The Pacific Slope, Kansas, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and New York thus had the honor of the initial attack in our greatest battle, in which men from every state in the Union were to have a part before it was won. In that area of rolling country from Verdun to the Bar-le-Duc-Clermont road, which had been stealthily peopled by our soldiers, the swarming of their khaki was relieved by scattered touches of the blue of the Frenchmen who had come to assist us. Though ours was the flesh and blood which was to do the fighting--every infantryman was an American--the French were filling the gaps in our equipment which we could have filled ourselves, as I have said, only by delaying the Meuse-Argonne offensive until the spring of 1919 as we had originally planned. Under their camouflage curtains in an open field, or in the edge of a woods, or under the screen of bushes which fringed a gully, the groups of French gunners seemed at home in a landscape that was native to them while it was alien to the Americans. When at rest their supple lounging attitudes had a certain defiance of formal military standards, as if French democracy were flouting Prussian militarism. When the order for firing came, the transition was to the alertness of the batter stepping up to the plate, and their swift movements had the grace and confidence of professional mastery which had long put behind it the rudimentary formalities of the drill-ground. They seemed a living part of the infantry, their pulse-beats answering the infantry's steps. Never were guests more welcome than they to our army. We could not have too many French guns--or cannon, as our communiqués called them in recognition of the unfamiliarity of our public with military terms--playing on the enemy's trenches and barbed wire in the preliminary bombardment which blazed a way for the charge. I have known the suspense preceding many attacks while the darkness before dawn was slashed by the flashes from nearby gun mouths and splashed by the broad sheets of flame from distant gun mouths. There is nothing more contrary to nature than that the quiet hours of the night should be turned into an inferno of crashes and, at the moment of dawn, when the world refreshed looks forward to a new day, men should be sent to their death. The suspense before the Meuse-Argonne attack was greater than before the Somme attack, when the British new army, after its months of preparation and nearly two years of training, was sent against the German line; it was greater than before Saint-Mihiel, our own first offensive.