The troops realized by these activities, trifling though they were, that mimic charges and class-room demonstrations of the training camp were things of the past and that they faced the real foe. The Germans in fact, were not tardy in impressing them with their new situation. They discovered that Americans were facing them and set about making a raid. Berlin announced the result in a brief bulletin on November 3. "At the Rhine-Marne Canal, as the result of a reconnoitering thrust, North American soldiers were brought in as prisoners." The news brought the American people a step nearer to a realization of the actualities of the great struggle. It also disclosed that the Americans were established on a section of the front defended by the German Crown Prince's army and facing Lorraine. The so-called "quiet sector" stood revealed as the only front through which war could be carried into the heart of Germany. It lay before the gap in the French barrier forts, Verdun-Toul and Epinal-Belfort, flanked by the invulnerable Verdun on the northeast and the French positions in the Alsatian Vosges on the southeast. A quiet sector it might be, but more than 40,000 German dead lie buried there, the flower of the army of the Crown Prince of Bavaria. They fell in a twenty-eight day battle in August and September, 1914, when five French army corps under General Castelnau fought seven under the Crown Prince The Germans finally retired into Lorraine after vainly attempting to cross the Moselle. Both General Pétain--who attempted an offensive there in 1916, but was checked from proceeding with it by political high commands--and General Castelnau were convinced of the vulnerability of this sector as a roadway into Germany, and prophets were not wanting who saw in the presence of the Americans there a foretoken that an American army might essay what the two French Generals had not accomplished. At any rate, after an unbroken calm of three years, the sector was no longer quiet. The Germans had scored by drawing first blood. The Berlin press was riotously gleeful over the event, one journal, the "Lokal-Anzeiger," gloating over it in these terms: "Three cheers for the Americans! Clever chaps they are, it cannot be denied. Scarcely have they touched the soil of this putrefied Europe when they already are forcing their way into Germany. "It is our good fortune that we are equipped to receive and entertain numerous guests and that we shall be able to provide quarters for these gentlemen. They will find comfort in the thought that they are rendering their almighty President, Mr. Wilson, valuable services, inasmuch as it is asserted he is anxious to obtain reliable information concerning conditions and sentiments in belligerent countries.