By Joe Lawlor
“Ye gods,
Sue, it’s over. Come down stairs and kiss your daddy because Tom and Jerryi
will soon be home.”
This must
have been the feeling in a general way throughout this good old country of ours
last Monday when the wires flashed forth the news that a colossal military
machine had the skids put under it so badly that its longitude and latitude
could not even be given. Dear Lord, could you blame us for feeling hilarious?
We who the blood hounds said wouldn’t fight. We, who were accused of constantly
foxtrotting to our meals and then to a road house for dancing and vintage. We,
of whom they said, “Those lounge lizards with perfumed handkerchiefs.”
Well,
maybe we did like our fox trots missed with a little vintage; maybe we did like
a week-end at the Country Club, where good fellowship reigned supreme. But at
the same time the pleasure process formed in us a love for liberty and woe be
to the man who would steal the precious stuff away from us because that is what
Old Glory flies for. We showed the arrogant clans that we, too, oh Lacademon
could perish in the pass, and hark ye to the Huzzas as our millions marched
away. And then what a marvelous change came over Columbia. The so-called tango
artists answered reveille as smoothly as they answered Dabney Europe’s
syncopated outfit of jazz artists, and they maneuvered their chow tools as
deftly as an Englishman his monocle.
It looked
like a tough change in life but nothing is tough when a youth carries American
blood. They took to military life like a baby to its mother in a short space of
time, they carried a stride that had the 100-year goose step clique holding
their double chins with astonishment. They nursed their rifles like a miser his
nickel, and when the transports carried them down the harbor towards the land
of the heroes and villains of the old world they all agreed that America was a
great country to die for.
Well, the
rest, dear reader, is history. The battles of Catigny, Chateau Thierry, the
Marne, Cambrai, etc. On all sections of the blast furnace of war, they went
singing and laughing to victory. When they went to their death, they were sorry
that they couldn’t give more. And stacked up against the Prussian guard, they
were certainly up against blood specialists, in other words the super-hounds of
the big jam, but oh, boy, they were just as much at ease as if they were
fighting all their lives. They outwitted them, outfought them, slugged them and
then lit their cigarettes but of course kept right on going.
There
were the lads who came from offices, factories, dry goods stores, etc., and all
to protect that precious liberty, that this country above all has nourished. The
Prussian caste never knew the thrill of a referee’s whistle on a fall
afternoon, when the gridiron warriors are sent down the field accompanied by
the roars of thousands. They never knew the thrill that a soiled baseball,
kissed by a late summer afternoon’s sun, gives while sailing through the air.
They never heard the batteries announced by Silk O’Laughlin. If they had there
would never had been such a stately drama of death and carnage pulled off. If
Germany had dabbled in sports and taught her youth the laws of good
sportsmanship, why Belgium would never have been plundered and plucked.
As so we
could go on and on and quote the different passages of Kultur that shocked a
civilized world but are lost. It’s a good way to put it, dear reader, that a
good sport beats a piker, yea, Bo, a hundred and one back them up against the
passages of American sportsmanship and they woys.
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