Fields of Victory

the Intelligence Department. After lunch I walked through the interesting old town, with the Chief of the Department, and our talk turned on

in self-defence against the new submarine campaign announced by Germany in January. "It can't be long," said my companion quietly; "Germany has gone too far to draw back. And the President will

ng on her fate. During the course of the month, England and America watched the piling up of the German score as vessel after vessel was sunk. Then on the 1st of April came the loss of tw

s of everybody one sees show a real bit of spring sunshine

me, was so great that the mere change bred hope; and for a long time we hoped against hope. All the more because the entry of America, and the thrilling rapidity of her earlier action put the Russian business into the shade, may, indeed, have dulled the perceptions of the Allies with regard to it. In forty days from the declaration of war the United States had adopted Conscription, which had taken us two years; General Pershing and his small force had sailed for France within eighty days; and by the end of June, or within ninety days, America had adopted the blockade policy of Great

the war was going to be won quickly by negotiation, before America could seriously come in; the other that the war would go on for another three years, and therefore there would be ample time for America to make all her own independent plans and form her own separate army with purely American equipment. English opinion wavered in the same way. I well remember a gathering in a London house in November, 1917, just after the first successful attack in the Battle of Cambrai. It was a gathering in honour of General Bliss, and other American officers and high officials then in London. General Bliss was the centre of it, and the rugged, most human, most lovable figure of Mr. Page was not far away. The Battle of Cambrai was in progress, and

d down again to a stubborn waiting for our own new recruits, then in the training camps, and for the first appearance of the American battalions. Meanwhile the news from Russia grew steadily worse; the Russian Army had melted away under the Kerensky regulations; and the country was rapidly falling in

et allowed her to do. Meanwhile one saw the President, aided by a score of able and energetic men, constantly at work removing stones in the path, setting up a War Industries Board, reorganising the Shipping Board and the Air Service, and clearing the way for those food supplies from the great American and Canadian wheatfields without which Europe could not endure, and which were constantly endangered by the pressure of the submarine attack. Perhaps in all that

capable of yet another great effort during the coming year, whatever might be the heroic patriotism of her people? One heard of the enormous preparations that America was making in France-of the new docks, warehouses, and railways, of the vast depots and splendid camps that were being laid out-with a mixture of wonder and irritation. A friend

French Armies, and to take their places as soon as possible in the fighting line, as integral parts of those armies, allowing the Allies to furnish all equipment till America was really ready? It was pointed out that Canada and Australia, by sending officers and men over at once to train and fight with the British, and leaving everything else to be supplied by the Allies, had in nine months from the outbreak of war already taken part in glorious and decisive battles.

readers: "The Allied forces are not in condition to withstand the terrific onslaught which Germany is bound to make within six months. America must win the war." In April the New York Bankers' Bulletin said: "We have not made progress as far as we might or could," while months later, even in its September number (1918), the North American Review sti

; a million by the end of July, nearly a million and a half before the Armistice. Wonderful story! Nobody, I think, can possibly exaggerate the heartening and cheering effect of it upon the Allies in Europe, especially on France-wounded and devastated France-and o

t America would have in France by 1919. On August 7th General March, Chief of the American General Staff, said in the Senate Committee, that America would have four millions of men in France, with one million at home, for the campaign of 1919. "The only way that Germany can be whipped is by America going into this thing with her whole strength. It is up to us to win the war.... We must force the issue and win." The editor of the North American Review wrote in August, and pu

he heads of the British Army, of the March retreat, had turned out by the summer to be the true one. The German armies had to a large extent beaten themselves out against the British defensive battle of the spring: and while the Americans were making their splendid spurt from April to August, and entering the fighting field in force for the first time, the British Army, having absorbed its recruits, taken huge toll of its enemies, and profited by all there was to be learnt from the German offensive, was getting ready every day to give the final strokes in the war, aided, when the moment came, by the supreme leadership

Director of Operations could hardly find space, it meant not only victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of German morale at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to Germany's undoing, since the opening of the struggle. The final victor

n to that which the American climate and atmosphere produces on the visitor from this side of the Atlantic. It breathed new life into everything, and especially into the heart of France, the chief sufferer by three years of atrocious war. As weary and devastated France watched the American stream of eager and high-hearted youth, flowing from Bordeaux eastwards, column after column, regiment after regiment, of men admirable in physique, fearless in danger, and full of a

March onward in response to the call of the Allies, provided indeed a moral support to the two older armies, which was of incalculable value and "influenced the fighting qualities of both; wh

remember. But our arrival at Nancy at midnight, very weary after a long day in the car, during which we had missed our way badly at least once, is linked in my recollection with the apparition of two young American officers just as we were being told for the third time that there was no room in the hotel to which we had driven up. Should we really have to sleep in the car? There seemed to be not a single vacant bedroom in Nancy; and there had been snow showers during the day! But these two Americans heard from our French Lieutenant that there were two English ladies in the car, and they came forward at once, offering their rooms. Luckily we found shelter elsewhere; but I shall not soon

at a cross roads in Eastern France with perfect ease and sang-froid. The astonishment and interest of this American occupation of a country so intensely and ultimately national, so little concerned in ordinary times with any other life than its own as France, provincial France above all, never ceased to hold me as we drove on and on through the American sector; especially when darkness and moonlight re

-fields and artillery positions had all belonged to the French battle-zone before the Americans took them over, and there had been fierce fighting here by the Fre

rt in the far north-east; the ridge of Vigneulles, which had been the meeting-point of the converging American attacks coming both from the north-west and the south-east; while in the near foreground rose the once heavily fortified Mont Sec. The American troops went over the parapet at five o'clock on the morning of

aordinary dash by very eager and physically magnificent soldiers." Possibly, he adds, a more seasoned army-the American troops had only had six months' experience in the fighting line!-might have turned the effects of a successful action to greater military advantage than was the case at St. Mihiel. The British or French critic, mindful of the bitter lessons of four years of war, is inclined to make the same criticism of most of the American operations of last year, except the fighting on the Marne in June and July, when French caution and experience found a wonderful complement in the splendid fighting qualities of the American infantry. "But"-adds one of them-"undoubtedly the American Command was learning very rapidly." What an army the American Army would have been, if the war had lasted through this year! The qualities of the individual soldier, drawn many of them from districts among the naturally richest in the w

ld of suffering and sacrifice with the free nations of old Europe, are only now beginning to show themselves above the horizon. They will