A march of victory in the center—Held on the left—But full speed on the second day—The 89th stays in—Veterans in leash—The 90th to the river wall—The 5th pivoting—The Borne at last taken by the 79th—The 5th gets across the Meuse—Varying resistance to the main advance—Rainbows give way to French entry into Sedan—In motion from Meuse to Moselle on the last day—Isolated divisions in Flanders—Every village in France—The folly of war.

One who moved about in the days before and the night before the attack, from the railheads to the front, his vision embracing the whole panorama, no longer need talk of what America was going to do in the war. He saw what America had done since September 26th between the ruins of the old trench system and the Kriemhilde Stellung, and he knew that the army which was to spring into action at dawn on the morning of November 1st was the greatest in our history.

When the simmering volcano of routine artillery fire broke into eruption at 3.30, racking the earth with concussions and assaulting the heavens with blinding flashes, as the stream of shells from the larger caliber of the forest of guns passed over the streams from the smaller caliber, it seemed that all the Germans in the front line must be mashed into the earth. If the preliminary bombardment left any alive, then that monstrous curtain of shell-bursts in front of the advancing infantry, and the trench mortar fire, and the sheets of machine-gun bullets that increased the strength of the shield, must hold them trussed to the earth until it passed over them and our men were upon them.

So it was with the 2nd Division, where I followed up the advance. With the seeming facility with which the easier hurdles are taken in a steeple-chase, the wave of the 2nd had swept over the fragmentary trenches of the Kriemhilde system beyond Sommerance, where the great attacks of the 1st and the 82nd had died down, and our line had been little changed by the general attack of October 14th, which had mastered the Kriemhilde in the center. There were occasional enemy shell-bursts in patches of woods and on obvious points, fired by German guns, halting in retreat or before withdrawal from their old positions, and occasional bullets cracked by from the left in the region of the Bourgogne forest; but all this seemed only the venomous and hopeless spite of a rearguard action that was breaking into a rout. Only at long intervals did you see a prone, still figure in khaki on the earth; and our wounded were not numerous. German prisoners were being rounded up from bushes and gullies, and in gray files they were crossing the fields to the rear, as the combings of a drive which was moving as fast this time as the pencilings on the map of high ambition. Admired by the Allies for our speed, we were showing it now in legs unlimbered and free of the chains that had encompassed us for over a month.

It had ceased to be a battle on the way to Bayonville-et-Chennery. It was a march, a joyous march of victory, more appealing than any city parade, you may be sure. Our guns and transport were coming along roads which were free of any except a rare vagrant shell-burst. Indeed, everything in the 2nd's sector was going according to schedule. It was good to be with the 2nd, as I had learned in June and July in the ChÂteau-Thierry operations. One stopped and watched for the figures ahead to appear in their mobile swiftness in open spaces, as they came out of woods and ravines. One knew by instinct that we were going over the heights and down the apron this time. The weather was with us, too. After the long period of chill rains and hardships, a kindly sunshine filtered through the leaden sky. There had been more thrilling days in the war, thrilling with triumph and apprehension for me: when I was in Brussels, before the German avalanche arrived; when I saw the British battle fleet go out to sea; when I saw the French driving the Germans back in the first battle of the Marne; when I saw the British and French in their retreat before the German offensives of 1918; when I saw our first contingent land in France. But the crowning day was the one which brought forth the confession of the German communiquÉ that we had broken the German line.

This is not saying, though the Fifth Corps in the center reached its objectives, except for a few hundred yards at some points, that everything in the schedule went without a hitch along the whole front. Our movement was fan-shaped, swinging toward the loop of the Meuse in its bend westward. The center of gravity, as I understood the plan, was to pass from the Fifth Corps to the First on the left, whose flank was on the Bourgogne forest, with an intricate tactical problem to solve in scalloping and flank maneuvers. Here we met severe resistance from the Germans, who were still inclined to hold their bastion. Though the 78th had pounded its old enemy, the Loges Wood, with shells of big calibers from heavy American and French batteries assigned to it, the Germans still clung to their machine-guns; and though the Bourgogne Wood was thoroughly gassed, it poured in a strong flanking fire, and even sent out one counter-attack. The 77th was checked by heavy casualties in its effort to storm Champigneulle. The 80th, also fresh and impetuously determined to let nothing stop it, found the Germans showing their old form in defending woods and hills, and had to repeat their attacks and repulse counter-attacks; for our left, which had the longest swing to make, was delayed, while our center, taking over the center of gravity as the result of its advance, had gone ahead for four and five miles.

