The _Yank_ did not smile because he failed to realize the seriousness of his job, but because with him the harder, the more dangerous, and the dirtier the job, the more must he smile and "jolly" about it.
"They had come to France to do a certain piece of work. It was a bloody, dusty, sweaty, unclean, disagreeable one, and they proposed to finish it. . . . We are a people given to discounting futures, and the average American soldier, to put it bluntly, discounted being killed in action. If our Allies, whose fortitude was sustained in a dark hour by the way that our men fought, could have probed what was in the mind of these Americans, they would have found still further reason for faith in our military strength." So declares Major Palmer of General Pershing's staff.
Raymond Fosdick says the character of the American soldier was shown when a Y.M.C.A. secretary asked a large body of _Yanks_ to write on little slips of paper distributed to them what they thought were the three greatest sins in a soldier. When the papers were passed back and examined, it was found that they agreed unanimously upon the first sin. It was cowardice. And almost unanimously upon the second. It was selfishness. And the third was big-headedness.
The _Yank_ is wonderfully free from the sins he hates. Dashing, fearless, willing to die rather than to surrender, unable, as General Bundy said, to understand an order to retreat, he is always a "jollier." It is said one platoon of _Yanks_ went "over the top" wearing tall silk hats with grenades in one hand and carrying pink parasols in the other. This may be only a story of what the _Yanks_ would have done if permitted, but it is true to their nature.
The _Yanks_ have written the noblest chapter of American history. They have honored their fathers and mothers, their churches, the American public school, and the land of Washington and Lincoln. Those who sleep beneath foreign soil have not died in vain.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, "_Thou must_," The youth replies, "I _can_."
There are songs of the north and songs of the south, And songs of the east and west; But the songs of the place where the four winds meet Are the ones that we love the best.