CHAPTER XI
THE SLACKER RAIDS
How the A. P. L. Made Patriots—Chasing the Slacker—Teaching
the Love of the Flag—Incidents of Western
Raids.
Even had Mr. Bryan's famous prophecy come true, that a million armed men would spring up over night and so end at once any trouble America might presumably experience in going to war, there still would have existed a vast deficit in our Army, which at the time of the Armistice had more than two million men armed and on the soil of France, almost as many in training, and ten times as many listed as army material if needed—although, to be sure, they had not sprung up either armed or equipped, as perhaps France or Great Britain could testify. The new draft ages of 18 to 45 swept in a vast additional army under the latest conscription act, although the first registration, those of 21 to 31, had set on foot our first American forces—as fine soldiers as ever stood on leather.
A great many phrases are made in time of war about war itself, and most of these come around to the ancient recruiting sergeant's inviting motto recounting the glory of dying for one's country. The Napoleonic wars were fought on the death-or-glory basis; but Napoleon got his troops by rigid conscription. We fought this war on a more sober basis of necessity. Most of us who are old enough and wise enough to study human nature and world politics knew that commercial jealousy, and not any abstract theories about democracy and the rights of man, lay basically under this war, as they have lain under most other wars. And the boys of the world—youth being resilient, of high pulse and low blood pressure, and believing, as youth always does, that nothing wrong can happen to youth and hope—were called on once more to fight the
