One by one, and in little protesting bands, the friends of the Allies slipped overseas bound on self-imposed, sacrificial quests.  They went like knight-errants to the rescue; while others suffered, their own ease was intolerable.  The women, whom they left, formed themselves into groups for the manufacture of the munitions of mercy.  There were men like Alan Seeger, who chanced to be in Europe when war broke out; many of these joined up with the nearest fighting units.  “I have a rendezvous with death,” were Alan Seeger’s last words as he fell mortally wounded between the French and German trenches.  His voice was the voice of thousands who had pledged themselves to keep that rendezvous in the company of Britishers, Belgians and Frenchmen, long before their country had dreamt of committing herself.  Some of these friends of the Allies chose the Ford Ambulance, others positions in the Commission for the Relief of Belgium, and yet others the more forceful sympathy of the bayonet as a means of expressing their wrath.  Soon, through the heart of France, with the tricolor and the Stars and Stripes flying at either end, “le train Americaine” was seen hurrying, carrying its scarlet burden.  This sight could hardly be called neutral unless a similar sight could be seen in Germany.  It could not.  The Commission for the Relief of Belgium was actually anything but neutral; to minister to the results of brutality is tacitly to condemn.

At Neuilly-sur-Seine the American Ambulance Hospital sprang up.  It undertook the most grievous cases, making a specialty of facial mutilations.  American girls performed the nursing of these pitiful human wrecks.  Increasingly the crusader spirit was finding a gallant response in the hearts of America’s girlhood.  By the time that President Wilson flung his challenge, eighty-six war relief organizations were operating in France.  In very many cases these organizations only represented a hundredth part of the actual personnel working; the other ninety-nine hundredths were in the States, rolling bandages, shredding oakum, slitting linen, making dressings.  Long before April, 1917, American college boys had won a name by their devotion in forcing their ambulances over shell torn roads on every part of the French Front, but, perhaps, with peculiar heroism at Verdun.  Already the American Flying Squadron has earned a veteran’s reputation for its daring.  The report of the sacrificial courage of these pioneers had travelled to every State in the Union; their example had stirred, shamed and educated the nation.  It is to these knight-errants—­very many of them boys and girls in years—­to the Mrs. Whartons, the Alan Seegers, the Hoovers and the Thaws that I attribute America’s eager acceptance of Calvary, when at last it was offered to her by her Statesmen.  From an anguished horror to be repelled, war had become a spiritual Eldorado in whose heart lay hidden the treasure-trove of national honor.

The individual American soldier is inspired by just as altruistic motives as his brother-Britisher.  Compassion, indignation, love of justice, the determination to see right conquer are his incentives.  You can make a man a conscript, drill him, dress him in uniform, but you cannot force him to face up to four years to do his job unless the ideals were there beforehand.  I have seen American troop-ships come into the dock with ten thousand men singing,