“Among our flyers was a young lieutenant who was born a Russian. Not a Jew, a Russian. He was finishing his training in this camp. It was partly the monotony and the lack of work that made him melancholy. You know we haven’t enough practise planes and the flying men are idle half the time. But mainly it was the sight of those Russian laborers that got on his nerves. He used sometimes to talk to them, and they were pathetically glad to have him, because nobody else spoke their language and they were lonesome. “He said to me once: ‘When those poor devils landed in France the houses were decked with flags to greet them. The streets were full of cheering crowds and children threw flowers in their path. Now nobody trusts them to fight. They are outcasts. They have no country, and no country wants to adopt them.’ I tried to tell him that he was wrong, that the allies wanted to help Russia to get back, but it was no good. “By and by this man took it into his head that he was distrusted because he had been born a Russian. It wasn’t true. But he thought it was. He said so. One day he went up in an altitude test with an observer. He was acting as pilot, but the machine had a double control and the man with him was a cool and capable flyer. Otherwise the thing might have been even worse than it was. For when they were six thousand feet up and still climbing, the Russian suddenly unbuckled the belt that secured him in his seat, and before the observer could even guess what he was about to do, he stepped over the side of the machine into space. “That settled me. I said to myself that I would rather be dead than be a man without a country. That’s what that poor fellow figured that he was, and all other Russians. But I’m not a Russian, nor an internationalist, nor anything else but a one hundred per cent. American, and if they want me to kill boches, I’m ready to begin any minute.” A man without a country. Is there any sentence in the language, any combination of words more dreadful? Yet what the German propagandists, which is the real name of many of the pacifists and “internationalists,” have been trying to do to American youth is to take their country away from them. They nearly succeeded, and the proof of that was the three years of indifference we loitered through before we woke up to the fact that this war was ours, as well as England’s, France’s and Belgium’s. We failed to realize that our country was in immediate peril, because we had almost forgotten that we had a country. Are we all awake to the fact yet? No, because, if we were, there would not be left anywhere from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific one single disloyal citizen, one single copperhead or so-called internationalist. No community would tolerate them. There would be no corner where they could hide.