Out To Win by Coningsby Dawson

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OUT TO WIN

THE STORY OF AMERICA IN FRANCE

BY

CONINGSBY DAWSON

AUTHOR OF "THE GLORY OF THE TRENCHES," "CARRY ON: LETTERS IN WARTIME,"
ETC.

NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
MCMXVIII

Copyright, 1918, BY JOHN LANE COMPANY

Press of J.J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A.

TO

MY AMERICAN FRIENDS AND BROTHERS-IN-ARMS THIS FRANK APPRECIATION OF
THEIR EFFORT IN FRANCE IS DEDICATED

CONTENTS

PAGE

A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY 9

"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS" 29

WAR AS A JOB 61

THE WAR OF COMPASSION 109

THE LAST WAR 196

A PREFACE FOR FOOLS ONLY

I am not writing this preface for the conscious fool, but for his
self-deceived brother who considers himself a very wise person. My
hope is that some persons may recognise themselves and be provided
with food for thought. They will usually be people who have
contributed little to this war, except mean views and endless talk.
Had they shared the sacrifice of it, they would have developed within
themselves the faculty for a wider generosity. The extraordinary thing
about generosity is its eagerness to recognise itself in others.

You find these untravelled critics and mischief-makers on both sides
of the Atlantic. In most cases they have no definite desire to work
harm, but they have inherited cantankerous prejudices which date back
to the American Revolution, and they lack the vision to perceive that
this war, despite its horror and tragedy, is the God-given chance of
centuries to re-unite the great Anglo-Saxon races of the world in
a truer bond of kindness and kinship. If we miss this chance we are
flinging in God's face His splendid recompense for our common heroism.

It is an unfortunate fact that the merely foolish person constitutes
as grave a danger as the deliberate plotter. His words, if they are
acid enough, are quoted and re-quoted. They pass from mouth to mouth,
gaining in authority. By the time they reach the friendly country
at which they are directed, they have taken on the appearance of an
opinion representative of a nation. The Hun is well aware of the value
of gossip for the encouraging of divided counsels among his enemies.
He invents a slander, pins it to some racial grievance, confides it
to the fools among the Allies and leaves them to do the rest. Some
of them wander about in a merely private capacity, nagging without
knowledge, depositing poison, breeding doubts as to integrity, and
all the while pretending to maintain a mildly impartial and judicial
mental attitude. Their souls never rise from the ground. Their
brains are gangrenous with memories of cancelled malice. They suspect
hero-worship; it smacks to them of sentiment. They examine, but
never praise. Being incapable of sacrifice, they find something
meretriciously melodramatic about men and nations who are capable. Had
they lived nineteen hundred years ago, they would have haunted Calvary
to discover fraud.

Then, there are others, by far more dangerous. These make their
appearance daily in the morning press, thrusting their pessimisms
across our breakfast tables, beleaguering our faith with ill-natured
judgements and querulous warnings. One of our London Dailies, for
instance, specializes in annoying America; it works as effectively to
breed distrust as if its policy were dictated from Berlin.

I have just returned from a prolonged tour of America's activities in
France. Wherever I went I heard nothing but unstinted appreciation
of Great Britain's surpassing gallantry: "We never knew that you
Britishers were what you are; you never told us. We had to come over
here to find out." When that had been said I always waited, for I
guessed the qualifying statement that would follow: "There's only
one thing that makes us mad. Why the devil does your censor allow the
P---- to sneer at us every morning? Your army doesn't feel that way
towards us; at least, if it ever did, it doesn't now. Are there really
people in England who--?"

At this point I would cut my questioner short: "There are men so
short-sighted in every country that, to warm their hands, they would
burn the crown of thorns. You have them in America. Such men are not
representative."

The purpose of this book is to tell what America has done, is doing,
and, on the strength of her splendid and accomplished facts, to plead
for a closer friendship between my two countries. As an Englishman who
has lived in the States for ten years and is serving with the
Canadian Forces, I feel that I have a sympathetic understanding of
the affections and aloofnesses of both nations; as a member of both
families I claim the domestic right of indulging in a little plain
speaking to each in turn.

