Paid In Full/Chapter 6

early 1917 America was full of Americans—even fuller than usual—for the simple reason that America was rated ‘neutral’ in a World War, and her citizens were mostly cooped up within their own borders.

Yet not quite all. Certain Americans, less diplomatic than their official leaders, had long since taken their own decision in the matter. Twenty-five thousand citizens of the United States were serving, at the risk of forfeiting their own cherished citizenship, under various Allied flags. Hundreds more were driving ambulances behind the Allied lines. The Harvard Unit had taken over an entire British Base Hospital. Americans were rolling bandages and cutting surgical dressings for the Allies in every State in the Union. Americans were taking care of homeless women and children in France. Americans were fighting typhus in Serbia. Many an American business man was running his business with his left hand, reserving his right for the direction and endowment of Allied War Relief.

Still, some odd hundred millions remained at home. There were no Americans in the Ritz at Paris, or in the Carlton at Cannes, or in the Casino at Monte Carlo—these establishments were devoted, for the most part, to sterner uses; so Palm Beach, White Sulphur Springs, French Lick, and Pasadena were swamped by a spring tide of pleasure-seekers. But pleasure, when you come down to cases, is mainly the resort of those who have failed in the pursuit of happiness; and few of the pleasure-seekers at Palm Beach in those days were entirely happy. A sovereign people were standing aloof from something which, whatever their heads might say, their hearts told them was very much their business.

Two years ago there really had been some room for doubt on the matter. The Old World had suddenly plunged into what, from a range of three thousand ocean miles, looked like one of the periodical scraps in which the monarchies of Europe had indulged from the beginning of time. The New World had shrugged its shoulders and wondered how long presumably enlightened nations would continue to tolerate ‘the King business.’ Sides were taken to a certain extent, but at first mainly for purposes of academic debate. America as a whole cherished a sentimental affection for France, her ancient ally in her War of Independence. New England, and ancient States like Virginia, were mainly pro-British. On the opposite side of the argument stood the Middle West, headed by the great Germanic communities of Wisconsin and Minnesota, solidly united and suspiciously ready with words. To the Francophiles, for instance, who made play with Lafayette's statue in Washington, these replied, not altogether unreasonably, by pointing to General von Steuben standing in the opposite corner of the same square. Short was the ancestral friend, as well as Codlin.

Russia was a ticklish topic: the vast Jewish community in the great cities saw to that. It was well enough to extol Holy Russia and the Little White Father as the heaven-sent protectors of small States like Serbia; but how could the greatest free Republic in the world compound with its conscience to the extent of toeing the line with the most corrupt and rotten Despotism in Christendom? Altogether it was not surprising that Uncle Sam should have demanded a little time to adjust his compasses in the magnetic storm that raged about his head.

But now two years had elapsed. The greatest of all wars had branched out in directions undreamed of by the prophets; and for the first time in history it had been made evident that if an international issue be vast enough all the world must take one side or the other in the end, or be ground up between the mill-stones. America was still officially at peace, but upon her soil—or rather beneath it—one of the bitterest yet most romantic of campaigns was raging. Some day the history of that underground struggle in and for the heart of the United States will be written; but the whole truth will never be told, for the simple reason that no one will believe it. It was a sheer battle of wits, inaudible and invisible, distinguished by no military pomp and entirely devoid of public acclamation. The participants therein were mainly men of the stamp which plays a game for its own sake, and sets the mark above the prize. All over America they were serving—as clerks, janitors, waiters, ships' stewards, what you will—taking notes, reporting symptoms, and encouraging tendencies. Walls had ears—microphonic ears; an incautiously spoken word in a hotel lounge might sink or save a liner in mid-Atlantic. The written word was equally unsafe. A visitor to New York might return to his locked bedroom after an absence of five minutes to find the door still locked, but his baggage ransacked and his papers rifled.

A new word had been coined, destined to wreck the German Empire and alter the face of the world for ever after—Propaganda. Its operations covered every field; nothing was too great or too small for it. A humourist in the British Intelligence Service became possessed of an ancient photograph of the German Ambassador to Washington disporting himself upon the beach at some watering-place with two damsels in distinctly arresting bathing-dresses. He sent it to a London society weekly, which published it in full-page form; and in due course some hundred copies of the number containing the photograph evaded the submarines and arrived in New York. But—by three o’clock upon the afternoon of the second day every single copy of that periodical had been mysteriously bought up and destroyed, while such copies as had reached their destination direct had disappeared with equal celerity from club tables and hotel reading-rooms. It was only an affair of outposts, but each side distinguished itself.

But propaganda cuts deeper than that. Below oceans of talk and streams of so-called literature, there were deeds. Wheatfields were fired in Kansas, that civilians might starve in Europe. In Connecticut munition factories were turning out shells for the Russian Army which the Russian Army was destined never to receive, because the Russian Munition Inspectors, being in the pay of the revolutionaries, who were in the pay of Germany, turned back consignment after consignment as below standard. In the North railway bridges were blown up, that Canadian soldiers might be held back from embarkation a few weeks longer. In the West a body paradoxically known as the International ‘Workers’ of the World, inexplicably flush of cash, were calling upon Labour to labour no more until wars should cease. In the South negroes were being incited to the verge of a stampede by whispered suggestions of Equal Rights and a Black Republic.

Yet Palm Beach was crowded. But not with Germans, or, for that matter, pro-Germans. The sands were running out. The German Ambassador had received his passports, and had departed homeward in a Scandinavian liner, faute de mieux, six weeks previously. Things were beginning to be called by their right names. For some months certain devoted and sturdy exponents of Americanism had been submitting themselves to voluntary military training at the great camp of Plattsburg; these, after being reviled by the hysterical as Militarists of the deepest dye, were now being acclaimed by the same mouths as Apostles of Preparedness. The voice of the pro-German had died away in the land—to be heard no more until it should rise again, thinly disguised, as the voice of the peacemaker.

America’s active participation in the War was merely a matter of time now. Uncle Sam, his long agony of uncertainty over, was out on his back porch, beating his ploughshare into a sword and pre pared to go fighting mad at any moment.