forty-mile front and on
May 28th had reached the Aisne, with the French and British steadily
falling back. The anxiety of the Allies throughout the world was
indescribable. This was the great German "Victory Drive" and each day
registered a new Allied defeat. Newspaper headlines were almost
despairing.

On May 29th, however, in quiet type, under great headlines announcing a
German gain of ten miles in which the Germans had taken twenty-five
thousand prisoners and crossed two rivers, had captured Soissons, and
were threatening Rheims, there appeared in American papers a quiet
little despatch from General Pershing. It read as follows:

"This morning in Picardy our troops attacked on a front of one and
one-fourth miles, advanced our lines, and captured the village of
Cantigny. We took two hundred prisoners, and inflicted on the enemy
severe losses in killed and wounded. Our casualties were relatively
small. Hostile counter-attacks broke down under our fire." This was the
first American offensive.

The American troops had now been in Europe almost a year. At first but a
small force, they had been greeted in Paris and in London with
tremendous enthusiasm. Up to this point they had done little or nothing,
but the small force which passed through Paris in the summer of 1917 had
been growing steadily. By this time the American army numbered more than
eight hundred thousand men. They had been getting ready; in camps far
behind the lines they had been trained, not only by their own officers,
but by some of the greatest experts in the French and the British
armies. Thousands of officers and men who, but a few months before, had
been busily engaged in civilian pursuits, had now learned something of
the art of war. They had been supplied with a splendid equipment, with
great guns and with all the modern requirements of an up-to-date army.

[Illustration: Photograph]
Copyright Committee on Public Information.
From Underwood and Underwood, N. Y.
CHATEAU-THIERRY; WHERE AMERICA INFLICTED A SECOND GETTYSBURG ON
GERMANY
Poilus and Yanks in the foreground looking over the roofs of
Chateau-Thierry, where, in the middle of July in the last year of the
war, the Americans at a crucial moment stopped the German advance in
the second battle of the Marne. After that Germany never went forward
on any field of battle again.

[Illustration: Photograph]
French Official Photograph by International Film Service.
WIPIN