ow, what would a Brass Hat say in such an awkward emergency?
Would he look wise or unwise when he said it? Trying to look unwise, I
replied: "They have the men now and can strike any time that they
please. It's not my place to know where or when. I asked for leave and
they gave it." I was quite relieved and felt that I was almost worthy
of a secretive Brass Hat myself, when one man remarked: "They don't let
you know much, do they?"

To keep such immense preparations wholly a secret among any
English-speaking people would be out of the question. Only the Japanese
are mentally equipped for security of information. With other races it
is a struggling effort. Can you imagine Washington keeping a military
secret? You could hear the confidential whispers all the way from the
War Department to the Capitol. In such a great movement as that of the
Somme one weak link in a chain of tens of thousands of officers is
enough to break it, not to mention a million or so of privates.

IV

READY FOR THE BLOW

French national spirit--Our gardeners--Tuning up for the
attack--Policing the sky--Sausage balloons--Matter-of-fact,
systematic war--A fury of trench raids--Reserves marching
forward--Organized human will--Sons of the old country ready to
strike--The greatest struggle of the war about to begin.

Our headquarters during my first summer at the front had been in the
flat border region of the Pas de Calais, which seemed neither Flanders
nor France. Our second summer required that we should be nearer the
middle of the British line, as it extended southward, in order to keep
in touch with the whole. In the hilly country of Artois a less
comfortable chateau was compensated for by the smiling companionship of
neighbors in the fields and villages of the real France.

The quality of this sympathetic appeal was that of the thoroughbred
racial and national spirit of a great people, in the politeness which
gave to a thickset peasant woman a certain grace, in the smiles of the
land and its inhabitants, in that inbred patriotism which through the
centuries has created a distinctive civilization called French by the
same ready sacrifices for its continuity as those which were made on
the Marne and at Verdun. Flanders is not France, and France is
increasingly French as you proceed from Ypres to Amiens, the capital of
Picardy. I was glad that Picardy had been chosen as the scene of the
offensive. It made the blow seem mo