tishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians.
They didn't know how to fight--they couldn't know--they had never done
any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare? They were
absurd. They didn't know the simplest rules of war--they didn't know
enough to surrender when they were surrounded, cut off, outnumbered.
They fought on! They didn't know how to fight; but Lord! how they could
kill Germans. And then they were such fools that their medical corps
came out onto the battlefield and when they found a German who wasn't
dead but was suffering, their doctors bound up his wounds and gave him
water to quench his raging thirst, and left him for his own comrades to
carry away and nurse--that, instead of gouging his eyes out with a
bayonet's end or bashing in his skull with the butt of a gun! Strange
people! They never could become good slaves of Kultur; so the wounded
Germans whose agonies they had assuaged, rose up on their elbows and shot
them dead.

In six hours the Allies, not only reinforced but recreated by this tide
of new life, new eagerness, re-took twice as much ground on the
Soissons-Rheims salient as the Germans had won in six days' desperate
advance.

When the word to fight came to the men of the American army, it was less
like a command to them than like a release, a long-desired permission.
Many, if not most, of them had for nearly four years been straining at
the leash which held them from the place where their sense of honor told
them they should be.

[Illustration: Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces]

"They were superb," Marshal Foch has said, paying wholehearted tribute to
them. "There is no other word. Our armies were fatigued by years of
relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them. We were
magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans. The youth of
the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory.
Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the
enormous material aid placed at our disposal. Nobody among us will ever
forget what America did."

Let us hope that neither will any among us ever forget for a single
instant how much was paid for us in blood and anguish by those who held
the beast at bay from us for long years before we put forth a stroke in
our own defense or in friendly help or in support of our ideals.

That our aid arrived in time to help turn the tide, that our me