940,373 R167w The Watch on the By Brigade Sergeant-Major ALLEN C. RANKIN From Field Artillery Headquarters Second Division American Army of Occupation in Germany Government Loan Organization Second Federal Reserve District Liberty Loan Committee V-348 Brtres SERGEANT-MAJOR ALLEN C. RANKIN, returned from the Army of Occupation by order of the Secretary of War to Gen- eral Pershing, is now on furlough, technically granted at Camp Meigs, Washington. Brigade Sergeant-Major Rankin en- listed with the 12th Field Artillery of the Regular Army at St. Asaph, Fort Myer, Virginia, which was constituted with the 5th and 6th Marines, the 9th and 23d Infantry, and the 15th and 17th Field Artillery into the Second Division of the American Expedition- ary Forces. The Second, which suf- fered a 125 per cent replacement from its entrance into action in March, 1918, to the signing of the Armistice in No- vember, 1918, and which captured one- fourth of all prisoners taken by the A. E. F., went through the first and great action of Chateau Thierry, through Soissons, the Argonne and Argonne- Meuse engagements, Mont Blanc and the last Verdun battles. The only important battle of the war in which ‘ it missed service was Cantigny. Ran- kin was twice gassed and was wounded at Soissons, but returned to the bri- gade in eight days, going with them into Germany. The First and Second Divisions are the only ones in the Army of Occupation which have crossed the Rhine. UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN BOOKSTACKS FYO. ae Bolus The Watch on the Rhine By Brigade Sergeant-Major ALLEN C. RANKIN LAD to be back? Oh, boy, am I? There’s no place in all the world like these little old United States, and heaven won't look any better than Hoboken does from the deck of a homeward-bound trans- port. Never again do I want to see the face of the Liberty Lady in the Harbor unless I go out to wash it. War will be nothing but a memory to me all the rest of my life unless— > Ror Ns iy 4 ZI “@ “Gk hs —Unless the Victory Liberty Loan Falls Down! For, if it falls, there’ll come a time when I'll be lifting my right hand again and saying “I do” voluntarily and all the rest of it, and swing- ing kitpack and saddlebags, and blinking at the Jersey shore line, and facing forward once more on the western front. If it fails, Germany is going to war again before I’m too old to get back in the line. She’s cowed, and crushed, and conquered now, but there’s fire down under her ashes, and some day it’s going to blaze un- less we keep the fire hose right in front of her eyes; and that fire hose is nothing else but her fear of the American people. The people of Germany are figuring today that they can beat Belgium and France and Italy and England, all together. They know, though, that they can never bully the world if the American people stand against them, but they are planning and scheming and hoping to shift the American people. In that hope they are watching the Victory Liberty Loan. By its failure or its success the German people will judge if we, the American people, want to hold the victory we have won. If the Victory Loan doesn’t go across with a whiz and a bang that will prove that our country backs the righteousness of the war now just as it backed us while we fought at the front, Ger- many is going to take heart. Germany is going to say, “Oh, yes, the Americans came into the war, and while they were in it, they fought to win; but now they are sorry that they went in, and they will not fight us again. The time is with us when we must pay through the nose, but the time will come when we will have ended the payment. And then —,” ‘Then will come another war, and its time will not be so far off that the crowd of us can’t get in again. For it will be the same kind of war all over again, and we can’t, before God, keep out of that kind and hold our nation’s honor. How do I know? _ Since December I’ve been in the Rhine Val- ley, in the districts that the pacifists, ante-war and post-war, love to call “the Germany of the Christmas tree, the Germany of Heine and Goethe, the Germany of Bach and Beethoven, the Germany of legend and folk song, the Ger- many of peace and beauty.” I’ve been quar- tered in German homes. Because I'd come from Milwaukee I understand German, and I came to know what these Germans thought of us and of the rest of the world. They weren't -Prussians, these men and women of Neuweid and Trier and Coblenz and of the little villages along the Rhine. They are the people whom we had half-believed to be victims of Prussian- ism. But are they glad that the Kaiser had been overthrown and his system disestab- lished? ‘They are not! With somber eyes they watched us. With furtive queries they plied us. The men who’d fought in the German Army had nothing to say, but the old men would come sneaking around, always with some trivial reason, but always with the questions, “What do your people think of the war now? Are they not divided about it? And will they trust more billions and billions to your government for another Loan now that the war is ended?” “You bet they will,” we told them. They went away shaking their heads. Why do they care about whether or not the people of the United States subscribed to the Victory Liberty Loan? we asked ourselves. At