The Rainbows of the 42nd, in reserve with the First Corps, were fractious. Weren't they in sight of the rainbow's end of their year in France? Let them in, and they would take it. Fine troops the 78th, 77th, and 80th, no doubt, thought the Rainbows, but the 42nd was the 42nd, and belonged to a class by itself for this kind of work. The three divisions of the First Corps were not offering iridescent travelers in the rear a holiday on the path they had blazed. They were about to enjoy it themselves.

The enemy was making his stand on the left to prevent our wholesale capture of prisoners, when he found that the combined movement of the French and American armies would put him into a trap; but the next day he was out of the Loges Wood and Champigneulle, and retreating through the Bourgogne forest. All three divisions took up the pursuit, to make up for lost time—and catch up with the procession. They were to show that they could move fast, too. On the 2nd they made four and five miles, and on the 3rd they kept up the same gait, which was a marvelous performance in deployment and contact and endurance.

The Fifth Corps in the center faced the final heights of the whale-back, the Barricourt crest. For its support it had an overwhelming concentration of artillery fire, which Summerall, the gunner, required in order to keep his word to "go through." Lejeune's race-horse 2nd surpassed its own record for speed, as we have seen. Not only did it take its own objectives, but it was called on to send support elements over to assist the left. It was glad to send support elements anywhere, if they filled a gap which the 1st might have filled.

The 89th, the other division of the Fifth Corps, was thrown head on against the Barricourt heights. Wright had been among his officers and men, making them feel that all the Mississippi valley was calling on them for all there was in them in this attack. They might have been gassed and mired in the Bantheville Wood, they might be tired; but their great day had come. They were "going through." The Stokes mortars kept up with the assault waves, even dragging wagons of ammunition with them; a brigade of artillery was following up the infantry two hours after the attack began. Prodigious effort had a road through the mire of Bantheville Wood by 10.30 in the morning, with all the divisional transport moving up. No less than those hard-shell veterans of the 2nd, the 89th went ahead from the start in the conviction that success was certain. Before that day was over they ran into nests of machine-guns which ordinarily ought to have repulsed the most gallant charge, but the waves of infantry, with supports fast on their heels, had tasted victory in its intoxicating depths, and they overcame every obstacle. That night the Barricourt ridge was ours; when the Germans stated that their line was broken, it meant that we had broken German resistance on the whale-back. The way was open to the Meuse, and Germans in front of the First Corps had better make the most of the darkness of the night of the 1st for retreat.

As the two divisions of the Fifth Corps, the 2nd and the 89th, in the pell-mell rush to get the final crest, which was of such decisive importance in the strategic plan, had become extended, the shorter advances required of them during the next two days, which included some stout, if uneven, resistance, by the Germans, allowed them time to get transport in order and bring up more artillery. Those old hounds of the 1st, with their mouths watering, were moving as close up to the front as their schedule would permit, and straining at the leash. The 89th, having had such a grueling time in going over the ridge, and such hard marching after the exhaustion of cleaning up Bantheville Wood, might be considered nominally expended, if not in fact. When the Fifth Corps gave an order that the 1st take over the 89th's place, General Wright objected. Take out his Kansans and Missourians! They were only getting their second wind. They were coming as strong as a flood on the Missouri. The order was revoked; a second one later was scotched by the same effective protest. Meanwhile the General was up at the front, urging on his tired men with the persuasive argument of the Corps threat. So the 89th was to remain in until the finish, while the 1st, licking its chops and panting, swinging this way and that, was begging: "Just give us one bite!"

Prospects were no better for the 32nd, in reserve with the Third Corps on the right. Everybody could not be in this battle; the 5th and the 90th were willing that the Arrows should study the ground they had won, but they might not participate in winning more. Ely's and Allen's men were preoccupied with that undertaking themselves, and too busy to look after tourist parties. Whereat the Arrows sharpened their points in impatience, as they pried forward, and tightened their bowstrings, ready for a flight if they could draw the bows which, if they had the chance, would show the divisions in front the character of veteran skill.

If the Fifth Corps took its objectives, you might be certain that General Hines of the Third Corps on the right would take his, and maintain his reputation for brevity by reporting the fact with no more embellishment than a ship's log. If he had written CÆsar's commentaries, they would have been compressed into one chapter. The former commander of the bull-dog 4th Division, who had been on the Meuse flank under the cross artillery fire from September 26th, knew his ground. As the Third Corps had its flank on the Meuse and was to swing in toward the river bank, it had the shortest advance of the three corps to make.

