An hour before midnight the Germans were (doubtless) surprised by some lively action of French artillery.  Strange!  But it couldn’t mean anything, of course!  So the boche came on.  The behavior of the French was not quite what he had expected; one thing after another happened that was not in his calculations.  But that did not argue aught against the calculations!  It was the exasperating habit of the French to do unexpected things.  Most annoying!  But not able to affect the outcome, of course.

On July 18th they got “more unexpected still”—­they and sundry “green” troops from the flaccid, fatuous U. S. A.!  Some “hounds of the devil” were let loose upon the gray-clad armies of righteousness.  It was outrageous the way those sons of Satan fought!  They rushed upon the legions of the Lord’s anointed as if killing Germans were the noblest work a man could be about.

So many things happened that were not down on paper—­in the plans of the German General Headquarters!  It became distressingly evident that these Yanks knew as little, and cared as little, what was expected of them as the stupid Britishers or the mercurial French or the suicidal Belgians.  They didn’t know how to fight—­they couldn’t know—­they had never done any fighting, and whom had they had to teach them warfare?  They were absurd.  They didn’t know the simplest rules of war—­they didn’t know enough to surrender when they were surrounded, cut off, outnumbered.  They fought on!  They didn’t know how to fight; but Lord! how they could kill Germans.  And then they were such fools that their medical corps came out onto the battlefield and when they found a German who wasn’t dead but was suffering, their doctors bound up his wounds and gave him water to quench his raging thirst, and left him for his own comrades to carry away and nurse—­that, instead of gouging his eyes out with a bayonet’s end or bashing in his skull with the butt of a gun!  Strange people!  They never could become good slaves of Kultur; so the wounded Germans whose agonies they had assuaged, rose up on their elbows and shot them dead.

In six hours the Allies, not only reinforced but recreated by this tide of new life, new eagerness, re-took twice as much ground on the Soissons-Rheims salient as the Germans had won in six days’ desperate advance.

When the word to fight came to the men of the American army, it was less like a command to them than like a release, a long-desired permission.  Many, if not most, of them had for nearly four years been straining at the leash which held them from the place where their sense of honor told them they should be.

[Illustration:  Marshal Foch, Executive Head of the Allied Forces]

“They were superb,” Marshal Foch has said, paying wholehearted tribute to them.  “There is no other word.  Our armies were fatigued by years of relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them.  We were magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans.  The youth of the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory.  Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the enormous material aid placed at our disposal.  Nobody among us will ever forget what America did.”