AMERICAN HYSTERIA

War in any country goes to its very roots, searches out the good and evil and lays them bare, that its citizens may judge their own worth. Our country has been no exception to the rule. Since the Declaration of War a year ago, the United States has undergone the acid test. And how has she stood it? Truthfully, we may answer: well. Our youths have flocked from every state, willing, at least in spirit; our efforts to make up for years of unpreparedness have been honest, though sometimes ineffectual; and, taken all in all, our national spirit has been praiseworthy. It has shown vigor and earnestness but unhappily only too often a complete lack of sober thought.

The American is naturally an egoist. He loves to do things in a spectacular way with himself as hero. Subconsciously he knows himself to be just a little better, stronger, and more farsighted than any foreigner. This supreme confidence, misplaced as it may be, gives him unbounded energy to do his part well. It is, however, often damaging. He instinctively tends to belittle his enemy and to consider him a foe of decidedly inferior mettle. American soldiers, officers and men, arrive in France, fresh from their training camps, without any doubts that their march toward Berlin is to continue peacefully uninterrupted. What a rude awakening they await! They swagger and boast before the seasoned soldiers of our Allies, who look on with amused tolerance and good nature, willing to be dominated and instructed at their own game, if only the newcomers can act as they talk.

What a pity it is that we cannot learn to be a little more unassuming, a little more willing to share the limelight with a worthy partner, to subordinate our selves to the Cause. The individual soldiers are not to be blamed. The fault lies deeper yet. It is with the American public at home who insist upon regarding war as a glorious sport at which our athletes are in nature bound to win. Parade after parade, motion pictures, books, and pamphlets confirm it. Our newspapers describe in four-inch headlines of alternated red and black how five "Yanks" have captured a German patrol of twenty, while on page five, under a flaring advertisement of some chewing gum company, we find the official British and French communications of attacks in which thousands have been engaged. In a way it is ludicrous, but such a sad commentary on our own crudity, that it loses most of its humor.

If anyone at home dares suggest that possibly the enemy may be stronger than we expect, he is looked upon as a pessimist. If he protests against heavy expenditures for displays of an emotional sort, he is fortunate if he is not considered openly unpatriotic. Even those who have been to France and have seen war stripped of its garnishings, ineffectually try to stem the tide of current opinion. Nothing but time and suffering can do it, and how intensely painful the realization is going to be! We will find that, though we are sending to France armies of the finest raw material, there are others of just as good courage that will struggle with and against them.

In this world of strife, there was never greater need of sober thought than now. Let us control rather than restrain our wonderful vitality, now bordering closely upon the hysterical, by a serious consideration of things as they are. Let us not turn deaf ears to advisers who know of what they speak. We owe it to our soldiers that they may go forth not less bravely but with open and determined minds, realizing that it is to battle and not to sport they go. This war is not one of headlines and billheads, it is man against man in deadly earnest. We are not the only great nation involved. Let us, for the moment, set aside our vanity and put our strong shoulders to the wheel of the Common Cause.