Self-proclaimed “good Americans,” who pray that when they die they may go to Paris, are no more the real Americans than is their cafed, boulevarded, liqueured-up artificial, gay night-life Paris—the only Paris they know (specially arranged and operated, by other foreigners, for their particular delectation and benefit!)—the real Paris. Such Americans, whose self-centered world stands still when their checks are but unhonored scraps of paper, the light of whose eyes fades if their personal baggage is gone, with just one idea of “service”—that fussy, obsequious attendance, which they buy, are they whose screaming Eagles spread their powerful wings on silver and gold coin only. Their “U. S.” forms the dollar-sign. They are the globe-trotting, superficial, frivolous “goers.” Boys in brown and blue, girls in merciful angels’ white, men and women of scant impedimenta, are the “comers,” to whom—and to whose distant home-fire tenders—“U. S.” means neither Cash nor Country alone, but a suffering humanity’s urgent—US. Bonds of liberty mean, to them, LIBERTY BONDS. Yes “La Fayette, we are here!” Real Americans think, shoot and shout, Pershing for the perishing, “the Yanks are coming over till it’s over, over there!” FOREWORD Let the fastidious beware! Here is no inviting account of a holiday in France. The fighting author does not apologize for this terrible tale. He has written literally, unglossed—no glamour, to Help you understand the horrors of War and Prussian dreadfulness. This gripping catalogue of catastrophe is by an American. It contains romance, history—but absolutely no fiction. It is a Love story. “Greater love hath no man than this....” The National Society of Real Americans, in the shadow of Independence Hall, Philadelphia, reminds Us that we have two Countries— United States and France. “Jack Bowe,” in this, his second volume on War, presents a French viewpoint, rather than the British. Cosmopolitan, born on the Scotch-English border, he Knows no boundaries in Freedom’s cause. He has served in five regiments in France. Wounded and spent, he has been restored in five different hospitals. Evacuated from the front, twice, he has recuperated in England and returned, on furlough, to America. When he received “Certificate of Honor” for promoting the sale of Liberty Bonds. Thrice decorated for distinguished conduct and valor in Europe, He wears, also, three medals from service in the Spanish-American War and in the Philippine Insurrection. He has been marched through countless villages of France whose Names he did not know—nor could he have pronounced them if he did. Indian file, in black night, he has tramped hundreds of miles of Trenches, which he could not have recognized in the morning. He has endured twenty days and nights of continuous cannonade. Experiencing every sort of military warfare on land, he has also survived a Collision at sea.