The Texans of the 90th, on the left of his Corps, had been fretting for a week in face of the Freya Stellung and the Andevanne ridge, which they were now to take. In one of his trips about the front, General Allen had had his artillery commander killed at his side by a shell. His Texans were the kind that would carry out his careful plans for the attack. Barrages were cleverly arranged; machine-gunners put on high points for covering fire. On the 1st the Texans made short work of the Freya Stellung, reaching their objectives at every point, and eager to go ahead. The Germans put in a first-class division against the Texans on the night of the 2nd; but that did not make any difference. It was a furious give and take at some points, but on the night of the 2nd they had Villers-devant-Dun and Hill 212. The next day, in face of only desultory shelling, it was a matter of tireless maneuver and scattered fighting, with the worst punishment from low-flying German planes, raking our lines with machine-gun bullets. That night the 90th was organizing on the Halles ridge, preparatory to striking for the river bank.

The 5th, the right division of the Third Corps, as it pivoted on the Meuse bank, had patrols studying the river for a crossing at Brieulles and beyond on November 1st. The next morning its left entered ClÉry-le-Petit, a mile farther down the river from Brieulles, and cleaned up the horseshoe bluff known as the Punch-bowl. Now we had word that the Fourth French Army, on the west, and our First Corps, on the east, of the Bourgogne forest, in their rapid pursuit were out of touch with the enemy. This prompted energetic measures by the 5th in crossing the river, which General Ely was to apply in dashing initiative that will hold our attention later.

By this time on that shell-cursed western slope of the Meuse where many of our divisions had fought under the cross-fire from the galleries, there was only an occasional burst. Apart from the taking of the whale-back, there was another reason—the action east of the Meuse, where our divisions, coÖperating with the French, had sprung to the attack on the morning of November 1st no less energetically than on the main battlefield. The Yankees of the 26th, as the only National Guard division then in the front line, sharing the freshened confidence of the hour, put the survivors of all four regiments in line, their sector being now farther south, over the ridges and through the woods north of Verdun, where they were hampered by bad roads and mud, which was to give them a part in keeping with their record in the last acts of the drama. The 79th was making a maneuver up the slopes of the bowl which called for initiative and consummate tactical resourcefulness. Kuhn, who had formed the division and led it, knew his men. There was nothing they would not attempt. He knew his enemy, too. A great honor had come to the 79th, the honor of storming the Borne de Cornouiller, or Hill 378, the highest of all the hills we took in the battle,—"corned willy," as the soldiers fighting for it on cold corned beef called it.

There was no rapid pursuit for them, but wicked uphill work all the way, in three days of repeated charges. Starting from the Molleville farm clearing, they had to ascend the steep, wooded slopes of the Etraye and Grande Montagne ridges, and struggle down one side and up the other of that deadly Vaux de Mille Mais and other ravines, before they were in sight of the Borne. The German grew bitter in his resistance at the thought of having to yield this favorite height, which had given his observers a far-flung view, and his artillery cover to swing the volume of fire into the flank of our Third Corps. The Borne was a bald and gently rounded ridge, with the undulating plateau-like crest, facing the bare and steep slope which the 79th had to ascend, peculiarly favorable for machine-gun defense in front, while along the bordering road to the west, in the edge of the Grande Montagne Wood, machine-guns could sweep in flank the road and the whole slope. Piles of cartridge cases which had been emptied into our waves were silent witnesses of the fire the assaults of the 79th had endured when every khaki figure was exposed on the blue sky-line, a pitilessly distinct silhouette at close range.

Checked at this point and that, taking advantage of each fresh gain in gathering their strength for another effort, the men of the 79th kept on until they had worked their way through the woods and finally overrun the crest. There in their triumph, as they looked far across the Meuse over the hills and ridges and patches of woods, they might see the very heights of the whale-back which had been their goal when they charged down the valley of Montfaucon on September 26th in their baptism of fire. That Borne was the crowning point of those frowning hills and ridges east of the Meuse, which bullet-headed Prussian staff officers, who dreamed of fighting to the last ditch, had foreseen as a line of impregnable defense on French soil, which should become as horrible a shambles as their neighbors, the hills of Verdun. They had a new and inexpressibly grateful relation now to the vineyards of France, her well-tilled fields, her flower gardens of the Riviera, and the security of the whole world—for everywhere the bullet-headed Prussian officer was becoming the protesting flotsam in the midst of a breaking army which he could not control. The 79th had gone as far as it was wanted to go in following north the course of the Meuse in that movement begun on October 8th when the 33rd crossed the Meuse and advanced on the flank of the 29th toward the Borne.

