"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 Germans, arrested and led into the presence of a court-martial. The judgment was summary, and after a quarter of an hour's questioning Marcelle Semer was condemned to death. "Do you admit," asked the presiding officer, "that you helped French soldiers to escape?" "I certainly do," she replied. "I managed it so that sixteen of them escaped, and they are beyond your reach. Now you can do what you want to me. I am an orphan. I have only one mother--France. She does not disturb me when I'm dying." This was one time when God intervened. Marcelle did not die. Brought to the place of execution, at the very moment when they were about to shoot, the French reentered the village and, by a miracle, she escaped her executioners. Today she wears the Croix de Guerre and the medal of the Legion of Honor.