Excerpt from The American Legion Weekly, Vol. 7: July 10, 1925

Of the two million Americans who found their way to France in 1917 and 1918, how many would like to go back on a visit?

Of the two million Americans who were ready to go to France when the Armistice cancelled their reservations, how many would like to go now?

The American soldier and the American sailor did not go to France in 1917 and,1918 to'pay a party call. It was strictly a business trip. The business to be done was so pressing that little time was left for social engagements. And, the business once done, most of the A. E. F'. Was glad to be off for home. France doubtless was equally happy to see the A. E. F. Go. The average householder is glad to. See the firemen take their departure after they have put out a fire in his house. A good part of France's house was burned during the war, and when the A. E. F. Left the furniture was still piled on the lawn.

The task of replacing the singed shingles by new ones and of restoring the overstuffed divan to its proper loca tion indoors goes by the name of reconstruction. It is a man-size job - a nation-size job. France has done it be fore. Caesar first made invasions of France popular, as every first-year high-school student ought to know. It is somewhat of an indictment of civilization that Caesar, operating nearly two thousand years ago, was the most constructive invader that France ever had to put up with, and that the hostile forces. Of 1914-1918 were the most de structive. But France, confronted by the most stupendous task of reconstruction in her own history or any other na tion's, has gone about the job in the proper spirit. She is taking it all as part of the day's work. Politicians talk, rant, bluster - though French politicians have no monopoly of these commodities - while in the valleys of the Somme and the Aisne and the Meuse the French peasant sets his house in order and digs the nose of his plow into soil that still shelters the deadly menace of the unexploded shell.

Mankind judges the mass by the individual. The A. E. F. Veteran whose tragic moment overseas came when a Parisian waiter gave him in change seven useless Napoleon III francs will judge the whole French nation by that waiter. The Americans who marched toward Chateau Thierry against a steady current of refugees with their few little possessions in carts and wheelbarrows sees in the memory of that procession the cruel spectacle of the innocent in pain, and sees beyond them a Whole people in arms against the red and devastating scourge of invasion.

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