"We will."
Pershing put the same all-embracing question to Hines and Dickman, and received the same resolute answer. Corps commanders were only repeating the messages of division, brigade, and battalion commanders, who were speaking the thought of the men.
"We will go through."
XXXIII
VICTORY
A march of victory in the center—Held on the left—But full speed on the second day—The 89th stays in—Veterans in leash—The 90th to the river wall—The 5th pivoting—The Borne at last taken by the 79th—The 5th gets across the Meuse—Varying resistance to the main advance—Rainbows give way to French entry into Sedan—In motion from Meuse to Moselle on the last day—Isolated divisions in Flanders—Every village in France—The folly of war.
One who moved about in the days before and the night before the attack, from the railheads to the front, his vision embracing the whole panorama, no longer need talk of what America was going to do in the war. He saw what America had done since September 26th between the ruins of the old trench system and the Kriemhilde Stellung, and he knew that the army which was to spring into action at dawn on the morning of November 1st was the greatest in our history.
When the simmering volcano of routine artillery fire broke into eruption at 3.30, racking the earth with concussions and assaulting the heavens with blinding flashes, as the stream of shells from the larger caliber of the forest of guns passed over the streams from the smaller caliber, it seemed that all the Germans in the front line must be mashed into the earth. If the preliminary bombardment left any alive, then that monstrous curtain of shell-bursts in front of the advancing infantry, and the trench mortar fire, and the sheets of machine-gun bullets that increased the strength of the shield, must hold them trussed to the earth until it passed over them and our men were upon them.
