When they arrived, the situation had become such that the French
command advised, indeed ordered, them to retire. But they and their
brave general would not hear of it. They disembarked almost upon the
field of battle and rushed forward, with little care for orthodox
battle order, without awaiting the arrival of their artillery, which
had been unable to keep up with their rapid passage to that front.

They stormed ahead, right through the midst of a retreating French
division, yelling like wild Indians, ardent, young, irresistible in
their fury of battle. Some of the Frenchmen called out a well-meant
warning: "Don't go in this direction. There are the boches with
machine guns." They shouted back:

"That's where we want to go. That's where we have come three thousand
miles to go." And they did go, into the very teeth of the deadly
machine guns. In defiance of all precedent they stormed, with rifle
and bayonet in frontal attack, against massed machine guns.

They threw themselves upon the victory-flushed Huns to whom this
unconventional kind of fierce onset came as a complete and
disconcerting surprise. They fought like demons, with utterly reckless
bravery. They paid the price, alas! in heavy losses, but for what they
paid they took compensation in over-full measure.

They formed of themselves a spearhead at the point nearest Paris,
against which the enemy's onslaught shattered itself and broke. They
stopped the Hun, they beat him back, they broke the spell of his
advance. They started victory on its march.

A new and unspent and mighty force had come into the fray. And the Hun
knew it to his cost and the French knew it to their unbounded joy. The
French turned. Side by side the Americans and the French stood, and on
that part of the front the Germans never advanced another inch from
that day. They held for a while, and then set in the beginning of the
great defeat.

I was in Paris when the news of the American achievement reached the
population. They knew full well what it meant. The danger was still
present, but the crisis was over. The boche could not break through.
He could and would be stopped and ultimately thrown back, out of
France, out of Belgium, across the Rhine and beyond!

The aid for which the sorely beset people of France had been praying,
had arrived. The Americans had come, young, strong, daring, eager to
fight, capable of standing up against and stopping and beating back
Ger