o the petty backbiting by the mischievous uninformed
which makes bad blood between peoples.

I knew, too, from experience, as I had kept repeating at home, that when
the chosen time arrived for the British to strike, they would prove with
deeds the shamelessness of this splash of printer's ink and confound, as
they have on the Somme, the witticism of a celebrated Frenchman who has
since made his apology for saying that the British would fight on till
the last drop of French blood was shed. Besides, on the same day that I
saw the poster I saw in a British publication a reproduction of a German
cartoon--exemplifying the same kind of vulgar facility--picturing Uncle
Sam being led by the nose by John Bull.

Thinking Englishmen and Frenchmen, when they pause in their
preoccupation of giving life and fortune for their cause to consider
this extraneous subject, realize the widespread sympathy of the United
States for the Allied cause and how a large proportion of our people
were prepared to go to war after the sinking of the _Lusitania_ for an
object which could bring them no territorial reward. If we will fight
only for money and aggrandizement, as the "Uncle Sham" style of
reasoners hold, we should long ago have taken Mexico and Central
America. Personally, I have never had anyone say to me that I was "too
proud to fight," though if I went about saying that I was ashamed of my
country I might; for when I think of my country I think of no group of
politicians, financiers, or propagandists, no bureaucracy or particular
section of opinion, but of our people as a whole. But unquestionably we
were unpopular with the masses of Europeans. A sentence taken out of its
context was misconstrued into a catch-phrase indicating the cravenness
of a nation wedded to its flesh-pots, which pretended a moral
superiority to others whose passionate sacrifice made them
supersensitive when they looked across the Atlantic to the United
States, which they saw profiting from others' misfortunes.

By living at home I had gained perspective about the war and by living
with the war I have gained perspective about my own country. At the
front I was concerned day after day with the winning of trenches and the
storming of villages whose names meant as little in the Middle West as a
bitter fight for good government in a Western city meant to the men at
the front. After some months of peace upon my return to England I
resented passport regulations which ha