In my appeal I leave the fighting men out of the question. Death is
a universal teacher of charity. At the end of the war the men who
survive will acknowledge no kinship save the kinship of courage. To
have answered the call of duty and to have played the man, will make
a closer bond than having been born of the same mother. At a New York
theatre last October I met some French officers who had fought on the
right of the Canadian Corps frontage at the Somme. We got to talking,
commenced remembering, missed the entire performance and parted as old
friends. In France I stayed with an American-Irish Division. They were
for the most part American citizens in the second generation: few of
them had been to Ireland. As frequently happens, they were more Irish
than the Irish. They had learned from their parents the abuses which
had driven them to emigrate, but had no knowledge of the reciprocal
provocations which had caused the abuses. Consequently, when they
sailed on their troop-ships for France they were anti-British almost
to a man--many of them were theoretically Sinn Feiners. They were
coming to fight for France and for Lafayette, who had helped to lick
Britain--but not for the British. By the time I met them they were
marvellously changed. They were going into the line almost any day
and--this was what had worked the change--they had been trained for
their ordeal by British N.C.O.'s and officers. They had swamped their
hatred and inherited bitterness in admiration. Their highest hope
was that they might do as well as the British. "They're men if you
like," they said. In the imminence of death, their feeling for these
old-timers, who had faced death so often, amounted to hero-worship. It
was good to hear them deriding the caricature of the typical Briton,
which had served in their mental galleries as an exact likeness for
so many years. It was proof to me that men who have endured the same
hell in a common cause will be nearer in spirit, when the war is
ended, than they are to their own civilian populations. For in all
belligerent countries there are two armies fighting--the military
and the civilian; either can let the other down. If the civilian army
loses its _morale_, its vision, its unselfishness, and allows itself
to be out-bluffed by the civilian army of Germany, it as surely
betrays its soldiers as if it joined forces with the Hun. We execute
soldiers for cowardice; it's a pity that the same law does not govern
the civilian army. There would be a rapid revision in the tone of
more than one English and American newspaper. A soldier is shot
for cowardice because his example is contagious. What can be more
contagious than a panic statement or a doubt daily reiterated? Already
there are many of us who have a kindlier feeling and certainly
more respect for a Boche who fights gamely, than for a Britisher
or American who bickers and sulks in comfort. Only one doubt as
to ultimate victory ever assails the Western Front: that it may be
attacked in the rear by the premature peace negotiations of the
civil populations it defends. Should that ever happen, the Western
Front would cease to be a mixture of French, Americans, Canadians,
Australians, British and Belgians; it would become a nation by itself,
pledged to fight on till the ideals for which it set out to fight are
definitely established.

We get rather tired of reading speeches in which civilians presume
that the making of peace is in their hands. The making may be, but the
acceptance is in ours. I do not mean that we love war for war's sake.
We love it rather less than the civilian does. When an honourable
peace has been confirmed, there will be no stauncher pacifist than
the soldier; but we reserve our pacifism till the war is won. We
shall be the last people in Europe to get war-weary. We started with
a vision--the achieving of justice; we shall not grow weary till that
vision has become a reality. When one has faced up to an ultimate
self-denial, giving becomes a habit. One becomes eager to be allowed
to give all--to keep none of life's small change. The fury of an
ideal enfevers us. We become fanatical to outdo our own best record
in self-surrender. Many of us, if we are alive when peace is declared,
will feel an uneasy reproach that perhaps we did not give enough.

This being the spirit of our soldiers, it is easy to understand their
contempt for those civilians who go on strike, prate of weariness,
scream their terror when a few Hun planes sail over London, devote
columns in their papers to pin-prick tragedies of food-shortage, and
cloud the growing generosity between England and America by cavilling
criticisms and mean reflections. Their contempt is not that of the
fighter for the man of peace; but the scorn of the man who is doing
his duty for the shirker.

A Tommy is reading a paper in a muddy trench. Suddenly he scowls,
laughs rather fiercely and calls to his pal, jerking his head as a
sign to him to hurry. "'Ere Bill, listen to wot this 'ere cry-baby
says. 'E thinks we're losin' the bloomin' war 'cause 'e didn't get an
egg for breakfast. Losin' the war! A lot 'e knows abart it. A blinkin'
lot 'e's done either to win or lose it. Yus, I don't think! Thank
Gawd, we've none of 'is sort up front."