first we couldn’t answer. The Germans themselves answered us after awhile. From them we came to know that they hadn’t ex- pected, even when our government went into war against them, that the American people would stand back of it. They thought that the Germans in America were going to be strong enough to hold the nation from real support of the war against Germany. The first Liberty Loan punctured that belief. The second Lib- erty Loan tore a hole init. The Third Liberty Loan left it flat. The Fourth Liberty Loan pulled off the rubber from the wheel. For when even those cities that the Germans thought their strongholds, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnatti, “your Milwaukee,” as they said to me, helped to send the Loans skyrocketing, Germany knew that the people of the United States were solid against her. She knew that not only the governmental machinery but the money and the spirit of the United States fought her. In the knowledge that unlimited munitions were coming to millions of men, Germany smashed. The fear of 1919 ended the war in 1918. But, with the Armistice signed, Germany waits. She must pay the piper, but payment can not take forever. Once before, when Bon- aparte conquered her, she paid, but the old men in whose homes the Army of Occupation is quartered today served in an Army of Occupa- tion in France in 1871. The wheel turns, they tell each other and their sons and grandsons. “We can not win from you,” they tell us. “You are too rich, too rash, too young! But, this war done, your people may not care what hap- pens. Even now we hear they are indifferent. And in fifteen, twenty years, who knows?” And so they keep watch there in the Rhine Valley, as they keep watch throughout Ger- many, for the barometer that shall teli them how America feels, the barometer of the Vic- tory Liberty Loan. If that shall tell them that the people of the United States no longer care enough for a just cause to pay with thanksgiv- ing the cost of their victory, then the fire under the ashes of Germany militarism will glow un- til the day when it may dare to blaze once more. | | ab a tee ae tg We were on the march through Luxembourg on a November Sunday when a crowd of us loitered beside the road, revelling in the quiet -and lovely serenity of the sheltered country- side. The Second had gone through the twenty-eighth of May at Chateau Thierry, through Soissons and the Argonne, through Saint Mihiel and the Argonne-Meuse. We had charged up the Lookout Mountain slope of Mont Blanc under the fire of the German guns. We had fought in the last Verdun battle. From March until November we had gone for- ward without rest, sometimes going without sleep for seventy-two hours. Now, victorious, in the enemy’s country and in peace, we rested. suddenly a motor car swung around the turn of a little church. In front of us it came to a sharp halt. We sprang to attention as _ General John Lejeune, commanding general of the Second, spoke. ‘“Who’s your ranking non- commissioned officer ?” ity SITs “Why aren’t you all at services?” We had no answer. No one had even thought to go. “How long have you been in this Division?” “Since it was organized, sir.” “I should think that any one who has gone through what you have, and come out of it, would want to thank God.” Come to think of it, we did.. Without a word we went down to the little church. There, remembering the men who had started out with us and who would not go back with us, we gave our thanks. Isn’ t the Victory Liberty Loan the church down the road for the American nation; the chance to thank God for life, for liberty, for peace; the place of promise that this peace and freedom won by the blood of the men who fell in France shall not be forfeited by our indif- ference? Because I can not forget the look on the faces of boys lying dead on the field at Chateau Thierry, because I can not forget the bombed hospitals and the shattered villages; because I can not forget the brave, blithe wounded who crowd the homecoming ships I am daring to sound this trumpet before the walls of Jericho. Not for us who have come through do I ask remembrance; but for those who come back to you maimed and for those who will not come ‘back do I ask recollection of what the war cost. That they may not have died in vain it is our nation’s task to watch, even as the German watches. That the German may know that we are not forgetting, not faltering in our great task, it is the first and paramount duty of the people of the United States to make this peace permanent by putting upon it the great seal of the Victory Liberty Loan. When that is set, the German will know that the American na- tion echoes the battle cry of the Second, “What we take, we hold.” We have taken peace. Let us hold it. For, unless we hold it now, the day will come when the great gray ships will be slipping out of the harbors again; and it will be our fault then that dead boys will be lying on the fields of France. It’s up to you, to me, to all of us here, to make this the last war with Germany. For the sake of the men who died, for the sake of other boys who will die if we fail, will you do your part in the Victory Liberty Loan that the Watch on the Rhine may know that we are united in triumph as we were united in war?