hospitals, where they have found its
doctors, its nurses to tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to
assure their material well-being and their moral comfort. And in
after-care it has not been less solicitous: teaching the blind,
reeducating the maimed and giving them the costly apparatus which take
the place of their lost limbs. When they could not survive, despite
efforts of science and devotion, it contributed toward assuring the
future of their widows and orphans.

America to-day gives us even her blood; she has from the first given us
her gold, given her heart!

Copyright, Catholic World, October, 1918.

* * * * *

The great series of battles, known in general as the Battle of Picardy,
formed a prelude to the final acts of the war. A stirring account of
these battles is given in the narrative which follows.

THE BATTLE OF PICARDY

J.B.W. GARDINER

[Sidenote: Possibly the decisive battle of the war.]

[Sidenote: Germany will emerge victor or vanquished.]

On March 21st, 1918, Germany opened the great engagement which will
probably prove to be the decisive battle of the war. This designation
has already, but not altogether correctly, been given to the Battle of
the Marne. The Marne did decide that the Germans were not to capture
Paris in their first great rush through Belgium and France. It did not
only halt the German advance, but threw it back behind the Aisne, thus
preventing Germany from winning the war in 1914. But it did not defeat
the German army decisively. Nor did it make an ultimate German victory
impossible. It left the German army still in the field, its strength
practically unimpaired, still capable of strong defense, still with
great striking power in attack. It made possible for the future a
decisive Allied victory, but it did not achieve it. The German defeat at
Verdun, indeed, did more harm to the German army, lessened to a greater
extent its power of defense and its strength to attack than did the
Marne, because through the French defense and counter-efforts, the
German army lost nearly half a million men. But the battle now raging,
which for convenience of reference is called the Battle of Picardy
(although it embraces Picardy, Artois, and Flanders), will do more than
did either the Marne or Verdun. It will place irrevocably and
unmistakably upon Germany the laurel of victory or the thorny crown of
defeat. It is, therefore, the decisive ba