exclamation, “No, indeed!” I knew something about England’s friendly acts, about Venezuela, and Manila Bay, and Edmund Burke, and John Bright, and the Queen, and the Lancashire cotton spinners. And more than this historic knowledge, I knew living English people, men and women, among whom I counted dear and even beloved friends. I knew also, just as well as Admiral Mahan knew, and other Americans by the hundreds of thousands have known and know at this moment, that all the best we have and are—law, ethics, love of liberty—
all of it came from England, grew in England first, ripened from the seed of which we are merely one great harvest, planted here by England. And yet I instantly exclaimed, “No, indeed! “
Well, having been inflicted with the anti-English complex myself, I understand it all the better in others, and am begging them to counteract it as I have done. You will recollect that I said at the outset of these observations that, as I saw it, our prejudice was founded upon three causes fairly separate, although they often melted together. With two of these causes I have now dealt—the school histories, and certain acts and policies of England’s throughout our relations with her. The third cause, I said, was certain traits of the English and ourselves which have produced personal friction. An American does or says something which angers an Englishman, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying, “Those insufferable Yankees!” An Englishman does or says something which angers an American, who thereupon goes about thinking and saying, “To Hell with England!” Each makes the well-nigh universal—but none the less perfectly ridiculous—blunder of damning a whole people because one of them has rubbed him the wrong way. Nothing could show up more forcibly and vividly this human weakness for generalizing from insufficient data, than the incident in London streets which I promised to tell you in full when we should reach the time for it. The time is now.
In a hospital at no great distance from San Francisco, a wounded American soldier said to one who sat beside him, that never would he go to Europe to fight anybody again—except the English. Them he would like to fight; and to the astonished visitor he told his reason. He, it appeared, was one of our Americans who marched through London streets on that day when the eyes of London looked for the first time upon the Yankees at last arrived to bear a hand to England and her Allies. From the mob came a certain taunt: “You silly ass.”
It was, as you will observe, an unflattering interpretation of our national initials, U. S. A. Of course it was enough to make a proper American doughboy entirely “hot under the collar.” To this reading of our national initials our national readiness retorted in kind at an early date: A. E. F. meant After England Failed. But why, months and months afterwards, when everything was over, did that foolish doughboy in the hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It was the act of an unthinking few. Didn’t he notice what the rest of London was doing that day? Didn’t he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
Couldn’t he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She’s a person who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even have ultimately struck him that here we came, late, very late, indeed, only just in time, from a country untouched, unafflicted, unbombed, safe, because of England’s ships, to tired, broken, bleeding England; and that the sight of us, so jaunty, so fresh, so innocent of suffering and bereavement, should have been for a thoughtless moment galling to unthinking brains?
I am perfectly sure that if such considerations as these were laid before any American soldier who still smarted under that taunt in London streets, his good American sense, which is our best possession, would grasp and accept the thing in its true proportions. He wouldn’t want to blot an Empire out because a handful of muckers called him names. Of this I am perfectly sure, because in Paris streets it was my happy lot four months after the Armistice to talk with many American soldiers, among whom some felt sore about the French. Not one of these but saw with his good American sense, directly I pointed certain facts out to him, that his hostile generalization had been unjust. But, to quote the oft-quoted Mr. Kipling, that is another story.
An American regiment just arrived in France was encamped for purposes of training and experience next a British regiment come back from the front to rest. The streets of the two camps were adjacent, and the Tommies walked out to watch the Yankees pegging down their tents.
“Aw,” they said, “wot a shyme you’ve brought nobody along to tuck you in.”
They made other similar remarks; commented unfavorably upon the alignment; “You were a bit late in coming,” they said. Of course our boys had answers, and to these the Tommies had further answers, and this encounter of wits very naturally led to a result which could not possibly have been happier. I don’t know what the Tommies expected the Yankees to do. I suppose they were as ignorant of our nature as we of theirs, and that they entertained preconceived notions. They suddenly found that we were, once again to quote Mr. Kipling, “bachelors in barricks most remarkable like” themselves. An American first sergeant hit a British first sergeant. Instantly a thousand men were milling. For thirty minutes they kept at it. Warriors reeled together and fell and rose and got it in the neck and the jaw and the eye and the nose—and all the while the British and American officers, splendidly discreet, saw none of it.
British soldiers were carried back to their streets, still fighting, bunged Yankees staggered everywhere—but not an officer saw any of it.
Black eyes the next day, and other tokens, very plainly showed who had been at this party. Thereafter a much better feeling prevailed between Tommies and Yanks.
A more peaceful contact produced excellent consequences at an encampment of Americans in England. The Americans had brought over an idea, apparently, that the English were “easy.” They tried it on in sundry ways, but ended by the discovery that, while engaged upon this enterprise, they had been in sundry ways quite completely “done”
themselves. This gave them a respect for their English cousins which they had never felt before.
Here is another tale, similar in moral. This occurred at Brest, in France. In the Y hut sat an English lady, one of the hostesses. To her came a young American marine with whom she already had some acquaintance.
This led him to ask for her advice. He said to her that as his permission was of only seventy-two hours, he wanted to be as economical of his time as he could and see everything best worth while for him to see during his leave. Would she, therefore, tell him what things in Paris were the most interesting and in what order he had best take them? She replied with another suggestion; why not, she said, ask for permission for England?
This would give him two weeks instead of seventy-two hours. At this he burst out violently that he would not set foot in England; that he never wanted to have anything to do with England or with the English: “Why, I am a marine!” he exclaimed, “and we marines would sooner knock down any English sailor than speak to him.”
The English lady, naturally, did not then tell him her nationality. She now realized that he had supposed her to be American, because she had frequently been in America and had talked to him as no stranger to the country could. She, of course, did not urge his going to England; she advised him what to see in France. He took his leave of seventy-two hours and when he returned was very grateful for the advice she had given him.
