and pro-Germans can testify through their prison bars; but it passes now and soon will "leave not a wrack behind." As these pages advance, the word issues for its official demobilization. It was honorably encamped on a secret and silent battlefield, but now, once more to use a poet's word, it has "folded its tents like the Arab, and silently stolen away." It was, and is not. You never have known what it was. You never will see its like again.
"A. P. L." means the American Protective League. It means a silent, unknown army of more than a quarter million of the most loyal and intelligent citizens of America, who indeed did spring to arms over night. It fought battles, saved lives, saved cities, saved treasures, defended the flag, apprehended countless traitors, did its own tremendous share in the winning of the war. It saved America. It did protect. It was a league.
It did all this without a cent of pay. It had no actual identification with the Government. Yet it has won scores of times the written and spoken thanks of our most responsible Government officials. Its aid in the winning of the war can not be estimated and never will be known. Not even its full romance ever can be written. May these hurrying pages save all these things at least in part, though done in the full consciousness that their tribute can be but a fragment of the total due.
The American Protective League was the largest company of detectives the world ever saw. The members served without earlier specialized training, without pay, without glory. That band of citizens, called together overnight, rose, grew and gathered strength until able to meet, and absolutely to defeat, the vast and highly trained army of the German espionage system, which in every country of the globe flooded the land with trained spies who had made a life business of spying. It met that German Army as ours met it at Chateau-Thierry, and in the Argonne, and on the Vesle and on the Aisne. Like to our Army under arms—that Army where any of us would have preferred to serve had it been possible for us to serve under arms—it never gave back an inch of ground. Growing stronger and better equipped each day, it worked always onward and forward until the last fight was won.
