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?
"_England has not done her share!_" How many thousands of British dead--men from every county in England and Scotland, from loyal Ireland, from every British dominion and colony--lie within the circuit of these blood-stained hills of Ypres?
How many more in the Somme graveyards ?--round Lens and Arras and Vimy ?--about Bourlon Wood and Cambrai ?--or in the final track of our victorious Armies breaking through the Hindenburg line on their way to Mons?
Gloriously indeed have the Dominions played their part in this war; but of all the casualties suffered by the Armies of the Empire, 80 _per cent_ of them fell on the population of these islands.

America was in the great struggle for a year and a half, and in the real fightingline for about six months.

She has lost some 54,000 of her gallant sons; and we sorrow for them with her.
But through four long years scarcely a family in Great Britain and the Dominions that possessed men on the fighting fronts--and none were finally exempt except on medical or industrial grounds--but was either in mourning for, or in constant fear of death for one or more of its male members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less injured for life.