and vividly this human weakness for generalizing from insufficient data,
than the incident in London streets which I promised to tell you in full
when we should reach the time for it. The time is now.

In a hospital at no great distance from San Francisco, a wounded American
soldier said to one who sat beside him, that never would he go to Europe
to fight anybody again--except the English. Them he would like to fight;
and to the astonished visitor he told his reason. He, it appeared, was
one of our Americans who marched through London streets on that day when
the eyes of London looked for the first time upon the Yankees at last
arrived to bear a hand to England and her Allies. From the mob came a
certain taunt: "You silly ass."

It was, as you will observe, an unflattering interpretation of our
national initials, U. S. A. Of course it was enough to make a proper
American doughboy entirely "hot under the collar." To this reading of our
national initials our national readiness retorted in kind at an early
date: A. E. F. meant After England Failed. But why, months and months
afterwards, when everything was over, did that foolish doughboy in the
hospital hug this lone thing to his memory? It was the act of an
unthinking few. Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that
day? Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and
Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government
that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and
stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She's a person
who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a
drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered
a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they
were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even have