But so does the American, and he knows the game from more points of view.  For years he has patterned his schools and colleges on German educational methods.  What applies to his civilian centres of learning applies to his military as well.  German text-books gave the basis for all American military thought.  American officers have been trained in German strategy just as thoroughly as if they had lived in Potsdam.  At the start of the war many of them were in the field with the German armies as observers.  They are able to synchronise their thoughts with the thoughts of their German enemies and at the same time to take advantage of all that the Allies can teach them.

“War is a business,” the Germans have said.  The Americans, with an ideal shining in their eyes, have replied, “Very well.  We didn’t want to fight you; but now that you have forced us, we will fight you on your own terms.  We will make war on you as a business, for we are businessmen.  We will crush you coldly, dispassionately, without rancour, without mercy till we have proved to you that war is not profitable business, but hell.”

The American, as I have met him in France, has not changed one iota from the man that he was in New York or Chicago.  He has transplanted himself untheatrically to the scenes of battlefields and set himself undisturbedly to the task of dying.  There is an amazing normality about him.  You find him in towns, ancient with chateaux and wonderful with age; he is absolutely himself, keenly efficient and irreverently modern.  Everywhere, from the Bay of Biscay to the Swiss border, from the Mediterranean to the English Channel, you see the lean figure and the slouch hat of the U.S.A. soldier.  He is invariably well-conducted, almost always alone and usually gravely absorbed in himself.  The excessive gravity of the American in khaki has astonished the men of the other armies who feel that, life being uncertain, it is well to make as genial a use of it as possible while it lasts.  The soldier from the U.S.A. seems to stand always restless, alert, alone, listening—­waiting for the call to come.  He doesn’t sink into the landscape the way other troops have done.  His impatience picks him out—­the impatience of a man in France solely for one purpose.  I have seen him thus a thousand times, standing at street-corners, in the crowd but not of it, remarkable to every one but himself.  Every man and officer I have spoken to has just one thing to say about what is happening inside him, “Let them take off my khaki and send me back to America, or else hurry me into the trenches.  I came here to get started on this job; the waiting makes me tired.”

“Let me get into the trenches,” that was the cry of the American soldier that I heard on every hand.  Having witnessed his eagerness, cleanness and intensity, I ask no more questions as to how he will acquit himself.