Part 24

"The boche," he had said, "has been halted . . . now we shall endeavor to do better."

What had happened? The boche was not halted! He was, in fact, shelling Paris!

It was in those days that the "soldier-saint," as Major Stuart-Stephens has called him, must have had need of all his faith and all his fortitude.

We don't know much, yet, except of a very superficial sort, about those days. We know what happened in them insofar as army movements are concerned, and the heartbreaking re-occupation of towns and villages where French and American restoration squads were working to make habitable those places the Huns had laid waste; and the continued shelling of Paris by the "mystery gun"; and the great exodus of civilians from the capital as the ravaging hordes drew nearer and always nearer.

These things we know; but not what Foch was thinking--except that he was not thinking of defeat.

If there was a true heart in France that ever for a moment doubted the outcome of the war, or dreamed of abandoning the conflict before it had made the future safe, I have never heard of that one.

Certainly the man who was leading them never doubted. Nor was it on his own skill that his faith was founded. He knew Who would give his cause the victory.

In the fifth German drive of 1918 the enemy crossed the Marne! Paris was almost in sight--Paris! where millions of French were celebrating the fall of the Bastille and the birth of freedom as if the leering, jeering enemies of all freemen were not so close to the gates of the Capital that the gleam of their tusks might almost have been seen from the city's outermost ramparts. Certainly the drunken fools within--drunk with their deep draughts of liberty--could hear the snarling and snapping of the approaching wolves, the baying of Big Bertha, the barking of her smaller sisters! But it would be like those crazy French to dance and sing and celebrate the overthrow of autocracy, while an autocracy the like of which no French King had ever exercised was on the eve of engulfing them.

So the German General Staff said, sneering, as it laid its plans for the final drive on Paris. They would start that drive on the night of July 14, while the fools were celebrating, when they were least expecting an attack. Probably most of them would be drunk. Oh, almost certainly! Their resistance would be weak, And for all time thereafter it would make an impressive tale for schoolbooks throughout the Pan-Germanized world, that democracy was dispatched in her last orgy of exultation.

As clearly as if he were not only present in the councils of German Headquarters, but present inside the thick round skulls about the council table, this boche attitude and intent was comprehended by the small frail man at Mormant, where his Headquarters then were.

On that night of July 14 he began the great offensive which never stopped until the whining boche was east of the Rhine!

His Intelligence Department told him that the German drive would probably begin at ten minutes past midnight. They might be quite wrong, but that was their guess. Foch was all-but sure they were not wrong; that it was not in German nature to reason other than as I have described.

An hour before midnight the Germans were (doubtless) surprised by some lively action of French artillery. Strange! But it couldn't mean anything, of course! So the boche came on. The behavior of the French was not quite what he had expected; one thing after another happened that was not in his calculations. But that did not argue aught against the calculations! It was the exasperating habit of the French to do unexpected things. Most annoying! But not able to affect the outcome, of course.

On July 18th they got "more unexpected still"--they and sundry "green" troops from the flaccid, fatuous U. S. A.! Some "hounds of the devil" were let loose upon the gray-clad armies of righteousness. It was outrageous the way those sons of Satan fought! They rushed upon the legions of the Lord's anointed as if killing Germans were the noblest work a man could be about.

So many things happened that were not down on paper--in the plans of the German General Headquarters! It became distressingly evident that these Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as the stupid Britishers 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.

"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 men were magnificent when their opportunity was given them, is cause not for vaunting ourselves, but only for gratefulness that our honor remains to us--that we have not had to accept life and liberty at other men's hands while our hands stayed in our pockets.

Our fighting men redeemed us in our own eyes; they restored our souls' dignity; for this we can never be grateful enough to them. But we can never be braggart about it. It might so easily have come too late!

On August 6, Foch was made Marshal of France.

And two days later, the British, on the Somme, launched the first really successful offensive of the war--not stopping a drive, but inaugurating one.

At last Foch was able to make war as he had for years contended that war should be made: The way to make war is to attack.

It was his plan, now that he had the men to make this possible, to keep the enemy busy by striking first at one point of the long line running from Belgium to the Piave, and then at another. And by the first of September the Allied line on the Western front was back where it ran in the deadlock of 1915-16 while the attack on Verdun was raging.

"General Pershing," Foch has said, "wished to have his army concentrated, as far as possible, in an American sector. The Argonne and the heights of the Meuse were a sector hard to tackle. So I said to him: 'All right; your men have the devil's own punch. They will get away with it. Go to it.'"

And they went! That was the famous St. Mihiel salient. The American infantry started their advance there on September 26. They went forward with a rush. On their left, the French advanced as rapidly, and on October 1 re-took St. Quentin, which the Germans had held since the beginning of the war. October 2 the British, operating on the left of the French, reached Cambrai which also had been in German hands for more than four years.

October 4 the Hohenzollern King of Bulgaria deserted his doomed allies and his throne and began looking for a place of refuge.