The sending of Major General John J. Pershing to France with a pioneer staff in May, 1917, had for its military purpose the huge and time-consuming task of preparing the way for the troops that were to arrive as soon as we had them trained, and the immediate object of assuring the people of the Allies that we meant to make active warfare on the western front. Although we had relieved the financial stress of the Allies by our loans, and with the removal of our interference with the British blockade we had strengthened the wall around Germany, we were incapable for the first eight months of striking any blow of account against the enemy except through the flotilla of destroyers which we had sent to cooperate with the British navy in combating the submarine. Considering that the French and British had over three million troops on the western front, the total of our regular army of one hundred thousand men, if all had been immediately dispatched to France, would hardly have been an important military factor. In a war where such enormous numbers were engaged, though we might have ten million able-bodied men in the United States, they were of no combat service against the enemy until they were in France, armed and trained. The French offensive, in the early spring of 1917, had failed with the result that France was depressed and that all observers agreed that it was not in the power of the exhausted French army to undertake another offensive. The Germans, after their retreat across the old Somme battle fields, had stood firm on the Hindenburg line. Despite their losses they had sufficient force on the western front to assure, unless there was some unexpected break in their morale, their retention of their positions in face of the determined attacks of the British in their summer offensives, culminating in the bloody ridge of Passchendaele, which were made not in the expectation of any decision, but to hold German divisions off from the Italian front, from an effort to crush Rumania, an effort against Saloniki and from exploitation of their successes in Russia.