HY THE TIDE WAS FATED TO TURN

These are soul-stirring days. To live through them is a glory and a
solemn joy. The words of the poet resound in our hearts: "God's in His
heaven, all's right with the world."

Events have shaped themselves in accordance with the eternal law. Once
again the fundamental lesson of all history is borne in upon the world,
that evil--though it may seem to triumph for a while--carries within it
the seed of its own dissolution. Once again it is revealed to us that
the God-inspired soul of man is unconquerable and that the power,
however formidable, which challenges it is doomed to go down in defeat.

A righteous cause will not only stand unshaken through trials and
discomfiture, but it will draw strength from the very setbacks which it
may suffer. A wrongful cause can only stand as long as it is buoyed up
by success.

The German people were sustained by a sheer obsession akin to the
old-time belief in the potent spell of "the black arts" that their
military masters were invulnerable and invincible, that by some
power--good or evil, they did not care which--they had been made so,
and that the world was bound to fall before them.

The nation was immensely strong only as long as that obsession remained
unshaken. With its destruction by a series of defeats which were
incapable of being explained as "strategic retreats," their morale
crumbled and finally collapsed, because it was not sustained, as that
of the Allies was sustained in the darkest days of the war, by the
faith that they were fighting for all that men hold most sacred.

To those who were acquainted with German mentality and psychology, it
had been manifest all along that when the end foreordained did come, it
would come with catastrophic suddenness.

WHERE THE TIDE TURNED

It is the general impression that the tide of victory set in with
Marshal Foch's splendid movement against the German flank on July 18th.
That movement, it is true, started the irresistible sweep of the wave
which was destined to engulf and destroy the hideous power of
Prussianism. But the tide which gathered and drove forward the waters
out of which that wave arose, had turned before. It turned with and
through the supreme valor of our marines and other American troops in
the _first_ battle at Chateau-Thierry and at Belleau Wood, _in the
first week of June_.

The American force engaged was small, measured by the standard of
numbers to which we ha