Pershing and his small force had sailed for France within eighty days; and by the end of June, or within ninety days, America had adopted the blockade policy of Great Britain, and assented to the full use of that mighty weapon which was to have so vast an influence on the war.  President Wilson’s speech, when he came to Congress for the Declaration of War, revealed him—­and America—­to England, then sorely brooding over “too proud to fight,” in an aspect which revived in us all that was kinship and sympathy, and put to sleep the natural resentments and astonishments of the preceding years.  Nay, we envied America a man capable of giving such magnificent expression to the passion and determination of all free nations, in face of the German challenge.

Then came the days of disappointment.  Troops arrived at a more leisurely pace in France than had been hoped.  Ships and aeroplanes, which American enthusiasm in the early weeks of the war had promised in profusion, delayed their coming; there was congestion on the American railways, interfering with supplies of all kinds; and the Weather God, besides, let loose all his storm and snow battalions upon the Northern States to hamper the work of transport.  We in England watched these things, not realising that our own confidence in the military prospects and the resisting power of the Allies, was partly to blame for American leisureliness.  It was so natural that American opinion, watching the war, should split into two phases—­one that held the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for America to make all her own independent plans and form her own separate army with purely American equipment.  English opinion wavered in the same way.  I well remember a gathering in a London house in November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle of Cambrai.  It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other American officers and high officials then in London.  General Bliss was the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of Mr. Page was not far away.  The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and English expectations, terribly depressed, at any rate among those who knew, by the reports which had been coming through of the severe fighting in the Salient, during the preceding weeks, were again rising rapidly.  Everybody was full of the success of the initial attack, of the tanks above all, and what they might mean for the future.  At last Sir Julian Byng had achieved surprise; at last there had been open fighting; if by happy chance we took Cambrai what might not happen?  A flash of optimism ran through us all.  Victory and peace drew nearer.  Yet in the background there were always those dim rumours of the appalling losses at Passchendaele, together with the smarting memory of Caporetto, and of the British divisions sent to Italy.