ners of fifty-four creeds and cults in his outfit. Before very
long he might truthfully expand both these figures.

To stopper the holes made by the wear and tear of intensive training,
the attritions of sickness and of transfers, the losses by death and by
wounding as suffered in the first small spells of campaigning,
replacements came up from the depots, enriching the local colour of the
division with new types and strange accents. Southern mountaineers,
Western ranch hands and farm boys from the Middle States came along to
find mates among Syrians, Jews, Italians, Armenians and Greeks. Cotton
Belt, Corn Belt, Wheat Belt and Timber Belt contributed. Born feudists
became snipers, counter jumpers became fencibles, yokels became
drillmasters, sweat-shop hands became sharpshooters, aliens became
Americans, an ex-janitor--Austrian-born--became a captain, a rabble
became an organised unit; the division became a tempered mettlesome
lance--springy, sharp and dependable.

This miracle so often repeated itself in our new army that it ceased to
be miraculous and became commonplace. During its enactment we as a
nation accepted it with calmness, almost with indifference. I expect our
grandchildren will marvel at it and among them will be some who will
write large, fat books about it.

On that great day when a new definition for the German equivalent of the
English word "impregnable" was furnished by men who went up to battle
swearfully or prayerfully, as the case might be, a-swearing and
a-praying as they went in more tongues than were babbled at Babel Tower;
in other words, on the day when the never-to-be-broken Hindenburg line
was broken through and through, a battalion of one of the infantry
regiments of this same polyglot division formed a little individual
ground swell in the first wave of attack.

That chill and gloomy hour when condemned men and milkmen rise up from
where they lie, when sick folk die in their beds and the drowsy birds
begin to chirp themselves awake found the men of this particular
battalion in shallow front-line trenches on the farther edge of a birch
thicket. There they crouched, awaiting the word. The flat cold taste of
before sunup was clammy in their throats; the smell of the fading
nighttime was in their nostrils.

And in the heart of every man of them that man over and over again asked
himself a question. He asked himself whether his will power--which meant
his soul--was going to be strong enoug