A MARTIAL PANORAMA But meanwhile great and portentous things had been happening elsewhere on the long battle line. Up in Flanders, the British troops, with American brigades fighting shoulder to shoulder with them, were driving the Germans eastward. Farther south, the French were hounding the fleeing Germans. And American forces around Soissons were pounding away in such a fashion as to make the positions along the Vesle untenable for their stubborn defenders. The enlisted men knew little or nothing of this and even the junior officers were surprised when word came back from patrols on the north of the river on September 4th, that they met almost no opposition from the enemy. Even his artillery fire had fallen off to a little desultory shelling, so at once a general advance was ordered. Roads in the rear instantly became alive with motor trucks, big guns, columns of men, wagon trains and all the countless activities of an army on the march. The sight of the main forces crossing the river was a wonderful one to the officers standing on the hills overlooking the scene, and one that they never will forget. The long columns debouched from the wooded shelters, deployed into wide, thin lines and moved off down the slope into the narrow river valley. Below them lay the villages and towns of the Vesle, pounded almost to dust by the thousands of shells which had fallen upon them during the weeks the two armies contended for their possession. The men went down the hill exactly as they had done so often in war maneuvers and sham battles at training camps. Only an occasional burst of black smoke and a spouting geyser of earth and stones showed it was real warfare, although even that had been so well simulated in the training that, except that now and then a man or two dropped and either lay still or got up and limped slowly back up the hill, the whole thing might have been merely a drama of mimic warfare. Many of the officers who watched did, in fact, compare it with scenes they had witnessed in motion pictures. Despite the occasional casualty, the line moved steadily forward. On reaching the river, there was little effort to converge at the hastily constructed bridges. Men who were close enough veered over to them, but the rest plunged into the water and either waded or swam across, according to the depth where they happened to be and the individual's ability to swim. Once on the north side, they started up the long slope as imperturbably as they had come down the other side, although every man knew that when they reached the crest of the rise they would face the German machine gun fire from positions on the next ridge to the north.