I want to see American troops on every front, and I particularly want to see the Czechs, the Bohemians, of whom we have great numbers in our army, fighting the Austrians. I saw some of these men, and they were magnificent soldiers. I think the most uproariously happy men I saw in France were the Poles in our army. On the night I embarked at “a port in France” an American transport came in carrying, besides our khaki clad men, the Polish regiment recruited here last winter. They looked like the chorus of a musical comedy, but if they can fight as well as they can yell, they will add a chapter to the history of the war. They began to howl for joy when the ship came into the harbor, and they streamed down the gangplank singing and cheering like mad. I suppose their blue and scarlet uniforms have been put in moth balls by now. We have often called America the melting pot, but, seeing this great multitude of foreign-born American soldiers, it occurred to me that we had not, in former years, kept a good enough fire burning under that pot. We didn’t try hard enough to melt that mass, to amalgamate it with our Mayflower and Puritan descendants. Why is it that so many naturalized American citizens, fighting under the Stars and Stripes, speak no English, or very little? What have our public schools been doing all these years? Why haven’t they extended their night school work to include these young men? Russians, Austrians, Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Syrians, Turks, Africans (the American negro is just another immigrant), we have no right to keep America away from them. We do wrong to consider them only as “labor.” They are American citizens, and for many of them the draft was the first time Uncle Sam ever called them son. The training camp was the real melting pot for them. In coin more precious than gold, those immigrant sons of America are paying us for our indifference. They are giving their lives for American ideals. Read the names in the casualty lists: Killed in action, Private Alexandro Cassealeno, Private Mike Grba, Private Ole K. Arneson; severely wounded, Constantine Poniaros, Tony Kaczor, Alexander Mashewsky. Many of these men were alone in America at the time of the draft. Their families were behind in the old home, and from some of those villages, those in the Austrian empire especially, no letters have come for more than a year. When the rest of the regiment gets letters and packages from home they get nothing. Remember that the next time they ask you to subscribe to the Red Cross, the Library War Service or the Salvation Army. You may think you haven’t anybody in the war, no near relatives. But you are wrong, you have our foreign legion and you owe them everything you can possibly afford to give. CHAPTER X THE GENERAL HIMSELF