To men who have gazed for months with the eyes of visionaries on
sudden death, it comes as a shock to discover that back there, where
life is so sweetly certain, fear still strides unabashed. They had
thought that fear was dead--stifled by heroism. They had believed that
personal littleness had given way before the magnanimity of martyrdom.

In this plea, then, for a firmer Anglo-American friendship I address
the civilian populations of both countries. The fate of such a
friendship is in their hands. In the Eden of national destinies God
is walking; yet there are those who bray their ancient grievances so
loudly that they all but drown the sound of His footsteps.

Being an Englishman it will be more courteous to commence with the
fools of my own flesh and blood. Let me paint a contrast.

Last October I sailed back from New York with a company of American
officers; they consisted in the main of trained airmen, Navy experts
and engineers. Before my departure the extraordinary sternness of
America, her keenness to rival her allies in self-denial, her willing
mobilisation of all her resources, had confirmed my optimism gained in
the trenches, that the Allies must win; the mere thought of compromise
was impossible and blasphemous. This optimism was enhanced on the
voyage by the conduct of the officers who were my companions. They
carried their spirit of dedication to an excess that was almost
irksome. They refused to play cards. They were determined not
to relax. Every minute they could snatch was spent in studying
text-books. Their country had come into the war so late that they
resented any moment lost from making themselves proficient. When
expostulated with they explained themselves by saying, "When we've
done our bit it will be time to amuse ourselves." They were dull
company, but, in a time of war, inspiring. All their talk was of when
they reached England. Their enthusiasm for the Britisher was such
that they expected to be swept into a rarer atmosphere by the closer
contact with heroism.

We had an Englishman with us--obviously a consumptive. He typified for
them the doggedness of British pluck. He had been through the entire
song and dance of the Mexican Revolution; a dozen times he had been
lined up against a wall to be shot. From Mexico he had escaped to New
York, hoping to be accepted by the British military authorities. Not
unnaturally he had been rejected. The purpose of his voyage to the Old
Country was to try his luck with the Navy. He held his certificate as
a highly qualified marine engineer. No one could persuade him that
he was not wanted. "I could last six months," he said, "it would be
something. Heaps of chaps don't last as long."

This man, a crock in every sense, hurrying back to help his country,
symbolised for every American aboard the unconquerable courage of
Great Britain. If you hadn't the full measure of years to give, give
what was left, even though it were but six months. I may add that
in England his services were accepted. His persistence refused to be
disregarded. When red-tape stopped his progress, he used back-stairs
strategy. No one could bar him from his chance of serving.

In believing that he represented the Empire at its best, my Americans
were not mistaken. There are thousands fighting to-day who share his
example. One is an ex-champion sculler of Oxford; even in those days
he was blind as a bat. His subsequent performance is consistent with
his record; we always knew that he had guts. At the start of the war,
he tried to enlist and was turned down on the score of eyesight. He
tried four times with no better result. The fifth time he presented
himself he was fool-proof; he had learnt the eyesight tests by heart.
He went out a year ago as a "one pip artist"--a second lieutenant.
Within ten months he had become a captain and was acting
lieutenant-colonel of his battalion, all the other officers having
been killed or wounded. At Cambrai he did such gallant work that he
was personally congratulated by the general of his division. These
American officers had heard such stories; they regarded England with a
kind of worship. As men who hoped to be brave but were untested, they
found something mystic and well-nigh incredible in such utter courage.
The consumptive racing across the Atlantic that he might do something
for England before death took him, made this spirit real to them.

We travelled to London as a party and there for a time we held
together. The night before several set out for France, we had a
farewell gathering. The consumptive, who had just obtained his
commission, was in particularly high feather; he brought with him a
friend, a civilian official in the Foreign Office. Please picture the
group: all men who had come from distant parts of the world to do one
job; men in the army, navy, and flying service; every one in uniform
except the stranger.

