Sergeant York was a straight-shooting open-living mountaineer. Yet there were city-bred heroes whose impetuosity led them to plunge into the war long before it spread to America. One of these was an actor and a dancer. Wallace McCutcheon, who pretended to British citizenship, got in at the start, and by sheer bravery and persistence rose from private to major. He would indeed have been a colonel if his second wound had caught him fifteen minutes later, for his colonel was killed then and he would have been automatically promoted. There were sons of wealthy parents and sons of humble parents who joined the French, the Canadian or the British forces and fought in the skies, or on land or sea for years before the rest of the nation decided to follow them overseas. This was a world war indeed, a universal struggle, and there was no race, color, condition, creed, or trade that was not represented and brilliantly represented. Clergymen, priests, waiters, polo-players, convicts, negroes, musicians, ditch-diggers, gunmen, farmers, chorusmen, gamblers—the entire list of heroes would exhaust any classification of the human race or its activities. A complete beadroll of heroes would fill a city directory, and make the most dismal reading. The only way in which justice can be done to anybody at all, is by omitting even to mention the vast majority, and to select a few at random, like a clutch of sample red apples from an enormous harvest. It is not feasible to attempt internationalism or non-partisanship. We must ignore the splendid heroism of other nations and leave them to the celebration of their own heroes and the neglect of ours. Of our own there remains too great a multitude to permit a systematic selection of examples. Some are here because they had the luck to be observed by skillful observers and recorders, as many kings are remembered because their historians or poets were superior to those of other kings. This volume, then, has all the faults of any other anthology. Yet the most imperfect anthology is better than no bouquet at all; and a bouquet is the happiest representative of a garden, as a framed canvas is the best memorial of a sunset. In this connection, there is a quaint poem of Emily Dickinson’s; she attached it to some flowers she selected from her garden: I send two sunsets— Day and I in competition ran. I finished two, and several stars, While He was making one. His own is ample— But as I was saying to a friend, Mine is the more convenient To carry in the hand. So it may be said of this volume: it does not contain the entire star-crowded firmament of the War of Wars, but it is “more convenient to carry in the hand.”