And the queer thing is that German machine-made illusions are of cast-iron. They "stay put"; permanently. During 1917 I read again precisely the same fatuous German statement regarding America and her inability to produce an army, that one read in 1914 and 1915 about Britain. The British New Armies (which Germany affirmed could never seriously count) have succeeded in capturing nearly three times as many prisoners as they have lost, and more than four times as many guns. From 1916 onward they steadily hammered back the greatest concentrations of German military might that Hindenburg could put up, and did not lose in the whole period as much ground as they have won in a single day from the Kaiser's legions. Yet still, in 1917, the same ostrich-like German scribes, who vowed that Britain could not put an army in the field because they could never officer it, were repeating precisely the same foolish talk about America and her New Armies. Perhaps there is only one argument which Germany is now really able to appreciate. That argument has been pointedly, and very effectively, presented for some time past by the writer of these letters, and all his comrades. From this stage onward, it will further be pressed home upon the German by the armies of America, whose potentialities he has laboriously professed to ridicule. It is the argument of high explosive and cold steel; the only argument capable of bringing ultimate conviction to the Wilhelmstrasse that the English-speaking peoples, though they may know nothing of the goose-step, yet are not wont to cry "Kamerad," or to offer surrender to any other people on earth. I know very well that the writer of these letters had no thought as he wrote--back there in 1916--of any kind of argument or reply to Potsdamed fantasies. But yet I would submit that, all unwittingly, he has furnished in these letters (on America's behalf, as well as Britain's) what should prove for unprejudiced readers outside Germany a singularly telling answer to the Boche's foolish boasts of the Anglo-Saxon inability to produce officers. As a correspondent in the Press recently wrote: "Why, for generations past the English-speaking peoples have been officering the world and all its waters--especially its waters!" And so they have, as all the world outside Germany knows, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego; from the Atlantic round through the Philippines to the golden gate and back. It is a high sense of honour, horse sense, and sportsmanship, in our Anglo-Saxon sense, that lie at the root of successful leadership. And one of Prussia's craziest illusions was that with us, these qualities were the sole monopoly of the men who kept polo ponies and automobiles!