The first was the period of preparation and training and of trench experience of the earlier divisions and of the organization of our general staff, the instruction of our reserve officers in the various schools and in the actual work at the front, and inaugurating the immense constructive work required for our lines of communication. Through the winter of 1917-18, whether drilling in the muddy fields of Lorraine or holding trenches, our men, in the penetrating, moist, and cold climate, knew as great hardships as any veteran of the Civil War or of the Revolution, Lorraine was aptly called our "Valley Forge" in France. It was a winter of discouragement including the disaster to the Italian army, the increasing submarine ravages, the want of shipping to keep up the program of troop transport, the failure of supplies to arrive, the final collapse of Russia and Rumania, the depression among the French and Italian people, the severe food restrictions in England, and the gathering of the German armies with their superior numbers for the great offensives for the spring of 1918. So serious did the Allies consider the situation that they were willing to offer Germany a very favorable peace, but Germany, confident that the Americans could not exert their pressure in time and that Allied spirits were depressed to a point when at any moment Allied disagreement might lead to an Allied collapse, refused to consider the offers. History offers nothing in the record of great wars in affording more contrast than the pessimism in the inner councils of the Allies in the winter of 1917-18, and the spring of 1918, in comparison with the complete victory which was achieved in the fall of 1918. Our second phase came with the first of the German offensives on March 21, 1918, against the British army. The success of this offensive startled the people of the Allied world to a full realization of the perilous situation of their cause. It was an innovation in tactics in that the Germans had swept through the front lines and support lines of the trench system, capturing the guns whose answering artillery fire had hitherto been the main reliance of the defense in stopping the enemy's charges, and carrying the warfare into the open. We had then only four divisions which had been in the trenches, Bullard's 1st Regulars and Bundy's 2d Regulars and Marines and Edwards's 26th, or New England, and Menoher's 42d, or Rainbow, National Guard Divisions. The plan had been to put them into a permanent American sector in Lorraine, but in face of this new emergency they were to be turned over to the French for such use as Marshal Foch, the new commander in chief of the Allied forces, might decide to make of them.