Alistair Cooke's America [antikvár]

D> rooQue A PASSAG TO AMERICA During the First World War, I was a small boy in Blackpool, a seaside town on the northwest coast of England, which was then the summertime Mecca of the cotton workers of inland Lancashire. It had hundreds of boarding houses and a stretch of sand on which it was possible to drill thousands of soldiers, since it was six miles long and, at the low tide of the Irish Sea, as much as half a mile wide. The town accordingly became a vast cantonment, and pretty soon after the United States declared war in 1917 the "doughboys" arrived. We had seven of them billeted on us. (I learned much later that the men who wrote the American Constitution put in a clause expressly forbidding the billeting of any soldier in a private house. But the Founding Fathers, with their uncanny foresight, saw to it that this prohibition did not apply to England.) I thus had the experience, extraordinary in those days for a provincial middle-class boy, of encountering in the flesh the legendary tribe of "the Yanks," who were known to us only through the silent and often baffling antics of Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford, and William S. Hart at the so-called picturedrome. The Americans moved in like a football team invading a hospital, for by the autumn of 1917 all the vigorous British conscripts had come and gone from Blackpool, and very many of them were already rotting on the fields of France. They had been succeeded by the last scrapings of the barrel, the old and the chronically frail and sick. All the "C3s," once confidently labeled as unfit for combat and assigned to the auxiliary service of the Royal Army Medical Corps, were now being desperately trained as warriors. To these brave crocks—most of whom would very soon go the way of their comparatively healthy predecessors—were added the "blue-jackets," a legion of the halt and the maimed who would today be categorized by thé Pentagon as "impaired combatant personnel" but in those honest days were known as wounded soldiers. The melding of these convalescents with the bouncing Americans was not easy. Cynical or crippled veterans of Ypres and the battles of the