Now another division, the 5th, was to cross the Meuse. The Meuse bottoms were broad, as I have hitherto noted, and swampy in places under the heavy rains, and required that the Meuse canal as well as the river should be bridged. There were many points on the river bottoms as well as on the hills on the east bank where machine-gunners might hide. German units still being urged to stand felt the appeal to their skill of such an advantage of position; their commanders the value of holding all the Meuse heights they could to assist the retreat of the Germans on the west. The 5th, despite its daring efforts, was not to achieve a crossing until the 90th on its left had finished its longer swing. On the night of the 3rd our Third Corps measured eight miles of front on the river bank. For the 5th and the other divisions, as their fan-shaped movement toward the bend brought each in turn to the river, it was a case of patrols finding openings by night between the tornadoes of machine-gun fire, where the engineers might do the building under the protection of our artillery. Material for the bridges had to be found or brought from the rear. In this our initiative and resourcefulness were at their best.

At dark on the night of the 3rd the attempts began. The engineers went to their hazardous task of working under fire, which is harder than shooting back at your enemy. They stealthily managed to put a footbridge across the river, but when they started to build another across the canal, they met a hurricane of machine-gun and rifle fire, while the German guns concentrating upon them forced their retirement. The engineers are a patient and tireless lot, who can wait until a burst of fire has died down and then start work again. By 2 A.M. they had two footbridges across the canal. When a small column of infantry tried to cross, they were blown back by the enemy, who had evidently been watching for the target to appear. The infantry dug in between the canal and the river. This much was gained at all events.

At 9.30 the next morning came a message from the Corps, directing that "the crossing will be effected regardless of loss, as the movement of the entire Army depends upon this crossing, and it must be done at once."

There was nothing to do, then, but cross or die in the effort, without waiting for darkness. All available artillery was asked to pound the east bank of the Meuse until eight in the evening. At four in the afternoon the 5th started to lay a pontoon bridge across at ClÉry-le-Petit, where the river was 110 feet wide and 10 feet deep. The pontoons were not blown up by shell-fire quite as fast as they were put in the water. Therefore the bridge was finally completed. Under a barrage of artillery fire two battalions made a rush to cross the bridge. The German artillery began tearing them to pieces at the same time that it was tearing the bridge to pieces.

Happily the 5th was not putting all its eggs in one basket. At 6.20 another party, without any artillery preparation, succeeded in crossing the canal as well as the river at Brieulles, and once on the other side would not be budged from maintaining their narrow bridgehead in face of the plunging fire from the heights. Just below Brieulles, another battalion, which was also favored, no doubt, by the German attention being drawn to the fragile targets of the pontoons, in the most unostentatious but expeditious manner got across by using rafts, duckboards, poles, and ropes, and by swimming. The water of the river was bitter cold, but we were winning the war, and every soldier in the Meuse-Argonne was used to being wet by rain. This sopping battalion made a lodgment in Chatillon Wood, and kept warm during the night by cleaning the Germans out of it.

It appeared at midnight that the whole division would have to swing round to cross the river by way of Brieulles; but before morning the left brigade, on the north, put pontoons over successfully during the night, and crossed a battalion; for the Aces of the 5th had taken the Corps order to heart. Never let it be said that the 5th was holding up the entire Army—if it really were. General Hines was a very taciturn man, as I have remarked; and the Army staff had studied foreign methods in propaganda.

By 8 A.M. there were artillery bridges over the Meuse at Brieulles. Such speed as this ought to be encouraged by calling for more speed. Two brigades had detachments across the river. The next thing was to join up the bridgeheads and take Dun-sur-Meuse, and this immediately. General Ely, of square jaw and twinkling blue eyes, did not care who took it, so it was taken.

"Take Dun-sur-Meuse and the hill north of 292, and from there go to the east," he told one brigade. "Do not wait for the other brigade. Keep pushing up with that one battalion, and take that place."

"Keep shoving your battalions through," he told the other brigade. "Don't stop, but go through Dun. Take the shelling, and take the machine-gun fire, and push things along. You are to go to Dun unless the other fellow gets there first."

