dying and asked if they had taken him out. They were puzzled as to what I meant, so I began to think a bit, for I found myself in a wooden bed and in a fresh room with only English in, while the room that I went to sleep in had French and Russians as well. So one of the men that was getting better came over to me after the doctor had gone and explained a few things to me. When he told me the date, I asked him if he were trying to pull my leg, but I soon found out that it was all true, so I said I must have had a long sleep. 'Yes,' he said, 'you are very lucky to wake up again, as you have been very bad.'

When I had finished talking to him, I had another sleep, about two hours this time, and I felt a lot better after that. Then he came over to have another talk with me, and he told me this time that my chum Lew was in bed with the typhus; and there he was, fast asleep the same as I had been, and he laid just in front of me. The corporal injected some more stuff into my arm, and he told me that I had plenty of that whilst I was asleep. So the next day I managed to have a drop of soup and I could have done with some more, but they told me too much was not good for me. I then passed the remainder of the day away collecting my senses together and wondering what all the black specks were that were always dancing in front of my eyes. It was the same as if I had a veil in front of me, and it was about two months before they disappeared. The next day I had another drop of soup brought me and there were two nice little bits of meat in it. I thought I would enjoy them, but I had no sooner had two spoonsful of the soup when severe pains came across

my stomach and I could not eat any more, so with a longing look at those two bits of meat I gave it away to the man that came to have a chat with me the day before. After the pains left me I had stomach trouble bad for five days. It then left me as sudden as it came, and it left me very thin too. I do not think I weighed more than five stone. I wanted then to be up and about, so I chanced it out of bed; but I had no sooner got on my feet than down I went between the two beds. I was then lifted back into bed again and told not to get out any more, but I wanted to be out of it; I knew that if I kept lying in bed, my legs would get weaker instead of stronger; so the next day I chanced it again. I took good care this time not to leave hold of the beds, and I managed to hobble alongside of the beds, and I very soon found my feet again with a little practice.

I crawled out of hospital on the first of April. I insisted on going out, as I hated to be in the place. When I got to the compound I was done up. There is a step about six inches high and for the life of me I could not get both my feet up, so a Russian came and lifted me into the room. I was very glad to be down again. It was a good job I had nothing to carry, or else it would have been all up before I had come half way. One of the other men brought my blankets for

me.

There was snow on the ground then, and I just had my two blankets and an empty sack for a bed for nine days before I got any straw to lie on, and there were some men who came out with me were even longer. And there I walked about like a drunken man for weeks, not caring whether I died or lived, I was so weak and weary.

I

WHEN the Great War broke out and Germany's invasion of Belgium made British participation in it inevitable, Englishmen instantly and instinctively looked across the Atlantic for sympathy and understanding. It could not have been otherwise. For us in Great Britain it is impossible to feel or affect indifference to American opinion upon our actions and policies in any part of the globe. American approval is frankly valued. American hostility or criticism is as frankly deplored. Not for nothing have the two great communities, politically separated, preserved the surer bonds of a common tongue, identical ideals and aspirations, and a kindred form of government. They are bound to influence and react upon each other with lightning decisiveness and through a thousand impalpable channels. Their judgment of each other's doings, whether favorable or unfavorable, cannot help having weight. Each nation, at more than one crisis of its history, in more than one phase of its development, has been stimulated by the other's example and support, has been disheartened, checked, or bewildered by the other's disapproval.

There could, therefore, be no question of England's not caring to know what Americans were saying and thinking about the tremendous decision of the British Government two and a half years ago, and all the subsequent events in which Great Britain has played a part. England did care and does care.

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Indifferent as we are, and as every strong, assured, and rather unimaginative people must be, to foreign opinion, we have for many decades got into the habit of making an exception in favor of America. The serene nobility of temper with which the British people gathered itself together to redeem a pledge of honor and to repel the most dastardly assault that has yet been perpetrated upon the fabric of civilization, could not, of course, have been damped down, but it might easily have been chilled and depressed, had we felt that America was against us or alienated from

our cause.

