The Project Gutenberg eBook, With the Allies, by Richard Harding Davis

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Title: With the Allies

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Release Date: March 27, 2004 [eBook #11730]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WITH THE ALLIES***

E-text prepared by A. Langley

WITH THE ALLIES

by

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

Preface

I have not seen the letter addressed by President Wilson to the
American people calling upon them to preserve toward this war the
mental attitude of neutrals. But I have seen the war. And I feel sure
had President Wilson seen my war he would not have written his
letter.

This is not a war against Germans, as we know Germans in America,
where they are among our sanest, most industrious, and most
responsible fellow countrymen. It is a war, as Winston Churchill has
pointed out, against the military aristocracy of Germany, men who are
six hundred years behind the times; who, to preserve their class
against democracy, have perverted to the uses of warfare, to the
destruction of life, every invention of modern times. These men are
military mad. To our ideal of representative government their own
idea is as far opposed as is martial law to the free speech of our town
meetings.

One returning from the war is astonished to find how little of the true
horror of it crosses the ocean. That this is so is due partly to the strict
censorship that suppresses the details of the war, and partly to the
fact that the mind is not accustomed to consider misery on a scale so
gigantic. The loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the wrecking of
cities, and the laying waste of half of Europe cannot be brought home
to people who learn of it only through newspapers and moving
pictures and by sticking pins in a map. Were they nearer to it, near
enough to see the women and children fleeing from the shells and to
smell the dead on the battle-fields, there would be no talk of
neutrality.

Such lack of understanding our remoteness from the actual seat of
war explains. But on the part of many Americans one finds another
attitude of mind which is more difficult to explain. It is the cupidity