He, it appeared, was one of our Americans who marched through London streets on that day when the eyes of London looked for the first time upon the Yankees at last arrived to bear a hand to England and her Allies.

From the mob came a certain taunt: "You silly ass." It was, as you will observe, an unflattering interpretation of our national initials, U.S.A.Of course it was enough to make a proper American doughboy entirely "hot under the collar." To this reading of our national initials our national readiness retorted in kind at an early date: A.E.

F.meant After England Failed.

But why, months and months afterwards, when everything was over, did that foolish doughboy in the hospital hug this lone thing to his memory?
It was the act of an unthinking few.

Didn't he notice what the rest of London was doing that day?
Didn't he remember that she flew the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes together from every symbolic pinnacle of creed and government that rose above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky?
Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide?
She's a person who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they were not all England.