The Americans went over in open formation at 6:45 o'clock, advancing at an easy walk and maintaining intervals as if on parade. The sun had just risen, and through streaky clouds all about tongues of red flame were darting from the muzzles of hundreds of massed guns, big and small, while the air itself quivered with the shock of explosions, mingled with the deafening yet purring roar that is called drum fire. Cantigny itself was turned into a veritable hell, a pillar of fire and smoke, and into it went the crawling, sinister tanks followed by the American infantry in thin lines or little groups. For a while they were swallowed up in the great white and brown and black cloud that enveloped the village, then back to the American line came the first message: "We're here! Everything O. K.!" Thus these troops of the New World made their first real entry into the war. Thus they did what they could to help in offsetting the new German effort. Compared with the giant struggle going on elsewhere it was just a little outburst, but we did our best with it and have succeeded. AN UNFORGETTABLE SCENE No one who had the privilege to be on the scene at the time of this first American attack will ever forget the sight. It was unforgettable. The whole thing is uneffaceable from the time in the pregnant darkness when the troops that had been chosen for this most honorable of tasks went quietly along the shell-pitted roads to the jumping-off place; from the time the grotesque monsters called tanks rumbled up the same roads to hide until dawn in lairs behind the front line, while other monsters with long snouts crouched upon their heavy carriages like coiled serpents and were given their last drop of oil and their last daub of grease to make sure that their devastating charges would fall true upon their mark; from the time the men were given their last orders and their last "good luck" and went off, they knew not to what, in the first early streak of rosy dawn when the cannonade began and the first airplanes whirred overhead toward the doomed village. From then until that last throbbing hour when the tempest of shellfire drowned out everything, yes, up to that tense minute at 6:45 o'clock when we turned to one another and in an awestruck whisper said, "They're over," it is all unforgettable. One lives such moments but once. This operation had been planned for weeks down to the minutest detail under the direction of the Superior French Command, and in the closest co-operation with the French, to whom must go a liberal measure of the credit for its success.