Meanwhile, the letters from the Front come in with their new note of joy.  “You should see the American faces in the Army to-day!” writes one.  “They bring a new light into this dismal spring.”  How many of them?  Mayn’t we now confess to ourselves and our Allies that there is already, the equivalent of an American division, fighting with the Allied Armies in France, who have used every honest device to get there?  They have come in by every channel, and under every pretext—­wavelets, forerunners of the tide.  For now, you too have to improvise great armies, as we improvised ours in the first two years of war.  And with you as with us, your unpreparedness stands as your warrant before history, that not from American minds and wills came the provocation to this war.

But your actual and realised co-operation sets me on lines of thought that distract me, for the moment, from the first plan of this letter.  The special Musketry School with which I had meant to open it, must wait till its close.  I find my mind full instead—­in connection with the news from Washington—­of those recently issued War Office pamphlets of which I spoke in my last letter; and I propose to run through their story.  These pamphlets, issued not for publication but for the information of those concerned, are the first frank record of our national experience in connection with the war; and for all your wonderful American resource and inventiveness, your American energy and wealth, you will certainly, as prudent men, make full use of our experience in the coming months.

Last year, for England’s Effort, I tried vainly to collect some of these very facts and figures, which the War Office was still jealously—­’and no doubt quite rightly—­withholding.  Now at last they are available, told by “authority,” and one can hardly doubt that each of these passing days will give them—­for America a double significance.  Surpass the story, if you can; we shall bear you no grudge!  But up till now, it remains a chapter unique in the history of war.  Many Americans, as your original letter to me pointed out, had still, last year, practically no conception of what we were doing and had done.  The majority of our own people, indeed, were in much the same case.  While the great story was still in the making, while the foundations were still being laid, it was impossible to correct all the annoying underestimates, all the ignorant or careless judgments, of people who took a point for the whole.  The men at the heart of things could only set their teeth, keep silence and give no information that could help the enemy.  The battle of the Somme, last July, was the first real testing of their work.  The Hindenburg retreat, the successes in Mesopotamia, the marvellous spectacle of the Armies in France—­and before this letter could be sent to Press, the glorious news from the Arras front!—­are the present fruits of it.