Messines, and the victory of June, 1917—­Passchendaele, and the losses of that grim winter—­all the points indeed of this dim horizon from north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great Britain and the Dominions.  For quite apart from the main actions which stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.

Then, as the great Army of the gallant dead seemed to gather round one on this famous road, and over these shell-torn flats, a sudden recollection of a letter which I received in August, 1918, brought a tightening of the throat.  A Canadian lady, writing from an American camp in the east of France, appealed to myself and other writers to do something to bring home to the popular mind of America a truer knowledge of what the British Armies had done in the war.  “I see here,” says the writer, “hundreds of the finest remaining white men on earth every week.  They are wonderful military material, and very attractive and lovable boys.  But it discourages all one’s hope for the future unity and friendship between us all to realise as I have done the last few months that the majority of these men are entering the fight, firmly believing that ’England has not done her share—­that France had done it all—­the Colonials have done all the hard fighting, etc.’” And she proceeds to attribute the state of things to the “belittling reports” of England’s share in the war given in the newspapers which reach these “splendid men” from home.

A similar statement has come to me within the last few days, in another letter from an English lady in an American camp near Verdun, who speaks of the tragic ignorance—­for tragic it is when one thinks of all that depends on Anglo-American understanding in the future!—­shown by the young Americans in the camp where she is at work, of the share of Great Britain in the war.

Alack!  How can we bring our two nations closer together in this vital matter?  Of course there is no belittlement of the British part in the war among those Americans who have been brought into any close contact with it.  And in my small efforts to meet the state of things described in the letters I have quoted, some of the warmest and most practical sympathy shown has come from Americans.  But in the vast population of the United States with its mixed elements, some of them inevitably hostile to this country, how easy for the currents of information and opinion to go astray over large tracts of country at any rate, and at the suggestion of an anti-British press!

The only effective remedy, it seems to me, would be the remedy of eyes and ears!  Would it not be well, before the whole of the great American Army goes home, that as many as possible of those still in France—­groups, say, of non-commissioned officers from various American divisions, representing both the older and the newer levies, and drawn from different local areas—­should be given the opportunity of seeing and studying the older scenes of the war on the British front?—­and that our own men, also, should be able to see for themselves, not only the scenes of the American fighting of last year, but the vast preparations of all kinds that America was building up in France for the further war that might have been; preparations which, as no one doubts, changed the whole atmosphere of the struggle?