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