Talk developed along the line of our absolute certainty as to complete
and final victory. The civilian stranger commenced to raise his voice
in dissent. We disputed his statements. He then set to work to run
through the entire argument of pessimism: America was too far away to
be effective; Russia was collapsing; France was exhausted; England had
reached the zenith of her endeavour; Italy was not united in purpose.
On every front he saw a black cloud rising and took a dyspeptic's
delight in describing it as a little blacker than he saw it. There was
an apostolic zeal about the man's dreary earnestness. He spoke with
that air of authority which is not uncommon with civilian Government
officials. The Americans stared rather than listened; this was not
the mystic and utter courage which they had expected to find well-nigh
incredible. Their own passion far out-topped it.

The argument reached a sudden climax. There were wounded officers
present. One of them said, "You wouldn't speak that way if you had the
foggiest conception of the kind of chaps we have in the trenches."

"It makes no difference what kind they are," the pessimist replied
intolerantly. "I'm asking you to face facts. Because you've succeeded
in an attack, you soldiers seem to think that the war is ended. You
base your arguments all the time on your little local knowledge of
your own particular front."

The discussion ceased abruptly. Every one sprang up. Voices strove
together in advising this "facer of facts" to get into khaki and
to go to where he could obtain precisely the same kind of little
local knowledge--perhaps, a few wounds as well. His presence was
dishonourable--contaminating. We filed out and left him sitting humped
in a chair, looking puzzled and pathetic, murmuring, "But I thought I
was among friends."

My last clear-cut recollection is of a chubby young American
Naval Airman standing over him, with clenched fists, passionately
instructing him in the spiritual geography of America. That's one
type of fool; the type who specialises in catastrophe; the type who in
eternally facing up to facts, takes no account of that magic quality,
courage, which can make one man more terrible than an army; the type
who is so profoundly well-informed, about externals, that he ignores
the mightiness of soul that can remould externals to spiritual
purposes. Were I a German, the spectacle of that solitary consumptive
leaving the climate which meant life to him and hastening home to give
just six months of service to his country, would be more menacing than
the loss of an entire corps frontage.

And there's the type who can't forget; he suffers from a fundamental
lack of generosity. The Englishman of this type can't refrain from
quoting such phrases as, "Too proud to fight," whenever opportunity
offers. His American counterpart insists that he is not fighting for
Great Britain, but for the French. He makes himself offensive by
silly talk about sister republics, implying that all other forms of
Government are essentially tyrannic. He never loses an opportunity
to mention Lafayette, assuming that one French man is worth ten
Britishers. A very gross falsehood is frequently on the lips of this
sort of man; he doesn't know where he picked it up and has never
troubled to test its accuracy. I can tell him where it originated; at
Berlin in the bureau for Hun propaganda. Every time he utters it he is
helping the enemy. This falsehood is to the effect that Great Britain
has conserved her man-power; that in the early days she let Frenchmen
do the fighting and that now she is marking time till Americans are
ready to die in her stead. This statement is so stupendously untrue
that it goes unheeded by those who know the empty homes of England or
have witnessed the gallantry of our piled-up dead.

Then there's the jealous fool--the fool who in England will see no
reason why this book should have been published. His line of argument
will be, "We've been in this war for more than three years. We've done
everything that America is doing; because she's new to the game, we're
doing it much better. We don't want any one to appreciate us, so why
go praising her?" Precisely. Why be decent? Why seek out affections?
Why be polite or kindly? Why not be automatons? I suppose the answer
is, "Because we happen to be men, and are privileged temporarily to be
playing in the role of heroes. The heroic spirit rather educates one
to hold out the hand of friendship to new arrivals of the same sort."

There is one type of fool, exclusively American, whose stupidity
arises from love and tenderness. Very often she is a woman. She
has been responsible for the arrival in France of a number of
narrow-minded and well-intentioned persons; their errand is to
investigate vice-conditions in the U.S. Army. This suspicion of the
women at home concerning the conduct of their men in the field, is
directly traceable to reports of the debasing influences of war set in
circulation by the anti-militarists. I want to say emphatically that
cleaner, more earnest, better protected troops than those from the
United States are not to be found in Europe. Both in Great Britain and
on the Continent their puritanism has created a deep impression. By
their idealism they have made their power felt; they are men with a
vision in their eyes, who have travelled three thousand miles to keep
a rendezvous with death. That those for whom they are prepared to die
should suspect them is a degrading disloyalty. That trackers should
be sent after them from home to pick up clues to their unworthiness
is sheerly damnable. To disparage the heroism of other nations is
bad enough; to distrust the heroes of your own flesh and blood,
attributing to them lower than civilian moral standards, is to be
guilty of the meanest treachery and ingratitude.

