I'm going to smash the Kaiser."

I have been present when packed audiences have gone mad in reiterating
the American equivalent for _Tipperary_, with its brave promise,

"We'll be over,
We're coming over,
And we won't be back till it's over, over there."

But nothing I have heard so well expresses the cold anger of the
American fighting-man as these words which they chant to their
bugle-march, "We've got four years to do this job."




II

WAR AS A JOB


I have been so fortunate as to be able to watch three separate nations
facing up to the splendour of Armageddon--England, France, America.
The spirit of each was different. I arrived in England from abroad the
week after war had been declared. There was a new vitality in the
air, a suppressed excitement, a spirit of youth and--it sounds
ridiculous--of opportunity. The England I had left had been wont to
go about with a puckered forehead; she was a victim of
self-disparagement. She was like a mother who had borne too many
children and was at her wits' end to know how to feed or manage them.