Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/21

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.

INTRODUCTION

When our President told us that the causes of the war were obscure and that the war did not concern us, he expressed the common feeling of the American people at the outbreak of the war. When in 1918 he told us that the object of the war was to make the world safe for Democracy and only in the triumph of Democracy could we expect peace, he expressed the common feeling of the American people at the present time. The difference between those two utterances indicates the distance which the American people had traveled during the three intervening years. The war has taught us something; it has taught us much. We now know as never before both the meaning and the value of Democracy.

This volume affords a striking illustration of this change in the American point of view by portraying the change in a single mind and the causes which produced that change. Says the author in his preface:

"I went over, as did so many of the others, with the object of seeing war at first hand and of getting