I went home in a black mood, all the blacker because I did not want to say what I felt before the men; and when I got to mess I found Lawrence, Anderson and Mangan and young McKenna as sore as myself. We all exploded together, and Colonel Barker, at first mildly interested, seemed to get worried. “Well,” he said, “at least they wouldn’t object if they had to wear English shoes, would they?” “No,” I said. “They’d have the satisfaction of stamping on them.” The laugh at my poor joke ended the discussion, but I waited after supper to talk with Colonel Barker. I didn’t want him worried about us, and he naturally couldn’t know; but I felt he could appreciate our attitude from his own very strong anti-German feelings. “Colonel,” I said. “We do not want you to feel that you have a regiment of divided loyalty or dubious reliability on your hands. We are all volunteers for this war. If you put our fellows in line alongside a bunch of Tommies, they would only fight the harder to show the English who are the better men, though I would not guarantee that there would not be an occasional row in a rest camp if we were billeted with them. There are soldiers with us who left Ireland to avoid service in the British Army. But as soon as we got into the war, these men, though not yet citizens, volunteered to fight under the Stars and Stripes. “We have our racial feelings, but these do not affect our loyalty to the United States. You can understand it. There were times during the past two years when if England had not restrained her John Bull tendencies on the sea we might have gotten into a series of difficulties that would have led to a war with her. In that case Germany would have been the Ally. You are a soldier, and you would have fought, suppressing your own dislike for that Ally. But supposing in the course of the war we were short of tin hats and they asked you to put on one of those Boche helmets?” The Colonel whacked the table, stung to sudden anger at the picture. Then he laughed, “You have a convincing way of putting things, Father. I’ll see that they clothe my men hereafter in American uniforms.” And though, as I found later, many of the offensive uniforms had been torn to ribbons by the men, nobody ever made any inquiry about “destruction of government property.” PERCEY _February_ 2nd, 1918