We never felt that. We never had any reason to feel it. Every test which it was possible for us to apply showed the popular sentiment of America to be overwhelmingly on the side of the Allies and ungrudging in its commendation of the course pursued and the spirit displayed by the British Government and people. We saw an America sharing to the full our own passionate indignation over the bloody rape of Belgium, revolted by the atrocities that accompanied it, and appalled by the spectacle of Teutonic power and ruthlessness. We had no need to ask where the American people 'stood.' Their whole history answered the question before there was any need to frame it. We in England simply took it for granted that Americans would have ceased to be Americans if they did not regard Germany's pounce upon Belgium with an almost frenzied detestation, and if they did not recognize that that act of unspeakable

257

treachery had transformed Germany into an enemy of the human race. We could not detect, we could not even imagine, one single ground of sympathy between the people of the United States and the military clique at Potsdam that had precipitated this measureless cataclysm. 'Necessity knows no law' is not a maxim of American statecraft. The violation of treaties and pledges and of the rights of smaller nations is not a proceeding they applaud. It never even occurred to us, that with the record before them, Americans would hesitate for a moment in making up their minds as to who brought on the war and who went to the uttermost limits to avert it; on which side it was a war of conquest and on which a war in defense of civilization. Nor did we even for an instant entertain the preposterous notion that between democratic America and the German ideal of jackbooted force there could be anything other than a fundamental antagonism. Not only, therefore, did we assume that the vast majority of Americans were ranged in hope and sympathy on the side of the Allies, but we dismissed from our minds the thought of any other attitude on their part as utterly incredible.

In this, I think, we were quite right. The average Englishman does not know much about America, but he showed in 1914 that he at least knew enough to scout the idea that America was or could be pro-German. He trusted his instinct, and very soon had proof that the trust was not misplaced. In the opening months of the war the American people justified by their expressions of goodwill all that their friends in Europe had ever claimed for them. To us in England the innumerable demonstrations of American partiality came with a peculiarly bracing effect. They cemented anew that sense of racial kinship of which the Englishman is always con

scious, and to which no doubt he attaches a quite excessive importance, whenever he thinks of England and America together. At a time when half the world was writhing in the agony of a ferocious war, it may have seemed absurd and even sentimental to set so high a value on mere words and feelings. But that is the English way. No Englishman with any vision at all but felt strengthened and encouraged by the reflection that in this ghastly struggle the moral force of American sympathies was by an easy preponderance behind the Allies. That at least was a stimulating fact, and though it has often in the past thirty months seemed to have been obscured, or to have lacked adequate expression, or even to have been partially counterbalanced by other emotions, Englishmen believe it to be a fact still. They find even now a certain comfort in the conviction that America by a huge majority is with them, not because she is pro-French or pro-British, but because she recognizes in a German triumph a menace to her own ideals and her own interests. They do not, however, read into the American attitude any special political significance. They do not expect it to bear fruit in overt and national action. It is simply that they are glad to know that a people whom they persist in regarding as kinsmen are wishing them well and backing them up in a tough struggle.

There has never, that I know of, been any disposition in England to quarrel with or to criticize the official policy of neutrality adopted at Washington. We accepted it as a matter of course that America would be neutral. At the beginning of the war neutrality was the obviously proper and sensible line for the United States to follow. Every one in Great Britain admitted as much. No one expected anything else. There was, it is true, some good

humored surprise when the President attempted to expand national neutrality into a rule of private thought and sentiment; but to neutrality itself, as the policy of the United States Government, nobody took or could take the slightest exception. The war was not an American war; the issues at stake were not specifically American issues; there seemed every reason to hope that the United States could hold honorably aloof from it.

Nor even at this time would any Englishman desire to see America drawn into the war except under the constraint of purely American interests and in order to fulfill her own conception of what her self-respect and her duty as one of the great pillars of democracy demand. Were the United States, of her own initiative, to throw in her lot with the Allies, then, indeed, every Briton would feel that his dearest political wish had been realized in the mere fact of a working coöperation between all the English-speaking peoples; would say - and would be right in saying that now at last the only possible foundations of a lasting peace had been well and truly laid. But that, as every one in Great Britain recognizes, is a matter for Americans to decide in their own way, at their own time, and in the light of exclusively American considerations. From first to last in this war I do not think you will be able to point to a single line in the British press or a single utterance of any British statesman that savored of the impertinence of urging the United States to abandon her neutrality or that tendered any advice whatever on the subject.

