy surge—that her Texan cotton, kneaded and nitrated, should fill the war-head of German torpedoes. Why, in her own waters half a dozen ships were smashed on the Lord's day, and terrified souls cast upon stormy waters sixty miles from land!

Then American steel-fine stuff for rails and bridgeswas being frittered in gun-tubes and armour plates. A British artist (in khaki, of course) was cutting new masks and faces for the hideously maimed out of Arizona and Montana copper. America's wheat and meat were too often snatched from starving Poland and Syria to feed the poison-gas fiend and peeping assassins of the Turkish trench. America was abased at her own trade, haunted by dim eyes of women that outwept the clouds with anguish. Who could grasp the totality of it in this wartime world? Here is Emma Wilkins, the white-haired

1

widow, who begins life over again as a cook in far-off Winnipeg. Her husband fell at Modder River, in the Boer War. Six times in succession had the British War Office wired to this woman to say that a son was killed. To these add three stepsons and a brother-in-law, as well as a sister who "became a raving maniac before my eyes when she heard her husband was lost in the Jutland fight."

Acres of print were published in the United States about the twin arts of killing and curing until America was stultified with a sense of crime. She lost interest in those surgical miracles: how bone was taken from the rabbit and grafted on the pet of the hospital ward; how blood was transfused, and the calf robbed of nerves for the sake of the V.C. bomber, or the palsied lad who had ripped up a dozen Huns in a minute's "haymaking" with the bayonet. Such wonders grew more than stale. So did pictures of the Hughes balance; the electro-magnet and the microphone for locating steel fragments in the living tissue.

Against these America set the German flame-projector that burns men alive as they face the foe. How perverse, when all was said and done; how revolting to men of sense was this endless game of hurt and healing! Here was Dr. Barthe de Sandfort who made a sound job of the flayed poilu-"barely recognizable as a human being" when brought in for the ambrine treatment to the famous hospital at Issy-les-Moulineaux. America had no enthusiasm for this wanton mending. Nor had she any pride in her own undoubted skill in the production of artificial limbs. It was an added reproach, indeed, being primarily the result of her own industrial speed-up, whose casualties vied with those of Verdun and the Somme.

You will gather from my Foreword that America was an unmilitary Power, with a policy diametrically opposed