ignorant objectors—who were dangerous to go up against in the laurel thickets or the far-back mountain coves. Very often, these men, when they learned how the flag of this country had been insulted, how our women and children had been murdered on the sea, were eager to join the colors, and never again were they deserters or slackers—only fighting men.
To this form of military evader among the simple outlying people of the southern hills, there must be added a great many deserters of foreign descent all over the country, caught in the Selective Service Act. Some of these had imbibed no real loyalty to America in their home associations; much too often their environments were those of other countries and not this. They heard another speech than ours used as a "mother tongue"; daily saw customs of the old world maintained, and not those of the new world taken on. They had small heart for the war because their loyalty to this country still was crude and unformulated. Many of the foreign-born troops who fought so well in France first joined our colors, not because they wished to, but because they had to, the law leaving no option. After that, they learned the fierce love of a real soldier for the real flag of a real country. Perhaps their wounds and their deaths may teach their surviving relatives in America not to remain foreigners, but to become Americans—and not foreigners masquerading as Americans. Some of our best soldiers had fathers who had taken the German oath never to renounce fealty to that famous "War Lord," chiefest coward of them all, who had not courage to die at the head of his army.
There was also in this war, as in all other wars, a certain percentage of the sullen and rebellious, of the weak and cowardly, men of no mark and no convictions in any cause, men who never rise above themselves and their selfish concerns in any situation. Beyond these, again, was a small class whose natural home longings or home bewailings or home pleadings led them to desert. Because of many reasons, then, a certain percentage of deserters marked this war as every war.
In the eyes of the law this was every man's war, and all must get under and back of it with no exceptions. A
