In those days the feeling was very high and enthusiastic for America. “_Ce sont les Américains qui nous out sauvés!_” was the popular sentiment, although America’s deeds at the front were never given in our papers. America, according to the German censorship, was even more negligible than England; only the French armies were allowed a certain amount of credit in regard to the “victorious alteration of our front” which the _puissances centrales_ were so often obliged to acknowledge in those later days. People, nevertheless, were not so intoxicated by present events as to forget the first thrilling days, when Belgium alone held back that overwhelming tide, and sowed the seed of the victory now approaching; nor those later ones when France and England so marvellously achieved the real, the all-important defeat of Prussia at the Marne. Nor were those still more terrible days forgotten, following Russia’s withdrawal—those weeks of anguish when new hordes of Germans rushed through Brussels toward the front, and wiped out all the Allied advances we had been following so patiently, so eagerly, step by step over the torn and blood-soaked regions of France. That period was more appalling even than that of the first onslaught, more annihilating to hope. Looking back on it, recalling the almost crazing tension of anxiety, the reigning conviction that Germany was rushing on to conquest, the second stand before Paris, that wonderful, all-glorious victory, shines out as more brilliant, more soul-thrilling, even than the first. And yet of the imperishable, recklessly heroic charge of the American marines before Chateau-Thierry, that outburst of fresh and determined energy, which refired the Allies and helped once and for all to turn the tide of war, we knew nothing until after the Allied troops had entered Brussels. We knew only that the enemy was stronger both in numbers and in his determination to win at any cost, despite the hypocritical peace offer that gave him excuse to cry: “You will not have peace on our terms? Then bear the consequences!” and to make those consequences—already prepared—throw into shadow all the horrors of his first _Massenschlacht_. No, glorious England, France, and Belgium! no plea of overwhelming numbers, no whine of enforced surrender before the entire world, can rob you of laurels won in the first awful years—that vast, unequalled victory which America’s generous hand helped at the critical moment to assure you!