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Europe's peasants continued to be peasants. Materialists in a sense more primal than that of Adam Smith or Marx, politically inert and purchasable, they served less as anchorage than as ballast. As for Europe's conservatives, it seemed unlikely at the moment that ordinary people would ever trust them again.
In whom was man to put his hope? In himself? A Frenchwoman, remembering the magnificent selflessness of war and the millennial hours of the liberation of Paris, sorrowfully said: "We have returned to our own egos."
Man's Fate. As winter moved down through Norway and, along the Gulf of Finland, rusted the dark green, springlike grass which heavy summer had never touched, many Europeans were preoccupied with matters even more primitive than the ego. When winter came, they knew, it would trap a hundred million of them with less food for each, or little more, than American soldiers got last year in Japanese prison camps. They would be severely short of fuel, of shelter, of clothing. Millions of homes — and, in Berlin, hospitals — were without windowglass. Tuberculosis was rampant among adolescents and common among small children. Bubonic plague nuzzled at the ports of the Mediterranean.
Many would die. Many more would survive. They were no braver than other men; they could be expected, in sufficient anguish and embitterment and desolation, to turn to those stronger than themselves who offered both a will and a way.
They could also be expected, as winter tightened its vise, to confirm an enduring opinion of that nation which, in the unalterable conviction of Europeans, might have prevented much of the anguish and so might have prevented political dereliction. That nation was the U.S.
The Dream & the Judgment. Countless millions of Europeans had all their lives seen in the U.S. a dream of liberty and security, of democratic generosity and efficiency. With the American armies had come the American reality, and it was not—it could not have been—the stuff of the dream.
The people of Europe had seen, and had not failed to value, the vigor and promise and individual generosity of the American soldier. They had also seen, with the deadly discernment of peoples experienced in disaster and disillusion, how ill-raised to understand this most sophisticated of wars, and how timidly briefed in its meanings, were these same Americans. Now, in France and the Lowlands, in Germany and Austria and Italy, the people saw Americans, homesick and purposeless and often misbehaved, affronting all around them and under them with their abundance amid want, their altogether human and altogether brutal longing to get the hell out of those ruined lands, and to go home.
The offenses were not universal, nor were they solely American. By a Dutch roadside stood a sign embossed with the Maple Leaf of the Canadian Army: REMEMBER! THE DUTCH ARE OUR ALLIES! But the Americans, in their overwhelming number and voice and strength, had made Europe supremely conscious of them, and of the country from which they came. In the end, and in this autumn of unfilled need, it was not the Americans, but America, that Europe judged.