We fight once more for freedom. For the fifth time in our history we draw the sword in the cause of liberty. The Revolution won the freedom of the nation. In 1812 we fought for the freedom of the seas. The Civil War was waged for the preservation of the Union and the liberation of the slaves. We went to war with Spain that Cuba might be free. Now we enter the Great War to preserve democracy and to insure the freedom of the world. And France, after an interim of nearly seven-score years, is our ally once again. In order to draw closer the bonds of our ancient friendship, to hearten us in the tremendous task which we have undertaken, and to place at our disposal the knowledge for which she has paid in blood and tears, France sent to us across perilous seas a mission composed of her most illustrious men. She sent them as a reminder that she was our first friend among the nations and an old comrade in arms, and because her ideals and aspirations are identical with our own. It was as though she had stretched out a hand across the ocean and laid it on America’s shoulder and had said, “Sister, well done.”

Though the coming of these men stirs our souls and grips our imagination, we are still too close to the picture to perceive its full beauty and grandeur. Real appreciation of its significance to ourselves and to the world can come only with the years. When time grants it the justice of perspective, the visit of the French envoys to our shores will be recognized as one of the turning-points in our history. It will prove as epochal as the landing of the Pilgrims, as the coming of Rochambeau, as the emancipation of the slaves. Meanwhile we must not make the mistake of looking on it as merely a picturesque incident which afforded an excuse for processions and banquets and addresses of welcome. It has a far deeper meaning; it means that History, in writing the story of the American people, has begun a new chapter.

Because I have myself marched with the armies of France, because in her hospitals I have seen the endless rows of white-bandaged wounded and upon her hillsides the other rows of white crosses, because I have witnessed the desecration of her churches and the destruction of her cities and the cruelties inflicted on her civil population by a brutal and ruthless soldiery, because from the bottom of my heart I admire her courage, her serenity, her abstinence from all complaint, because I appreciate the sentiment which prompted her to send us these great men as a pledge of her friendship and faith, and because I wish those of my country-people who have not had the opportunity of knowing the French as well as I have to understand what manner of men are these, our brothers in arms, I have written this little book.

On the 25th of April, 1917,—it is a date which we shall teach our children,—the anchor of the Lorraine, which brought the commissioners from France, rumbled down off the Virginia shore. The route by which the mission traveled from the Capes of the Chesapeake to the Capital held in its one hundred and eighty-five miles more places of historical significance to the American people than any other route of like distance that could be laid out on a map of the world. At Hampton Roads, where the commissioners boarded the Mayflower, which was to take them up the Potomac to Washington, was fought the first battle between ironclads; a battle which sent the wooden navies of Europe to the scrap-heap and changed the history of the world. Across the bay the visitors could see the mouth of the James, up which sailed, two centuries ago, Captain John Smith and his fellow-adventurers, to found on its shores the first permanent English settlement in the New World. A half-hour’s steam brought them to the mouth of another river, the York, where once lay the frigates of the Comte de Grasse, the lilied flag of France drooping from their sterns. Here one of the commissioners, the young Marquis de Chambrun, might have said with pardonable pride, “A few miles up that river my grandfather, the Marquis de Lafayette, helped General Washington to win the battle which assured to the American Colonies their independence.”

Now the Mayflower entered the Potomac, a stream whose every mile is peopled with the ghosts of the history-makers. Here the imaginative Frenchmen, leaning over the steamer’s rail, with the incomparable landscape slipping past, could not but have yielded to the river’s mystic spell. Lulled by the ripple of the water running aft along the hull, they found themselves living in this region’s storied and romantic past. Indians in paint and feathers slipped silently along in their barken war-canoes. Lean and sun-bronzed white men, clad in the fringed buckskin of the adventuring frontiersman, floated past them down the stream. A square-rigged merchantman poked its inquisitive bowsprit around a rocky headland, seeking a spot at which its band of colonists might land. Frigates, flying the flag of England and with the black muzzles of guns peering from their tiers of ports, cautiously ascended, the leadsmen in the shrouds sounding for river-bars. Log forts and trading posts and mission stations once again crowned the encircling hills. Forgotten battles blew by on the evening breeze. A yellow dust-cloud rose above the river-bank and out of it emerged a plodding wagon train. The smoke of pioneer camp-fires spiraled skyward from those rich Maryland valleys, where in reality sleek cattle browsed in lush-green pastures and the orchards were pink and white with promised fruit. Borne on the night wind came the rumble of ghostly cannonading, and the thoughts of the visitors harked back to the month-long battle of the Wilderness, fought yonder, amid the Virginia forests, by the armies of Grant and Lee. Dawn came, and out of the mist to starboard loomed the peninsula of Indian Head, where the ridiculed inventor, Langley, flew, for the first time in history, a motor-driven aeroplane—forerunner of the thousands of aircraft which to-day swoop and soar and circle above the battle-line. In the very waters through which the Mayflower was now ploughing, a poor Irish schoolmaster, John Philip Holland, evolved the marvel of the undersea boat and thereby did more to shape the course of this war than Haig or Hindenburg or Marshal Joffre himself. Now above the port rail, high on its wooded hillside, showed the stately white façade of Mount Vernon, the home of the founder of this nation and the first leader of its armies, and, close by, the modest brick tomb where the great soldier and his wife lie sleeping. Rounding the river bend, the mighty shaft of the Washington Monument rose skyward like a pointing finger, as though emphasizing the motto graved upon our coins. Alexandria, with its white steeples and its old, old houses, came in view, and beyond it the templed hills of Arlington, where rest, in their last bivouac, the men who died for the Union. Now the long journey of the Frenchmen was almost finished; their destination was at hand. Slowly, with much clanging of bells and shouting of orders, the white yacht sidled up to the quay, the gangway was run out, the Marine Band burst into Rouget de l’Isle’s splendid Hymn, and the envoys, filing between massed rows of bluejackets whose rifles formed a lane of burnished steel, set foot on the soil of the United States, not as strangers, but as allies and friends.

Each step in the route of the commissioners through Washington was a lesson in American history, and it was this that gave the route its great dignity and significance. It was not the cheering throngs that lined it, or the thousands of flags that fluttered from the buildings on either side, but the silent statues and the dumb reminders of those who had gone before, who had created this nation and had laid down their lives that this nation might live, and who had come back this day to charge the route with their unseen presence. The Navy Yard, where the commissioners landed, was burned, with the rest of Washington, by the British in 1814, yet now, barely a century later, its foundries were roaring night and day in the manufacture of guns to aid Britain. Swinging from Seventh Street into Pennsylvania Avenue, there rose in the path of the visitors the splendid dome of the Capitol, and beneath that dome the representatives of eight-and-forty States were enacting into law the measures which would send to the aid of France millions of American soldiers and billions of American dollars. At the foot of Capitol Hill the envoys passed the Naval Monument, “In memory of the officers, seamen, and marines who fell in defense of the Union and Liberty of their country.”