Thus Dun and the heights were taken that day, and the 5th fully established on the east bank of the Meuse. It was an accomplishment admirable in courage and skill.

The spirit of rivalry shown by the battalions rushing for Dun was that of all the divisions sweeping down the apron of the reverse slopes of the whale-back toward the river. This apron was not a smooth descent, but undulating, broken by hills, ravines, and woods, where machine-gunners could take cover and force deployment. In many instances advancing was no mere maneuver. The 89th ran into strong opposition on the heights overlooking the Meuse, and in common with all other divisions could not answer the enemy artillery, as we did not want to fire into the inhabited villages on the other bank. The 2nd met strong resistance on the 4th, which required organizing a regular attack; but, of course, it went through. Lejeune was not a man to consider any other result, or his men inclined to waste time when the 1st Division was waiting in the rear to take the 2nd's place if it so much as stubbed its toe. As we know, on critical occasions, the 2nd did not worry about casualties. Its casualty list, whose total was the heaviest of any division in France, for the final drive was over four thousand.

Enemy resistance varied with the mood of individual units. A few answered the professional call and the call of fatalism not to miss an opportunity to turn their machine-guns upon our advancing troops. Others asked only to escape or to surrender. The harder we pressed, the larger would be this class. Our own mood was that of the soldier who has his enemy in flight. Every blow was another argument for an armistice, and a further assurance of an early passage home. The elation of the chase eliminated the sense of fatigue. Abandoned guns, rifles, bombs, trench mortars, worn-out automobiles and trucks, all the stage properties of retreat were in the wake of that German army whose mighty organization had held the world in a fearful awe. We were passing through a region where houses were intact and only a few shells had fallen in the course of our advance. Villagers in a wondering delirium of joy were watching the groups of German prisoners, too weary for any emotion except a sense of relief, of officers with long faces and a glazed, despairing look in their eyes, officers who were indifferent, and occasional ones in whom the defiance of Prussian militarism still bore itself in ineffectual superciliousness; and watching these strange Americans going and coming on their errands, and the passage of our troops, guns, and transport in an urgent procession which thought of nothing except getting ahead.

The Commander-in-Chief having on the 5th directly urged all possible speed on the left toward the Meuse at Sedan, which was of course the farthest objective from our starting-point, those mouth-watering veteran hounds in reserve of the First and Fifth Corps at last had their leashes removed, and joined the pack in full cry. Taking the place of the 78th, the men of the 42nd knew now that there was a rainbow's end, and they meant that it should go to none other than the Rainbow Division. March is hardly the word for their speed; gallop is a better one. On the 8th they had reached Wadelincourt, a suburb across the river from Sedan, in their wonderful dash. Their Rainbow ambition having considered all northern France as their objective, they found that they were out of the American sector, and accordingly must be "side-slipped." The French took Sedan. There was historical fitness in the French poilus, in their faded blue, being the first troops to enter that town, where a French disaster, due to a travesty of imperial leadership, had glorified the Hohenzollern dynasty, which was now a travesty with its armies in dissolution.

The 1st, swinging over to the left but still remaining with the Fifth Corps, had a long march before reaching the front of the 80th, which it relieved. When it received the word to go, it developed a speed which was sufficient reason for its being in at the finish, without depending upon its record in previous actions. Our pioneer veterans had two days and two nights in line, advancing ten miles. Then they were "squeezed out" by the "side-slipping" of the 42nd from before Sedan. From the morning of November 5th, when the call came to them, until midnight of November 7th-8th, their units had fought for forty-eight hours, and marched from thirty to forty-five miles. Will the race-horse 2nd please take note of this?

If the Arrows of the 32nd, the third of the veteran divisions in reserve, had had to go home without being in the final drive, when the 42nd was in it, our army staff would have been even more unpopular than it was. They, too, had this chance. As the Third Corps' front broadened with its advance over the heights on the other side of the river they took over a portion of the sector of the 15th French Colonials, where they were driving the enemy in most uncivil fashion when the flag fell.

The Texans of the 90th had to swing their right flank to the river bank in liaison with the flank of the 5th, and keep firm liaison with the 89th on their left. They faced very resolute fire from the other bank in their bridge-building, which had to be done under most troublesome conditions after some expensive reconnoitering, in which the Texans did not allow artillery or machine-gun fire to interfere with their pioneering audacity. On the 9th they had orders to cross. That night they went over their new bridge under a pitiless fire. While one detachment went into Stenay, which lies under a bluff, where it had a busy time in cleaning up the town, the other detachment pressed on into Baalon Wood.

