Probably the first death in France in which the whole nation grieved was that of young Quentin Roosevelt, aviation lieutenant, son of the ex-President, who fell in an air fight in the preliminary to the battle on July 17. He was last seen in a fight with two enemy planes. His machine fell within the German lines. Weeks later the onward Allied army found his grave, marked, in English, "Lieutenant Quentin Roosevelt, buried by the Germans," and an official despatch from Germany stated that he had been buried with full military honors. Colonel Roosevelt made a brief statement: "Quentin's mother and I are very glad that he got to the front, and had a chance to render some service to his country and to show the stuff there was in him before his fate befell him." The news of his death arrived just a few weeks after the news that he had downed his first German plane. The simple sincerity of this statement, and its courage, gave an example to the mothers and fathers of fighters which no one feared they would fail to come up to. And when the casualty lists from the second Marne battle came in, every bereavement was stanched by the fact that "they had shown the stuff there was in them." Certainly not least in importance was the fact that they had shown it to the Germans. An official German Army report was captured, July 7, on an officer taken in the Marne region. After giving a prodigious amount of detail concerning the American Army, its composition, destination, and so on, it appended the following opinion: "The 2d American Division may be classified as a very good division, perhaps even as assault troops. The various attacks of both regiments on Belleau Wood were carried out with dash and recklessness. The moral effect of our firearms did not materially check the advance of the infantry. The nerves of the Americans are still unshaken.... Only a few of the troops are of pure American origin; the majority is of German, Dutch, and Italian parentage, but these semi-Americans, almost all of whom were born in America and never have been in Europe, fully feel themselves to be true-born sons of their country." CHAPTER XXIII ST. MIHIEL Historians and military experts are fond of taking one particular battle or campaign, and saying: "This was decisive." It enables one to simplify history, to be sure, but often any such process is more simple than truthful. After all, every battle is to some degree decisive, and the great actions of the war are so closely connected with smaller ones that it is difficult to separate them. It is the fashion now to speak of the second battle of the Marne as the deciding factor in the war. Indeed, there is one school of strategists which goes back to the first Marne, and speaks as if nothing which happened after that really mattered.