Persons who visited the National Guard of Pennsylvania in its training camps, especially the last one in this country, Camp Hancock, at Augusta, Ga., were impressed with the quiet confidence with which the older officers and enlisted men viewed their handiwork. Many of the newer men in the service, catching the spirit of confidence, voiced it in boyish boastfulness.
"These men are ripe and ready," said the older, more thoughtful ones. "They will give a good account of themselves when the time arrives. They are trained to the minute, and Pennsylvania never will have need to be ashamed of them."
"Just wait until this little old division gets to France," bragged the younger ones. "The Hun won't have a chance. We'll show 'em something they don't know. Go get 'em; that's us."
And today, Pennsylvania, mourning, grief-stricken, but aglow with pride and love for that gallant force, agrees with both.
It is an odd coincidence that the Twenty-eighth Division of the German army should have been one of the most frequently mentioned organizations of the Kaiser's forces during the war and that it, too, should have acquired, by its exploits, a title all its own. It was known as "the Flying Shock Division," and on frequent occasions it was disclosed, through the capture of prisoners, that the two Twenty-eighth Divisions were opposing each other—a fact eloquent in itself of the esteem in which the enemy held our Pennsylvania lads as foemen, for the "Flying Shock Division" was shunted from one end of the Western Front to the other, wherever a desperate situation for the Germans called for desperate fighting.
In the heroic stand of the Pennsylvania Guardsmen may be traced one more instance of the truth of the adage that "history repeats itself." On the field of Gettysburg a handsome monument marks the crest of Pickett's charge, the farthest point to which Confederate fighting men penetrated in their efforts to break through the Union lines. Here they were met and stopped by Pennsylvania troops (the Philadelphia Brigade). Had they not been stopped, military authorities have agreed, the battle of Gettysburg almost certainly would have been lost to the Union. The whole course of the war probably would have been changed and the Confederacy would have been within sight of ultimate victory.
But they were met and stopped by the Pennsylvania troops. From that time the cause of the Confederacy was a losing one, and for that reason the monument is inscribed as marking "The High Water Mark of the Rebellion."
It is not inconceivable that, when the time comes to erect monuments on the battlefields of the Great War, one will stand at or near the tiny village of St. Agnan, in the Department of the Aisne, France, fixing the "high-water mark" of the German bid for world domination.
Here it was, at this village and its vicinity, that Pennsylvania troops met and defeated the flower of the German army, halted the drive and sent the Huns staggering backward in what turned, within a few days, to wild flight. The Germans, in their first rush through Belgium and France in 1914, came closer than that to Paris, but with less chance of success. Then virtually everything was against them except the tremendous impetus of their forward movement. In July, 1918, everything favored them, and the entire world awaited with bated breath and agonized heart the news that Paris was invested.
When it seemed that nothing could prevent this crowning blow to our beloved Ally, the advancing Germans struck a portion of the line held by Pennsylvania's erstwhile despised National Guardsmen. Instead of news that Paris lay under the invader's heel came the gloriously thrilling tidings that the German was in retreat before our very own men, and that it was again Pennsylvania troops which had turned the tide.