Casualties continued to grow with the constant shelling. Sporadic raids over no-man's-land and visitations of German airships added to them. Bombs were dropped on a party of engineers, killing one of them, and two privates were victims of a German aviator's explosive over a wood in which they were camped. Winter set in with a snowfall that impeded the training of the troops and communications. Roads became impassable by drifts, and many motor trucks, after crawling at a snail's pace over the hilly roads, became stranded in the snow. A thaw in January turned icy roads into river beds. Torrential streams flowed from melting snows in the hills, and together with a downpour of fine rain combined to make weather conditions on the American front the worst the troops had encountered since their arrival in France. The roads were cluttered in places with ditched motor trucks. Here and there mule-drawn vehicles were mired. Transport trains drawn by mules suffered most before the thaw, the animals slipping and falling on the icy roadbeds, and were unable to rise except by the aid of thick layers of branches and twigs placed under their hoofs. The beginning of 1918, in short, found the American army in France, like their allied comrades on the rest of the front, stalled by the weather, and little tidings came of their accustomed activities. CHAPTER IX POPE AND PRESIDENT Peace efforts, assiduously pursued in Berlin, and culminating in the Reichstag resolution recorded in the previous volume, had meantime taken a new turn; but they encountered a new element in the United States as a resolute belligerent. The Vatican interposed with an olive branch. The Pope tread cautiously, sensible of the delicacy of his task in seeking to effect world peace; but his proposals were hopelessly futile and died in the borning. Their only welcome came from the Central Powers, and even there dissentient voices were heard. The Allies' reception of his note was cold, unresponsive, suspicious, and resentful. "As you were," the Pope virtually proposed to the two groups of belligerents, running directly counter to the chief aim of the Allies, which was to overturn the _status quo ante_, and establish a European concert of nations on a new, safer, and enduring foundation. The Papal note, communicated to the various belligerent powers on August 1, 1917, invited their governments to agree on the following points, which seemed to his Holiness, "to offer the basis of a just and lasting peace":