It was in 1917 that Paris leave as a supplement to the usual home leave was common. This was understood as for the soldier's health. It would stop the boils and ease the system. Men could draw a handsome arrear of pay on the strength of Paris leave, and once in Paris they went deeper than in the dug-outs of the war. Or units were withdrawn to places where the women thronged. Men were robbed by the war of their respect unto their living selves. And 1917 saw the entry of puritan America into the war, the nation of vice-hunting and prohibition, and the rest. But it did not raise the morality of rank and file. The Yanks were shipped with a thirst. The men brought up in sheltered Western communities proved to have no more power than we had to resist the temptations of European vice. The virus of the army seems to have been the same in United States training grounds as in those of England. Material conditions imposed some restraint, but imagination fed the starved side of men's souls with lurid pictures of what obtained in France. Uncle Sam's common soldiers, handsome and clean as they were, and brave, yet brought with them an expectancy which caused them to take no moral lead but on the contrary to plunge headlong into that war-mire which we had all been making. And disease ravaged the American ranks. Some few thousands fell dead on the field of battle and some tens of thousands were wounded, but disease casualties filled the hospitals. It was fortunate for America's manhood that the war was not protracted. Their war enthusiasm was pushing them on. They did not realise that what they called "the shooting gallery" was a myriad-fold death-trap. Death in many shapes was ready to raven on America. As her men were inexperienced in war's alarms, so also were they unfitted to face the moral ordeal. Humanitarianism, materialism, and a superimposed morality do not produce men more capable of withstanding temptation. Purity depends too often on keeping temptation away. The Yanks brought their own brand of bad language with them--a language beside which lurid English was but pale. Where they had learned such verbal frightfulness seemed puzzling. But curiously enough it caused the American soldier to be hail-fellow well-met. He brought no airs of moral superiority or prudishness. It became a pastime in the British army to imitate admiringly the American type of swearing. It is all beyond the power of the pen. But those who heard it know. If the Yanks had kept to this extreme they would have remained enduringly popular--but they vaunted their prowess and exaggerated their feats and ignored the reality of the hell through which others had been, and they started the talk of their winning the war, and so lost ground. The Americans in France were on the whole perplexing to the average European. Their exaggerated thirst for war's relaxations on the one hand tended to make them one with the other armies in the field, but their idea of superiority kept them separate.