I set these things down plainly.  There is a very strong disposition in all the European countries to believe America fundamentally indifferent to the rights and wrongs of the European struggle; sentimentally interested perhaps, but fundamentally indifferent.  President Wilson is regarded as a mere academic sentimentalist by a great number of Europeans.  There is a very widespread disposition to treat America lightly and contemptuously, to believe that America, as one man put it to me recently, “hasn’t the heart to do anything great or the guts to do anything wicked.”  There is a strong undercurrent of hostility therefore to the idea of America having any voice whatever in the final settlement after the war.  It is not for a British writer to analyse the appearance that have thus affected American world prestige.  I am telling what I have observed.

Let me relate two trivial anecdotes.

X came to my hotel in Paris one day to take me to see a certain munitions organisation.  He took from his pocket a picture postcard that had been sent him by a well-meaning American acquaintance from America.  It bore a portrait of General Lafayette, and under it was printed the words, “General Lafayette, Colonel in the United States army.”

“Oh!  These Americans!” said X with a gesture.

And as I returned to Paris from the French front, our train stopped at some intermediate station alongside of another train of wounded men.  Exactly opposite our compartment was a car.  It arrested our conversation.  It was, as it were, an ambulance de grand luxe; it was a thing of very light, bright wood and very golden decorations; at one end of it was painted very large and fair the Stars and Stripes, and at the other fair-sized letters of gold proclaimed—­I am sure the lady will not resent this added gleam of publicity—­“Presented by Mrs. William Vanderbilt.”

My companions were French writers and French military men, and they were discussing with very keen interest that persistent question, “the ideal battery.”  But that ambulance sent a shaft of light into our carriage, and we stared together.

Then Colonel Z pointed with two fingers and remarked to us, without any excess of admiration: 

“America!”

Then he shrugged his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth.

We felt there was nothing more to add to that, and after a little pause the previous question was resumed.

I state these things in order to make it clear that America will start at a disadvantage when she starts upon the mission of salvage and reconciliation which is, I believe, her proper role in this world conflict.  One would have to be blind and deaf on this side to be ignorant of European persuasion of America’s triviality.  I would not like to be an American travelling in Europe now, and those I meet here and there have some of the air of men who at any moment may be dunned for a debt.  They explode without provocation into excuses and expostulations.