Under Foch's Command: A Tale of the Americans in France

by F. S. Brereton

Many and long were the discussions held by Jim and Bill and Larry now that they had reached the neighbourhood of the vast European conflict which had drawn America into its whirlpool. As they sat on their captured trawler at Dover they could literally hear the sound of that conflict in the distance; for across the Channel, but fifty miles inland, beyond Ypres—the celebrated Ypres, which had long since been shattered into fragments—British troops were fighting their way along the ridge of Paschendaele. Messines, the German stronghold, had fallen. British guns, made in British factories manned by British women, had smashed the Hun defences.

Consider this achievement for a while. In 1914 Britain possessed guns sufficient only for a small expeditionary force, and the supply none too liberal. In 1915 her manufacturing resources were sufficient to supply guns for an increasing host of volunteers—guns and every other munition necessary for the conduct of warfare. But the business of manufacturing weapons and all that appertains to fighting was not yet by any means fully expanded. Indeed, the need for it was not apparent. The call for shells, more shells, and still more shells, and for guns by the hundred to project them, had not yet gone through the land, nor had munition factories sprung up in every direction with the rapidity of mushrooms.

Then came the Ministry of Munitions—a huge Government concern inaugurated to control supplies for every kind of warfare. It commenced its work perhaps hesitatingly, it forged ahead with determination, it got fully into its stride; so that when 1916 arrived, and Britain and France faced the German in Picardy across the Somme valley, British guns, aye, and British men, were the masters of the situation.

And here was 1917 with still more men and with a still mightier array of munitions, deluging the German, bruising him all along the line through Flanders into France, smashing him and his defences, driving him from the ridges which he had held since 1914, and from which he had looked down upon the British troops floundering in the mud in Flanders.

To the Kaiser and his ruthless agents, to the German High Command as it is termed, those days must have seemed portentous. Disaster hung in the air, the fortune which had favoured them from the first instant seemed to have departed from them altogether. The Central Powers were in fact girt in by enemies. The world had declared war against these land and sea marauders. America had joined the Allies, having suffered indignities at the hands of the Kaiser; Portugal had joined the ranks of Prussia's enemies; and states in South America were already considering their position, or were now throwing in their lot with those sworn to beat down the oppressors of mankind and to fight for the freedom of nations.

The Dardanelles was an old tale. Britain had there left her mark, and the graves of her sons, and had departed. In Egypt the tribes haunting the Delta of the Nile, stirred up by German agents and supplied with money and with weapons, had revolted and had been subjugated by British columns. The Senussi, to take an example, were now conquered. Across the Canal, and far to the east of it, Turkish hosts gathered in Beersheba, Jerusalem, and other places were watching the steady relentless advance of a British railway across the desert, and, as Bill and his friends reached European waters, troops of the King-Emperor were already on the fringe of Palestine, where very soon they were to advance by Beersheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, and other places of Biblical interest, and were to hoist their flag over the ancient and sacred walls of Jerusalem, once the home of historical crusaders.

Farther east lay Mesopotamia, where the forced surrender of General Townshend's gallant troops at Kut had long since been avenged by the capture of that place and the taking of Bagdad. The noble-hearted Sir Stanley Maude was already leading his forces up the Tigris and Euphrates towards Mosul, and, though in later months that dread scourge cholera seized him, there were others to step into his place and still lead British and Indian troops onwards.

Glance to the eastern area of Europe. If matters wore a rosy aspect on the French front, in Egypt, Salonica, and Mesopotamia, if along those lengths of British trench-lines British guns and British troops were causing the Prussian to reel, the Turks to surrender, and the Bulgarians to wish perhaps that they had never joined hands with the Kaiser and his soldiers, to the east of Europe Russian troops were reeling from another reason altogether.

Revolution was in the air; the rights of man were being preached and practised in preference to patriotism and unselfish devotion to country; upstarts were springing into position; subtle agents of the Kaiser, their pockets heavy with German gold, had seized upon the ear of the ignorant people; soldiers turned against their officers; the working and the peasant class were induced first to oppose and then to throw off allegiance to those who had been their lords and masters. Anarchy supervened, though for a time the revolutionists, holding those who would carry matters to great lengths, attempted to form a Government and control the country, even attempted to keep the soldiers in the trenches and to stem the German invasion; until anarchy reared its head still higher, the voices of Trotsky and Lenin overpowered the voices of the moderates. The Tsar and his house had been removed, and were, in fact, prisoners; the government of the people, on behalf of the people, was destroyed. Trotsky and Lenin became, in fact, the rulers of the country, and they, be it understood, were already more than half given over to Germany. Trenches were abandoned, soldiers gave themselves leave and went off to their distant homes, a few faithful and patriotic divisions were left stranded; guns by the hundred and munitions of every description—for the most part supplied by Britain—lay at the mercy of any German battalion that cared to come for them.

The inevitable followed. German troops advanced and seized wide tracts of country. They took, with only the trouble of taking it, vast masses of military booty; they imposed peace terms on the Russians which practically made slaves of them; and, with their accustomed cunning, so handled matters that this huge country, once tenanted by a patriotic people, became dissolved into separate provinces, each claiming its own sovereignty, the one already engaged in warfare against the other, careless of the fact that the conqueror was already knocking at their doors.