Life — May 31, 1917 — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MAY 31, 1917. “*Whiale there is Life there's Hope"* Published by LIFE PUBLISHING COMPANY J. A. Mitcnett, Pres’t. ‘ A. Minter, Sec’y ond Treas. 17 West Thirty-first Street, New York English Offices, Rolls House, Breams Bldgs., London, E, C. E begin to get along. General Pershing is picked to go to France with twen- ty-five thousand regular troops, and marines, engineers, aviators and others are go- ing, enough to bring our immediate contribution up to forty thousand. Colonel Roosevelt is thankful if his efforts contributed to this concession. No doubt they did contribute vitally. Neither the administration nor the General Staff gave any sign of dis- position to send a fighting force to Frarre immediately until the Colonel's imp2 ‘nate demands made it desir- able to do something. We wish he might go along with Pershing. He seems not as yet to be included in the expedition, but he has broken up his recruiting organization, thereby leav- ing not only his men but himself “ free to get into the military service in some other way, if that is possible, and if not, to serve the country in civil life as best they can.” The Colonel is a useful man. In these days he seldom gets precisely what he wants, but he usually gets something else, which, in the long run, is liable to prove better. Thus by run- ning for President in 1912 he insured the election of Mr. Wilson, and now by agitating to go to France he gets General Pershing sent. General Pershing is a good man to go. His men are in the top of train- ing and very able soldiers. They may be expected to get off promptly. Just how soon “promptly” means the reader will please guess for himself. In about six weeks, perhaps. Congress at last has passed the law for registration of all men between twenty-one and thirty from whom men needed for military service are to be selected in September. September seems a long way off, but the filling out of the regular army and national guard regiments does not wait till then, and the training camps for officers are hard at it to provide men competent to help train the candidates selected by conscription. “It is not an army,” says the President, “that we must shape and train for war, it is a nation. The whole nation must be a team, in which each man shall play the part for which he is best fitted.” That suggests that the administra- tion is taking a very large view of the war, an impression that is borne out by the distribution through the Asso- ciated Press on Monday, last week, of a rehearsal in detail of the Pan-Ger- man plan of a mid-Europe empire, stretching across Germany, Austria, the Balkans and Turkey from the North Sea to Asia Minor, and taking in Con- stantinople and the Dardanelles. It is not merely that Germany wants this territory. She has got it now. She owns Austria, body and boots; also Bulgaria and Turkey ; and she has con- quered, at present, Roumania and Ser- via. The job is not merely to defend these countries from her, but to fetch them loose out of her clutch. , That helps to understanding why the President says that our job is to train a nation for war, for this undertaking of Germany is an all-nation undertak- ing, and the job of thwarting it is the same. Southeastern Europe may seem to be a pretty distant speculation for us Americans to be fighting over, but if the present German management and successors of like kidney should become the moving spirit and compel- ling force of an empire stretching from the North Sea to Asia Minor, the rest of mankind would take orders from Germany, until, in the Lord’s good time, she blew up with pride and beer. A peace that left such a Germany with so much of the sun-space as she now controls would be nothing but a truce. She could afford almost any terms on the West that were asked for, provided her eastern gobblerients remained to her. And presently, with nice new ma- terials and a new stock of canonen futter, she could clean up in the West any jobs that present pains compelled her to leave unfinished. Train the nation, says the President. So progresses Germany’s immense work of lifting mankind out of ease and self-complacency, and compelling every mother’s son and daughter of us to do our bit. CHARLEY TAFT, and twenty-five other Yale undergraduates, en- listed on May 2tst as privates in the new army in cheerful expectation of getting to France with the regulars. Charley is the son of the ex-President ; a young man highly competent both as an athlete and as a scholar. It is pos- sible now to enlist in the regular army for the term of the war, and that is one course available for the unused material of the Roosevelt collections. The bait that seemed to catch the Roose- velt recruits, besides the happiness of getting in again with their admired leader, was the prospect of getting promptly to France. The open door to France lies now through the regular army and the national guard, both of which are clamoring for recruits to fill up their organizations. The example of the twenty-six Yale men is com- comicbooks.com