My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete FormPalmer, Frederick
History
My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form
Palmer, Frederick
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The American is an outsider to them all; some strange melting-pot
product of many races which is trying to forget the prejudices and
hates of the old world and perhaps not succeeding very well, but not
yet convinced that the best means of producing patriotic unity is war.
After this and other experiences, after being given a compartment all
to myself by men who glanced at me with eyes of hate and passed
on to another compartment which was already crowded or stood up
in the aisle of the car, I made a point of buying an American flag for
my buttonhole.
This helped; but still there was my name, which belonged to an
ancestor who had gone from England to Connecticut nearly three
hundred years ago. Palmer did not belong to the Germanic tribe. He
must be pro the other side. He could not be a neutral and belong to
the human kind with such a name. Only Swenson, or Gansevoort, or
Ah Fong could really be a neutral; and even they were expected to be
on your side secretly. If they weren't they must be on the other. Are
you for us? or, Are you against us? I grew weary of the question in
Germany. If I had been for them I should have "dug in" and not told
them. In France and England they asked you objectively the state of
sentiment in America. But, possibly, the direct, forcible way is the
better for war purposes when you mean to win; for the Germans have
made a study of war. They are experts in war.
However, the rosy-cheeked German boy, in his green uniform which
could not be washed clean of all the stains of campaigning, whom I
met in the palace grounds at Charlottenberg, did not put this tiresome
question to me. He was the only person I saw in the grounds, whose
quiet I had sought for an hour's respite from war. One could be
shown through the palace by the lonely old caretaker, who missed
the American tourist, without hearing a guide's monotone explaining
who the gentleman in the frame was and what he did and who
painted his picture. This boy could have more influence in making me
see the German view-point than the propagandist men in the
Government offices and the belligerent German-Americans in hotel
lobbies--those German-Americans who were so frequently in trouble
in other days for disobeying the verbotens and then asking our State
Department to get them out of it, now pluming themselves over
victories won by another type of German.
About twenty-one years old this boy, round-faced and blue-eyed, who
saw in Queen Louisa the most beautiful heroine of all history. The
hole in his blouse which the bullet had made was nicely sewed up
and his wound had healed. He was fighting in France when he was
hit; the name of the place he did not know. Karl, his chum, had been
killed. The doctor had given him the bullet, which he exhibited proudly
as if it were different from other bullets, as it was to him. In a few days
he must return to the front. Perhaps the war would be over soon; he
hoped so.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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