Here, then, are some of the sample fools to whom this preface is
addressed. The list could be indefinitely lengthened. "The fool hath
said in his heart, 'There is no God'." He says it in many ways and
takes a long while in saying it; but the denying of God is usually the
beginning and the end of his conversation. He denies the vision of
God in his fellow-men and fellow-nations, even when the spikes of the
cross are visibly tearing wounds in their feet and hands.

Life has swung back to a primitive decision since the war commenced.
The decision is the same for both men and nations. They can choose the
world or achieve their own souls. They can cast mercenary lots for
the raiment of a crucified righteousness or take up their martyrdom
as disciples. Those men and nations who have been disciples together
can scarcely fail to remain friends when the tragedy is ended. What
the fool says in his heart at this present is not of any lasting
importance. There will always be those who mock, offering vinegar in
the hour of agony and taunting, "If thou be what thou sayest...." But
in the comradeship of the twilit walk to Emmaus neither the fool nor
the mocker are remembered.

OUT TO WIN

I

"WE'VE GOT FOUR YEARS"

The American Troops have set words to one of their bugle calls. These
words are indicative of their spirit--of the calculated determination
with which they have faced up to their adventure: an adventure
unparalleled for magnitude in the history of their nation.

They fall in in two ranks. They tell off from the right in fours.
"Move to the right in fours. Quick March," comes the order. The
bugles strike up. The men swing into column formation, heads erect
and picking up the step. To the song of the bugles they chant words as
they march. "We've got four years to do this job. We've got four years
to do this job."

That is the spirit of America. Her soldiers give her four years, but
to judge from the scale of her preparations she might be planning for
thirty.

America is out to win. I write this opening sentence in Paris where I
am temporarily absent from my battery, that I may record the story of
America's efforts in France. My purpose is to prove with facts that
America is in the war to her last dollar, her last man, and for just
as long as Germany remains unrepentant. Her strength is unexpended,
her spirit is un-war-weary. She has a greater efficient man-power
for her population than any nation that has yet entered the arena
of hostilities. Her resources are continental rather than national;
it is as though a new and undivided Europe had sprung to arms in
moral horror against Germany. She has this to add fierceness to her
soul--the reproach that she came in too late. That reproach is being
wiped out rapidly by the scarlet of self-imposed sacrifice. She did
come in late--for that very reason she will be the last of Germany's
adversaries to withdraw.

She did not want to come in at all. Many of her hundred million
population emigrated to her shores out of hatred of militarism and to
escape from just such a hell as is now raging in Europe. At first it
seemed a far cry from Flanders to San Francisco. Philanthropy could
stretch that far, but not the risking of human lives. Moreover, the
American nation is not racially a unit; it is bound together by
its ideal quest for peaceful and democratic institutions. It was a
difficult task for any government to convince so remote a people that
their destiny was being made molten in the furnace of the Western
Front; when once that truth was fully apprehended the diverse souls
of America leapt up as one soul and declared for war. In so doing the
people of the United States forewent the freedom from fear that they
had gained by their journey across the Atlantic; they turned back in
their tracks to smite again with renewed strength and redoubled hate
the old brutal Fee-Fo-Fum of despotism, from whose clutches they
thought they had escaped.

America's is the case of The Terrible Meek; for two and a half years
she lulled Germany and astonished the Allies by her abnormal patience.
The most terrifying warriors of history have been peace-loving nations
hounded into hostility by outraged ideals. Certainly no nation was
ever more peace-loving than the American. To the boy of the Middle
West the fury of kings must have read like a fairy-tale. The appeal to
armed force was a method of compelling righteousness which his entire
training had taught him to view with contempt as obsolete. Yet never
has any nation mobilised its resources more efficiently, on so titanic
a scale, in so brief a space of time to re-establish justice with
armed force. The outraged ideal which achieved this miracle was the
denial by the Hun of the right of every man to personal liberty and
happiness.

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