the equivalent of an American division, fighting with the Allied Armies
in France, who have used every honest device to get there? They have
come in by every channel, and under every pretext--wavelets, forerunners
of the tide. For now, you too have to improvise great armies, as we
improvised ours in the first two years of war. And with you as with us,
your unpreparedness stands as your warrant before history, that not from
American minds and wills came the provocation to this war.

But your actual and realised co-operation sets me on lines of thought
that distract me, for the moment, from the first plan of this letter.
The special Musketry School with which I had meant to open it, must wait
till its close. I find my mind full instead--in connection with the news
from Washington--of those recently issued War Office pamphlets of which
I spoke in my last letter; and I propose to run through their story.
These pamphlets, issued not for publication but for the information of
those concerned, are the first frank record of _our national experience_
in connection with the war; and for all your wonderful American resource
and inventiveness, your American energy and wealth, you will certainly,
as prudent men, make full use of our experience in the coming months.

Last year, for _England's Effort_, I tried vainly to collect some of
these very facts and figures, which the War Office was still
jealously--'and no doubt quite rightly--withholding. Now at last they
are available, told by "authority," and one can hardly doubt that each
of these passing days will give them--for America a double significance.
Surpass the story, if you can; we shall bear you no grudge! But up till
now, it remains a chapter unique in the history of war. Many Americans,
as your original letter to me pointed out, had still, last year,
practically no conception of what we were doing and had done. The
majority of our own people, indeed, were in much the same case. While