General Pershing's wife and children were received into the church by Bishop Brent when the bishop was presiding over the Philippine diocese, and while the General was stationed in Manila. Since his acceptance of the post in France the General himself has been welcomed into the fellowship of the church by his old friend, now serving as leader of the chaplains of the American army. There is something vastly re-assuring in the manifest poise of a man who is so transparently unaffected in great decisions and whose personal example is so high a challenge to acknowledge the authority of the spiritual. It was after office-hours when I found my way down the ancient stairway and into the courtyard. Out through the guarded gates I passed, the gates through which Napoleon marched his legions when he turned them toward Moscow, the city of their destruction. And as I thought of Bonaparte and of his programme, of that unsated ambition and pride which brought about the overthrow of the military genius no time of the past or the present has duplicated, I was glad that America's man of the hour on the field of democracy's destiny has not forgotten to place first things first; that he retains so clear a conception of relative values in so disturbed a time. CHAPTER V _SEICHEPREY_ The head-lines that told the story of the battle of Seicheprey brought me a sensation entirely apart from the thrill of anxiety and pride with which we all read of the heavy attack, the loss of ground, the desperate fighting, the recapture of the village, and the gallantry of American troops in the most extensive assault yet directed against our lines on the western front. It was the name of the village that gripped me; gripped me with the memory of things that I shall never forget, of kaleidoscopic days that were eternities of supreme emotion. It was about Seicheprey that our first division permanently in the line, our first division to be made fully responsible for a sector on the western front, experienced its first general gas attack and its first general raids. It was here that the American soldier established in fact what in his own soul he had never doubted, his ability to meet and defeat the finest shock troops of imperial Germany, and under conditions and in an event chosen by the German command to demonstrate America's military inferiority. There will be a thousand greater occasions for American arms in this war than that which fell on Friday, the first of March, 1918, and than those which immediately preceded and followed it. But in the chronicles of this conflict those days will remain as the days which first sent back from the flaming front to every officer and every man in the ranks the triumphant message, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." _It was the moment when the American army was baptized by fire into the sacrificial comradeship of democracy's international Calvary._