THE BOOK OF DAMN
YANKEES
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE BOOK OF MANIFEST DESTINY
The Yanks remember the Lusitania
Chapter 76
What happened was that the Krauts sank a Brit ship called the dLusitania,
2Which was loaded with eYanks,
3In spite of the fact that the Krauts had warned the Yanks to stay away from Brit ships if they didn’t want to get hurt.
4Of course, the Krauts thought it would be okay to give the Yanks a slightly more serious warning,
5Because they had always thought the Yanks were kind of silly,
6And undisciplined,
7And didn’t know anything about fighting wars anyway,
8fBecause after all, just look at that gruesome little skirmish they had back there in the nineteenth century,
9gWhich proved they didn’t know anything about war.
10hThe only problem was, the Krauts had sunk a ship that had Yanks on it,
11iWhich meant that the Yanks would “Remember the Lusitania,”
12Forever,
13And would find a way to get even,
14No matter how much it cost,
15jBecause that’s the American Way,
16And so forth,
17And so on.
18Besides, the more Wilson thought about it,
19The more he realized that it was up to the Yanks to save the Europeans from themselves,
20Because it looked very much to Wilson as if the Europeans had just invented the concept of ktotal war,
21lOnly fifty years or so after Lincoln and Grant had invented it.
22This meant that somebody would have to teach the Europeans how to get along with one another,
23Because they couldn’t just keep going out and slaughtering twenty or thirty million of each other’s troops every few years or so,
24Indefinitely,
25Without causing major problems for everybody else,
26mIncluding the Yanks.
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Chapter 76 / 154