The indefatigable industry of our workers, in preparation for the reception of vast hosts which at the inception of the great plan seemed visionary, now appeared as the most practical kind of prevision, a prevision which was to play an important part in winning the war. By results we had answered the fears of all skeptics. All the way from the North Sea, over four hundred miles to Switzerland, the traveler saw American soldiers behind the line; and they were scattered through all the villages of France. We had ten divisions who had been assigned to the British, we had soldiers in training in the Ypres salient on the old Somme battle field, in Champagne, in the Woevre, in Lorraine, and in the forests of the Vosges Mountains in sight of the Alps. The transports were disembarking men by the thousands every day and railroad trains were dispatching our divisions here and there with a frequency that left it out of the question that any man or woman in France should not now realize by their own observation that America was in the war in earnest and she was bringing her man power to bear on the battle front. Our project for an army of our own had been abandoned for the time being in order to meet the emergency due to the German offensives. The American effort in France had been that of many scattered divisions called to fill breaches and then sent into the attack in order to make the most of the turn of the tide. We could not have an American army in our own sector until these detached divisions had assisted in making sure that Paris was forever out of danger, and that there was not enough spirit or force left in the German armies to undertake an offensive of any kind. The situation of our forces meanwhile was unique and amazingly difficult. The British had their line from thirty to seventy-five miles from the coast which was only an hour's ride away from England itself, and the French were in their own country wherever they went. But the nearest homes of our soldiers were three thousand miles away and the homes of some of them were five and six thousand miles. When they received "leaves" they could not go to visit their families as the British and French might. While the British were in their permanent sector with all the system of supplies regularly established, our soldiers might be one day serving with the British army and the next day with the French; they knew the weariness of long rides on railway trains, billets in barns and haylofts, and no home associations except that of their own companionship and that supplied by the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Knights of Columbus, and the Salvation Army. They were under the strictest kind of censorship, their mail took weeks to reach France and then followed them about from place to place in trying to overtake them.