A Straight Deal or The Ancient Grudge Author:Owen Wister Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IN FRONT OP A BULLETIN BOARD There, then, are ten letters of the fifty which came to me in consequence of what I wrote in May, 1918, which was ... more »published in the American Magazine for the following November. Ten will do. To read the other forty would change no impression conveyed already by the ten, but would merely repeat it. With varying phraseology their writers either think we have hitherto misjudged England and that my facts are to the point, or they express the stereotyped American antipathy to England and treat my facts as we mortals mostly do when facts are embarrassing — side-step them. What best pleased me was to find that soldiers and sailors agreed with me, and not "high-brows" only. May, 1918, as you will remember, was a very dark hour. We had come into the war, had been in for a year; but events had not yet taken usout of the well-nigh total eclipse flung upon our character by those blighting words, "there is such a thing as being too proud to fight." The British had been told by their General that they were fighting with their backs to the wall. Since March 23d the tread of the Hun had been coming steadily nearer to Paris. Belleau Wood and Chateau-Thierry had not yet struck the true ring from our metal and put into the hands of Foch the one further weapon that he needed. French moral was burning very low and blue. Yet even in such an hour, people apparently American and apparently grown up, were talking against England, our ally. Then and thereafter, even as to-day, they talked against her as they had been talking since August, 1914, as I had heard them again and again, indoors and out, as I heard a man one forenoon in a crowd during the earlier years of the war, the miserable years before we waked from our trance of neutrality, while our chosen l...« less