now and then by the ear-splitting crashes that
followed each nearby flash of lightning.

Through it all, everything moved. It was a mighty mobilisation in the
dark. Everything was moving in one direction--forward--all with the same
goal, all with the same urging, all with the same determination, all
with the same hope. The forest was ghostly with their forms. It seemed
to me that night in the damp darkness of Villers-Cotterets Forest that
every tree gave birth to a man for France.

All night long the gathering of that sinister synod continued. All night
long those furtive forces moved through the forest. They passed by every
road, by every lane, through every avenue of trees. I heard the
whispered commands of the officers. I heard the sloshing of the mud
under foot and the occasional muffled curse of some weary marcher who
would slip to the ground under the weight of his burden; and I knew, all
of us knew, that at the zero hour, 4:35 o'clock in the morning, all hell
would land on the German line, and these men from the trees would move
forward with the fate of the world in their hands.

There was some suspense. We knew that if the Germans had had the
slightest advance knowledge about that mobilisation of Foch's reserves
that night, they would have responded with a downpour of gas shells,
which spreading their poisonous fumes under the wet roof of the forest,
might have spelt slaughter for 70,000 men.

But the enemy never knew. They never even suspected. And at the tick of
4:35 A. M., the heavens seemed to crash asunder, as tons and tons of hot
metal sailed over the forest, bound for the German line.

That mighty artillery eruption came from a concentration of all the guns
of all calibres of all the Allies that Foch could muster. It was a
withering blast and where it landed in that edge of the forest occupied
by the Germans, the quiet of the dripping black night was suddenly
turned into a roaring inferno of death.

Giant tree trunks were blown high into the air and splintered into
match-wood. Heavy projectiles bearing delayed action fuses, penetrated
the ground to great depth before exploding and then, with the expansion
of their powerful gases, crushed the enemy dugouts as if they were egg
shells.

Then young America--your sons and your brothers and your husbands,
shoulder to shoulder with the French--went over the top to victory.

The preliminary barrage moved forward crashing the forest down about it.
Behind