What we liked about this piece by the Muckraking Ida Tarbell (1857 - 1944) was that it was written some six months after the heavy handed George Creel had ceased influencing Yankee magazine editors into printing pro-American blather, and so we tend to feel that her praise of the American Doughboys was quite sincere - and praise she does! Up hill and down dale, the Doughboys can do no wrong in her eyes.
"'A great French surgeon, under whose hands scores of our boys had gone, a silent man as a rule, said to an American nurse, 'There's something in their eyes. I don't know whether it's your Monroe Doctrine, or President Wilson, or God Almighty; but they have something that other men have not.'"
Another article by Ida Tarbell can be read here.
It was later discovered that a full sixty percent of the invalided Doughboys were mentally deficient, and the Army was unable to screen them out - you can read about that here
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