If America is satisfied to remain outside, we in England are well content to have her do so. While we most passionately believe that we are fighting for every sound principle of right-dealing between nations, for everything that

makes democracy possible, and for the protection of freedom itself against the assaults of a panoplied absolutism, we do not expect America to go crusading on behalf of these causes unless and until her own national honor or security is involved in their maintenance. We are not quite so foolish as to look for an exhibition of international knighterrantry from the American or any other government. Still less do we stand in any need of either the naval or the military assistance of the United States. The war of European liberty will be won even if America remains neutral to the end. We can, and we shall, save civilization, if we have to, without her. For themselves the Allies want nothing from the United States beyond what their command of the sea. enables them at this moment to receive -arms, food, raw material, equipment of all kinds; and in regard to some at least of these necessaries they will before long be independent of any source of supply but their own.

Many Englishmen have even argued that the belligerent interests of the Allies are better served by American neutrality than they would be by American intervention. That also is a favorite American contention and unquestionably there is a great deal to be said for it. But no Englishman, or none at least of any consequence, has been guilty of attempting to force either that opinion or its opposite upon the attention of the United States. Most emphatically we do not seek and have never sought American intervention; we are perfectly confident that we can dispense with it; at the same time, if it came, as of course it could only come, under the compulsion of American honor and American interests, we in Great Britain would welcome it, not so much for its effect on the present war, as because it would powerfully reinforce the guaranties of future peace.

II

But there are different kinds of neutrality, and I am not going to pretend that the kind adopted by the United States Government has commended itself to British opinion. I suppose that it must always and necessarily be the fate of neutrals to incur the dislike of both sets of belligerents. I suppose, too, that in England, as in every country that is fighting for what it most highly values, we do not see quite straight, have lost something of our sense of proportion, and find it unusually difficult to get away from our own point of view. One must allow for this. One must particularly allow for it in a war that reduces all other wars to the ⚫ dimensions of a street brawl. But after every discount has been made, there is still a large and sober body of British opinion, friendly to the United States by instinct and conviction, that has found American diplomacy during the past two years a hard pill to swallow. It must even be said that disappointment with the figure America has been made to cut throughout the war is most acute precisely among those Englishmen who know America best and are most warmly disposed towards her.

What is it that they feel? They feel, first, that the authentic voice of the American people, whose accents they have caught occasionally in the speeches of private citizens, has hardly once found official expression. They feel, secondly, that the United States Government abdicated something of its old high position when it passed over in silence one of the most nefarious crimes in human history -the savage trampling down of Belgium in the interests of German militarism. How the American people regarded that execrable atrocity we in England knew well enough. But the one voice that could speak for them collectively, as a nation,

as a community that had inherited unique traditions of liberty-loving independence, was silent. Not a word from the President, not a resolution in Congress, not a dispatch from the State Department, has even now placed on the record the judgment of the American nation. Americans by the score and hundred have spoken out in their old free and fearless fashion. But the United States has been dumb.

I imagine that had Mr. Wilson uttered but one sentence of reprobation all Americans to-day would have an easier conscience and would be holding their heads a little stiffer; and I am certain that, had that sentence been spoken, the moral standing of the United States throughout the world would be immeasurably higher than it is. A law of civilization, a main bulwark of international right, had been broken and cast down; and the United States looked on and said nothing. From that false start America has not yet recovered; that lost opportunity she has not yet retrieved; and the shock of her acquiescent silence and inaction still rumbles in the British consciousness like an aching nerve. Whenever Mr. Lansing talks of the sacred rights of neutrals, or the President dilates upon America's championship of humanity and her mission to serve the world, the average Englishman irrepressibly brings these admirable phrases to the test of Belgium; and except in the welcome protest against the deportations, he has never once found that they could stand the test. We never felt that America owed it to the Allies to pass a public and emphatic verdict on Germany's invasion of Belgium. We did feel, and feel acutely, that she owed it supremely to herself.

Remember that we in England take, or used to take, an exalted, possibly even an exaggerated, view of the influence and beneficent potentialities of the United States in the sphere of inter