We have come upon troubled times. We have enemies at home as well as abroad. We have those who would cry “Peace at any price,” when our country knows that the only enduring peace is one which is won with honor. We have those who would barter American ideals for immediate comfort, those who would sell the future for the present. It is our part, the part of each and every American, to stand firm for those principles which America has cherished and for which she fights to-day. It is our part to be American, to think American, to pray American. It is our duty to remember what America does for us. It is our privilege to do what we can for America. Every man, woman, and child in the United States, not in active war service in army or navy, is nothing less than a licensed pilot, steering the ship of his patriotism among rough waters. It is his part to steer it straight, and, as the President said of the nation, “God helping him, he can do no other.” CHAPTER II THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD WAR In the last days of April, 1918, fifty men in the khaki of the army of the United States of America landed at an Atlantic port. Their coming, unheralded and almost unwelcomed, marked one of the most important events in the history of our country. For they were the first homecoming veterans of the American Expeditionary Forces, men who had fought under Pershing on the soil of France for the principles that inspired our nation’s entrance into the world war. There was the man who had fired the first American gun in the battles. There was the man who had stood beside the first man killed in action. There was the man who had brought five German prisoners back into camp after the rush on the trenches. Wounded, disabled, made unfit for further immediate service, they had been sent home; and they came back to their country, the advance-guard of the greatest army the United States has ever assembled and one of the greatest armies the world has ever seen, to bear witness to the fact that America has actually taken her place in the world struggle. They had fought under German fire. They had stood beside French soldiers and British soldiers in the attack. They had received their baptism of blood. They had set the flag of the United States of America on the battle-fronts in the standard that bears the flags of those nations which are defending the rights of democracy against the invasion of autocracy. They are of the first division of an American army to fight a battle for America in the fields of Europe; and they had come home to give testimony of what America’s part in the great war really is. For they are the first of the millions of fighters whom the nation has gathered for the winning of the war.