30 



The Journal of Heredity 



in France, has some bearing on the ra- 

 cial distribution of the readiness to 

 fight and of physical courage : 



"It is interesting to learn about the 

 relative fighting ability of the various 

 races in this game. The Norman and 

 Breton Frenchmen and the North 

 French generally are the fighting men 

 of France. Today they compose prac- 

 tically all the fighting troops left. The 

 Scotchmen are the top-hole fighters of 

 them all, Boches and Allies, and that 

 seems to be admitted by all alike, while 

 the Italians of certain divisions are ut- 

 terly unreliable. A fighting Italian is 

 as scarce as the dodo bird, in spite of 

 all the newspaper bull to the contrary. 



. . They are used entirely for 

 road building and stevedore work about 

 as far back of the lines as they can get. 

 Some French troops told us that the 

 Italians took over the sector we left 

 between the Vesle and the Aisne when 

 we pulled out of there, and in two days 

 they lost practically all that we had won 

 across the Vesle and were being wal- 

 loped soundly by the Boches. 



"There is not a bit of use denying 

 that the Boches are brave men and fight 

 like heroes. Their aviators are the fin- 

 est fighters of the lot, with the excep- 

 tion of the British, perhaps. But how 

 anyone can show greater sand or finer 

 dash than the Boche aviators, I cannot 

 understand. They may be devils, but 

 they are fighting devils and have guts 

 through and through. Between them 

 and the Italians give me the Boches 

 every time. 



"As for our own troops, their fight- 

 ing ability is in direct proportion to the 

 Americans in the various units. Get a 

 draft outfit filled with the kind that is 

 swept up around our east side and it is 

 just about as unsafe as anything in the 

 Army; given an outfit like the Yankee 

 division, or some of them with a full 

 proportion of Americans, and there is 

 nothing they are afraid of, nothing that 

 will stop them short of death itself. In 

 fact they're too darned brave if any- 

 thing. That idiotic 'melting pot' idea is 

 blown to the devil by this war if they 

 tell the truth about the thing. But it 



is ten to one bet that they will lie and 

 smooth the matter over in such a man- 

 ner that you all at home will believe 

 that anyone with an American uniform 

 on is as good as another smiilarly 

 dressed. Fighting men are born that 

 way ; you cannot drill the real stuff into 

 anyone at all. 



"I think that the Southerners and the 

 New Englanders are the best of our lot, 

 with no choice between the two. But 

 you really cannot hand the palm to any 

 of the Americans ; they are all equally 

 full of the greatest spirit that any man 

 ever saw in war. 



"I have seen no negroes fighting and 

 have heard very dififerent reports of 

 them, but the experience of the French 

 and British is that the lower races can- 

 not stand the strain of this war, par- 

 ticularly shell fire, which is the hardest 

 thing of all on the morale of troops. 

 And I do not imagine that they are very 

 good fighting troops, though they are 

 invaluable as working troops, and one 

 sees thousands of them everywhere on 

 the roads right back of the lines and 

 from there back to the docks at Brest 

 itself." 



The above, from a letter not intended 

 for publication, is more or less con- 

 firmed by other observers. Of course 

 it does not take into account the influ- 

 ence of training. It is an open secret, 

 however, that in the first battle of the 

 Marne, it was the men of Mediter- 

 ranean race from the south of France 

 who gave way and had to be rallied and 

 replaced by sterner material from the 

 north of France. 



JOHN JAY chapman's COMMENT 



It is interesting also to see the com- 

 ments on the above letter by a distin- 

 guished man of letters, Mr. John Jay 

 Chapman, who does not believe in ra- 

 cial values in psychic qualities: 



1. "Many thanks for letting me see 

 the enclosed. I don't doubt that some 

 races fight better than others. But I 

 doubt whether you can scheme to pre- 

 serve any particular race without doing 

 more harm than good. If you accept 

 the test of survival as the best test of a 

 race, why it's only scientific to let the 