Meanwhile the Kansans and Missourians of the 89th had been preparing, at the same time with the 2nd of the Fifth Corps, to cross and take the heights of Inor. As soon as their outposts reached the bank, their patrols had begun swimming the river under machine-gun fire. They were assigned some German pontoons, which they transformed into rafts. The first was rowed across; the others were pulled across with ropes. Seventy-five men being crowded on each raft, they put one whole battalion on the opposite bank while footbridges were being smashed by the enemy artillery as fast as the engineers could build them. The battalion, having taken over a hundred prisoners, pressed on to Autreville. It goes without saying that the 2nd had also effected a crossing—and under equally trying conditions.

Every battalion over the Meuse, every rod of ground gained, was considered a further argument for the Germans to accept the terms of the armistice now in their hands. Until the word to cease fire came, the Army would go on fighting; at dawn on the 11th, when the German delegates were signing their names on Marshal Foch's train our Second Army, weak in numbers and strong in heart, began carrying out the orders that had been planned in the Saint-Mihiel sector, where several of our veteran divisions had been resting after being expended in the Meuse-Argonne, and we had the 7th and 88th among our new divisions. On the right was the 92nd, colored, National Army, nearest of all our troops to the former German frontier, who were the first to cross it, I understand, in their successful charge. To say that the 28th and the 33rd were also in the action is sufficient. They were going ahead, and the German infantry was resisting with machine-gun fire which caused numerous casualties, and the German artillery was responding with a heavy bombardment at some points, when word was flashed through from Marshal Foch to our General Headquarters, and through to the Second Army, and out to the regiments and battalions, that at 11 A.M. hostilities would cease.

The Second Army advance was immediately stopped. Everywhere east of the Meuse our troops were advancing on the morning of the 11th. The 81st was engaged on the flank of the veteran 26th, which had been ceaselessly pushing the enemy over the hills since November 1st, and was now approaching the plain. The 79th, after taking the Borne de Cornouiller, had faced round in a rapid and brilliant maneuver, pressing over the rim of the bowl from the Grande Montagne and from Belleu Wood, in whose fox-holes three of our divisions had suffered, and moving down into the plain had taken Damvillers, and was now storming the last of the three hills between its line and the plain of the WoËvre. The men were wrathful at being stopped. They wanted to finish the job: to take the last of the hills.

At many points where our infantry units were far beyond our communications and infiltrating around hills and through woods, it took some time to reach the rapidly moving advance detachments with the news that they were to cease firing and go no farther. Particularly was this true in front of the Fifth Corps, whose skirmishers, having just crossed the river, were taking the bit in their teeth. A few elements were still engaging the German rearguard at eleven, unaware that the war was over, while on all the remainder of the front from Switzerland to Holland there was silence for the first time in four years—and the mills of hell had ceased grinding.

Two of the divisions which had been in line on the first day of the Meuse-Argonne battle were in line on the last. Two others which had helped break the old trench system on September 26th, the 37th and the 91st, were to see the finish far from our army family, on the plains of Belgium. Isolated in an odd Flemish world of level fields broken by canals, the two were attached to different French corps in that Allied force of British and French and Belgians under the Belgian King, and under the direct command of General Degoutte, which had disengaged Ypres, recovered Ostend, Bruges, Roulers, and Courtrai, when on October 31st our men joined in that tide of victory which was soon to flow into Brussels itself. In three days they made eight miles against irregular rearguard action. In taking the low ridge commanding the Scheldt, they were under a heavy artillery reaction of the Germans in protecting the retreat across the river. The Ohioans on November 2nd, in face of the concentrations of gun-fire, were able to slip small detachments across on bridges improvised from tree-trunks and timbers taken from shattered houses, and eventually, that night, to pass over several battalions on a temporary footbridge; the 91st and the French divisions were unsuccessful in reaching the other bank except by this one bridge. The Pacific Coast men, with their usual intrepidity, were planning to swim the river, but after three days of continued advance, which included the capture of the large town of Audenarde, they and the Ohioans were given a rest by the corps commands. On the 10th they were put in line again, but they did not overtake the line pursuing the retreating enemy before his capitulation.

