The Yank

: Winning A Cause World War Stories

The boche went into the war as a robber, the poilu as a crusader

determined to save the sacred and holy things of the world from

desecration and destruction, the Tommy as a player in a great game,

and the Yank as a policeman whose job it was to clean up the affair.



To the American soldiers, the Yanks, and to the American people, the

war was a job, a most disagreeable one, but one that must be done. No

on else was ready and able to do it; so they went at it smilingly and

jollied every one with whom they came in contact.



French children were asked to write descriptions of the Yanks for a

New York paper. They nearly all said that they were big and handsome

and quick, that they always smiled and were always hungry, especially

for chocolate and candy. The French noticed the everlasting smile of

the Yank, for after three years of war and suffering the French, even

the children, had ceased to smile. It is said the children had even

forgotten how to play, but they responded to the love in the hearts of

the Yanks, as did the German children when the American soldiers

crossed the Rhine. To the Yanks there were no enemies among the

children; they loved them, French or German.



The Yank did not smile because he failed to realize the seriousness

of his job, but because with him the harder, the more dangerous, and

the dirtier the job, the more must he smile and jolly about it.



They had come to France to do a certain piece of work. It was a

bloody, dusty, sweaty, unclean, disagreeable one, and they proposed to

finish it. . . . We are a people given to discounting futures, and the

average American soldier, to put it bluntly, discounted being killed in

action. If our Allies, whose fortitude was sustained in a dark hour by

the way that our men fought, could have probed what was in the mind of

these Americans, they would have found still further reason for faith

in our military strength. So declares Major Palmer of General

Pershing's staff.



Raymond Fosdick says the character of the American soldier was shown

when a Y.M.C.A. secretary asked a large body of Yanks to write on

little slips of paper distributed to them what they thought were the

three greatest sins in a soldier. When the papers were passed back and

examined, it was found that they agreed unanimously upon the first sin.

It was cowardice. And almost unanimously upon the second. It was

selfishness. And the third was big-headedness.



The Yank is wonderfully free from the sins he hates. Dashing,

fearless, willing to die rather than to surrender, unable, as General

Bundy said, to understand an order to retreat, he is always a

jollier. It is said one platoon of Yanks went over the top

wearing tall silk hats with grenades in one hand and carrying pink

parasols in the other. This may be only a story of what the Yanks

would have done if permitted, but it is true to their nature.



The Yanks have written the noblest chapter of American history. They

have honored their fathers and mothers, their churches, the American

public school, and the land of Washington and Lincoln. Those who sleep

beneath foreign soil have not died in vain.



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