"Good luck, my soldier! You Americans are an extraordinary people. You are complex. We have thought we understood you—but, we do not. We never know what you will do next."
I asked my French landlady, who thus responded to the news that I had joined the Foreign Legion, for an explanation. She said:
"In the early days of the war, when the Germans advanced upon Paris at the rate of thirty kilometers a day, driving our French people before them, pillaging the country, dealing death and destruction, when our hearts were torn with grief, Americans who were in Paris ran about like chickens with their heads cut off. They could not get their checks cashed; they had lost their trunks; they thought only of their own temporary discomfort, and had no sympathy for our misfortunes."
"But," she continued, "the same ship that took these people away brought us other Americans. Strong and vigorous, they did not remain 8in Paris. Directly to the training camps they went: and, today, they are lying in mud, in the trenches with our poilus."
"Now, we should like to know, if you please, which are the real Americans—those who ran away, and left us when in trouble, or those who came to help us in time of need. Are you goers or comers?"
Self-proclaimed "good Americans," who pray that when they die they may go to Paris, are no more the real Americans than is their cafed, boulevarded, liqueured-up artificial, gay night-life Paris—the only Paris they know (specially arranged and operated, by other foreigners, for their particular delectation and benefit!)—the real Paris.
Such Americans, whose self-centered world stands still when their checks are but unhonored scraps of paper, the light of whose eyes fades if their personal baggage is gone, with just one idea of "service"—that fussy, obsequious attendance, which they buy, are they whose screaming Eagles spread their powerful wings on silver and gold coin only. Their "U. S." forms the dollar-sign.