[Footnote: I have in mind the transportation and supply of two million
troops overseas. Prof. Wesley Mitchell points out that the total
production of goods after our entrance into the war did not greatly
increase in volume over that of the year 1916; but that production for
war purposes did increase.] But among those most affected by the
stereotype, there was no place for the consideration of what the
fruits of victory were, or how they were to be attained. Therefore,
aims were ignored, or regarded as automatic, and victory was
conceived, because the stereotype demanded it, as nothing but an
annihilating victory in the field. In peace time you did not ask what
the fastest motor car was for, and in war you did not ask what the
completest victory was for. Yet in Paris the pattern did not fit the
facts. In peace you can go on endlessly supplanting small things with
big ones, and big ones with bigger ones; in war when you have won
absolute victory, you cannot go on to a more absolute victory. You
have to do something on an entirely different pattern. And if you lack
such a pattern, the end of the war is to you what it was to so many
good people, an anticlimax in a dreary and savorless world.
This marks the point where the stereotype and the facts, that cannot
be ignored, definitely part company. There is always such a point,
because our images of how things behave are simpler and more fixed
than the ebb and flow of affairs.
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