A gentleman's agreement was effected with neither side committed to any binding policy. The United States retained a free hand, and was not controlled, formally or informally, by any entangling undertaking as to any future course it might elect to take in its relations with Germany. But one enlightening point emerged. It was that while the United States was free to enter into any peace it chose, it would not enter into a separate peace. No action in that direction was imaginable in the circumstances without consulting the Entente Allies. This injection of peace considerations into the war situation, before the United States had really entered the lists with troops and guns, was taking time by the forelock. But it was needful to clear the air early, as one of the reasons ascribed to Germany's apparent complacence to the entrance of America as a belligerent was that she counted on the United States as a balance wheel that might restrain the Entente's war activities and hasten peace, or later operate to curtail the Entente's demands at the peace conference. On these assumptions America's participation was supposed to be not wholly unwelcome to Berlin. American freedom of action was unlikely to confuse the war issues in the manner Germany looked for. Whatever hopes Germany built upon that freedom did not deter Secretary Lansing and Mr. Balfour from hastening to counteract misleading impressions current that America would be embarrassed in its postwar foreign policy by becoming involved in European territorial questions, from which, for more than a century, it had remained aloof. The French mission also achieved an incontestable popular triumph, due to the presence of Marshal Joffre and to memories of French assistance in the Revolutionary War. France's heroic resistance to German invasion of her territory, specially in thwarting the advance on Paris, had also attached American sympathies to her cause. M. Viviani and Marshal Joffre did not hesitate to avail themselves of this feeling by plainly requesting the immediate dispatch of American troops to France. While this course conflicted with the early plans of the American General Staff, the latter had to recognize the immense moral effect which the flying of the Stars and Stripes would have on the Allied troops in the Franco-Belgian trenches, and the request did not go unheeded. The country realized that the French importunity for troops was born of an equally importunate need.