My Year of the War - Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and - the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the - First Time in its Complete Form by Frederick Palmer
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a clear eye. He could say of his best personal friend: "I like him, but
he has a poor head for affairs." Yet he was the type who, if he had been a trained soldier, would have been a business man of war who would have wanted a sharp, ready sword in a well-trained hand and to leave nothing to chance in a battle for the right. In Germany, where some of the best brains of the country are given to making war a business, he might have been a soldier who would rise to a position on the staff. In America he was the employer of three thousand men-- a general of civil life. "But look how the Belgians have fought!" he exclaimed. "They stopped the whole German army for two weeks!" The best army was best because it had his sympathy. His view was the popular view in America: the view of the heart. America saw the pigmy fighting the giant rather than let him pass over Belgian soil. On that day when a gallant young king cried, "To arms!" all his people became gallant to the imagination. When I think of Belgium's part in the war I always think of the little Belgian dog, the schipperke who lives on the canal boats. He is a home-staying dog, loyal, affectionate, domestic, who never goes out on the tow-path to pick quarrels with other dogs; but let anything on two or four feet try to go on board when his master is away and he will fight with every ounce of strength in him. The King had the schipperke spirit. All the Belgians who had the schipperke spirit tried to sink their teeth in the calves of the invader. One's heart was with the Belgians on that eighteenth day of August, 1914, when one set out toward the front in a motor-car from a |
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