Some American units, besides the 27th and 30th Divisions with the British, had been isolated from the first from the American family. American hospitals in base towns on both the British and French fronts were an evidence, from the days of our neutrality, of that work of war which knows no national allegiance. Volunteer ambulance sections, maintaining the traditions of the American Field Service, continued to the end to serve with French divisions; and indeed, many of the former volunteers who had preferred to prepare for commissions in the French army might be come upon unexpectedly in the horizon blue uniform. Engineer troops for which our Allies had made an early request might be buried in obscure parts of the front, to come to light only in the shadow of an emergency which, as at Cambrai and in the German March offensive, turned engineer troops into combatants; or again, as our own demands grew, to return to our own fold. Air squadrons, as well as individual aviators, served in valiant anonymity on Allied fronts, in many cases never seeing the American front, which yet wanted for aviation. So wide was the dispersion of Americans throughout France that it is safe to say that hardly a single commune of the country has gone without sight of the soldier from overseas. In due time the far-flung legions would all have come home to an integral army; but the problem of keeping in touch with units which believed themselves lost to the sight of their comrades was not a simple one, and yet a problem that must be faced. How was the motor park, isolated in French barracks at Epinal, or the forestry unit in the Jura or the Pyrenees, to be assured that somewhere in the inner circles of hierarchy its faithful service was being noted and appreciated?

Most isolated of all, though they received due meed of honor from the French with whom they served, were certain colored regiments. Recruited from various National Guard organizations in northern States, they had arrived in a training area in France after a usual period of service as labor troops in the S. O. S., and were formed into a provisional 93rd Division, which was not, however, to be assembled. In the spring the regiments were assigned to various French divisions for trench service, at the request of the French staff, which had developed long experience with colored troops in many African campaigns. For this service the Americans were equipped throughout with French mustard-colored khaki uniforms, French rifles, packs, gas masks, and helmets, which still further accentuated their isolation. The varying fortunes of trench warfare in the Argonne and about Saint-Mihiel seasoned their experience for a due part in the repulse of the last German offensive, and in the offensive begun by General Gouraud's army west of the Argonne, at the same time with our attack to the east. Withdrawn with their divisions after a few days of advance which counted them as "expended," the regiments were sent to recuperate in the Vosges, whence they started on the short march to the Rhine after the armistice.

We know how, in framing the armistice terms, as one after another strong demand was included, an apprehension developed in certain Allied quarters lest the Germans, with such a large army still in being, might become desperate and continue the war. When one read the terms, which surrendered the German navy and placed us in command of the Rhine bridgeheads, he knew how deep the two-edged sword had cut, and that the Allies had power in their hands to force complete submission to their will. It was a skillful and wise peace, bringing an end to the bloodshed and the agony.

Only those who considered it to their honor or their profit could have wished to fight all the way to Berlin. The thought in the mind of every soldier was: "I still live; I shall not have to go under fire again;" in the mind of every relative of a soldier: "He is still alive." Through all the celebrations to come, it was a thought dominant in subconsciousness, if not publicly expressed. To some of our own newcomers, perhaps, who had not yet been in action, there was human disappointment that they had arrived too late; though our veterans and the war-weary veterans of our Allies might tell them that they were fortunate in what they had escaped. Perhaps, too, certain of our officers, who had worked toward the vision of the spring campaign, when our recuperated divisions would be supported by the enormous quantity of munitions from home, and all our branches would be fully equipped, may have felt that they had been robbed of professional fulfillment. Not until spring would we have been able to undertake another offensive against determined resistance. On November 11th we had only two fresh divisions in reserve; we were depending upon green replacements, and our hospitals were full. If we had come late into the war, we had given the full measure of our strength in the final stage.

The forming of the new Third Army of Occupation under Major-General Joseph T. Dickman, drawn from our veteran divisions in a favorable position for the movement, and its long tour of police duty, is no more in the province of this book than the many journeys which the author made after the armistice: up and down the Rhine; into Brussels, to see the people welcome back their King; over the Ypres, the Somme, and the Verdun battlefields, as well as our own; along roads which had been for four years in sound of the guns, now silent; among our camps where our soldiers in the dreary, long, cold nights were impatiently marking time until their homegoing; through the Services of Supply, where I saw that vast machine we had built reversed, to the ports, where the tide of our soldiery was flowing outward instead of inward—the thought ever uppermost being that humanity might learn from this most monstrous example of war's folly how to avoid its repetition.