and
fighting in this mud, I can find no other means of expression than
the words that have already served the Commander in Chief of the
French Army, General Petain, on the evening of his great victory at
the Chemin des Dames. In receiving the American newspapermen, he said
to them:

"Do not speak of us, the generals and the officers. Speak only of the
men. We have done nothing; the men have done everything. Our men are
wonderful; we, their leaders, can only kneel at their feet."

* * * * *

The women have been no less wonderful. And I want to write a few words
about them.

The women who are at the front have fought like the men. Can you
imagine a more beautiful deed of arms than that of a young girl,
twenty years old, named Marcelle Semer, whose heroic story a French
Cabinet Minister, M. Klotz, told recently at one of the Matinees
Nationales at the Sorbonne.

In August, 1914, there lived at Eclusier, near Frise, a young girl
with gray eyes and blonde hair named Marcelle Semer. She was twenty
years old at the time and kept accounts in addition to overseeing the
work of a factory. At the time of the August invasion, after the
Battle of Charleroi, the French tried to halt the Germans at the
Somme. Not being in sufficient force, they retreated, crossing the
river and the canal. The enemy immediately pursued. Marcelle Semer,
who was following the French troops, had the presence of mind, after
the last soldier had crossed the Somme Canal, to open the drawbridge
in order to prevent the Germans from crossing it, and to hurl the key
to the bridge into the canal in order that they might not take it from
her when they came up. An entire enemy army corps was thus detained
for twenty-four hours by this young girl's presence of mind; and it
was only on the following day that the enemy, having found some boats
on the Somme, made a bridge of them and passed over the canal. But the
French soldiers were already far away.

The Germans were masters of the neighborhood for some days. They
seized the inhabitants as hostages and shut them up in a cave.
Marcelle Semer secretly carried them food. She also carried
sustenance to other inhabitants who had hidden in the woods or in
cellars. She succored and concealed the soldiers whom wounds or
fatigue had prevented from following the main body of troops. She
contrived that sixteen of them, dressed as civilians, escaped. Then
she was apprehended by the German