VII THE TANKS IN ACTION 348

XXVIII CANADA IS QUICK 360

XXIX THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES 374

XXX FIVE GENERALS AND VERDUN 385

XXXI _Au Revoir_, SOMME! 400

MY SECOND YEAR OF THE WAR

I

BACK TO THE FRONT

How America fails to realize the war--Difficulties of
realization--Uncle Sam is sound at heart--In London again--A Chief of
Staff who has risen from the ranks--Sir William Robertson takes time
to think--At the front--Kitchener's mob the new army--A quiet
headquarters--Sir Douglas Haig--His office a clearing house of
ideas--His business to deal in blows--"The Spirit that quickeneth."

"I've never kept up my interest so long in anything as in this war,"
said a woman who sat beside me at dinner when I was home from the front
in the winter of 1915-16. Since then I have wondered if my reply,
"Admirable mental concentration!" was not ironic at the expense of
manners and philosophy. In view of the thousands who were dying in
battle every day, her remark seemed as heartless as it was superficial
and in keeping with the riotous joy of living and prosperity which
strikes every returned American with its contrast to Europe's
self-denial, emphasized by such details gained by glimpses in the shop
windows of Fifth Avenue as the exhibit of a pair of ladies' silk hose
inset with lace, price one hundred dollars.

Meanwhile, she was knitting socks or mufflers, I forget which, for the
Allies. Her confusion about war news was common to the whole country,
which heard the special pleading of both sides without any
cross-questioning by an attorney. She remarked how the Allies' bulletins
said that the Allies were winning and the German bulletins that the
Germans were winning; but so far as she could see on the map the armies
remained in much the same positions and the wholesale killing continued.
Her interest, I learned on further inquiry, was limited and partisan.
When the Germans had won a victory, she refused to read about it and
threw down her paper in disgust.

There was something human in her attitude, as human as the war itself.
It was a reminder of how far away from the Mississippi is the Somme; how
broad is the Atlantic; how impossible it is to project yourself into the
distance even in the days of the wireless. She was moving in the orbit
of her affairs, with its limitations, ju