Of the more than one hundred thousand detailed maps, together with some forty thousand photographs, completely showing every foot of the ground over which the battle was to be fought, the youths knew before the drive was fully launched. But significant as these facts were of the scope and thoroughness with which the battle was to be carried out, they were not prepared for the proofs of American efficiency which their present duties brought before them. Apparently no contingency was overlooked, and it was this care in preparation which figured so largely in the sustained drive which utterly routed the theretofore self-confident Germans. The hospital facilities that were provided for the care of the sick and wounded included thirty-five complete hospital trains, with no less than sixteen thousand beds in the advanced, or almost front line, sector, and fifty-five thousand such additional beds behind the lines. That not more than ten per cent of them ever had to be used was a matter of natural gratification and another proof of the expert strategy which directed every mile of the advance. Nevertheless the preparations had been made, in the event that they were needed, and this sort of leadership served but to strengthen the confidence and determination of the American fighting forces. During every daylight hour that the battles raged, the records as well as the personal knowledge of the boys showed, the skies constantly had been swept by squadrons and fleets of aeroplanes, preventing aerial observations by the enemy, attacking the moving infantry, artillery and supply trains of the retreating Germans, and at the same time most effectively directing the fire of the American artillery, with the most devastating effects upon the demoralized Hun forces. In all a total of one hundred and fifty-two square miles of French territory, and seventy-two villages, which the Germans had held for four years, were captured outright in the drive, and for the reduction of the German defenses which they had thought impregnable, and for the creeping barrage which almost invariably preceded the doughboys in their attacks, more than a million and a half shells were fired by the American artillery, making the territory being traversed by the fleeing Germans a great charnel country of death and destruction. With a remarkably small casualty list to themselves, everything considered, the American forces took no less than sixteen thousand prisoners, which was only a small proportion of those annihilated in the merciless advance, and to this conquest of territory and men they added the taking of one hundred and eleven guns, many of them of large calibre and great distance range, and great stores of munitions and supplies which the Boches had not time even to destroy in their headlong flight back toward the Rhine.