As for the Half-Hours of Hell, these mainly take the form of short, furious bombardments and midnight raids. But the German artillery is not very busy in this sector. Guns, and more guns, are urgently required farther north, where the Allied line, after stretching back and back during those anxious days in the spring of the year, has now reacted like a released bowstring and has shot the Boche back to the Meuse.
So far as we can gather from the sources at our disposal—official bulletins, intermittent newspapers, and trench gossip (personified in the American Expeditionary Force by a supposititious individual of great erudition but small reliability, whose Christian name is “Joe”)—our cause is prospering from the North Sea to the Alps. Germany shot her bolt with her third great offensive on the twenty-seventh of May, when German arms once more crossed the Marne and penetrated to within twenty-eight miles of Paris. There they were stayed, in a battle where at least one third of the Allied troops were American, and where the young American Army got its first real chance, and took it. In this operation the Second and Third American Divisions were sent to stiffen the French line. Of these, the Third successfully held a vital bridge-head opposite Château Thierry: the Second captured Bouresches, Belleau Wood, and Vaux.
So much we know for certain, for these things happened before we left England, and official information was available. The work of the Marines, in the Second Division, has already passed into American history. But for news of subsequent happenings we have had to depend too much upon our friend Joe. All we know for certain is that on the fifteenth of July the enemy launched just one more offensive—his fourth and as it proved, his very last. This time, so far as we can gather, the Allies, instead of contenting themselves with defensive tactics, took the business into their own hands and bit suddenly and deeply into the side of the huge, distended, pocketful of Germans which hung down from Soissons over Paris. The pocket promptly contracted itself: the enemy disgorged himself from its mouth, and began to retreat. From all accounts he has been retreating ever since.
French, British, and American troops were all engaged in this, the final and triumphant redressing of the balance. And each were represented by their best. One of our liaison officers tells us of a memorial set up by French soldiers in honour of the dead of the famous Fifty-first Division of the British Army—the Highland Territorials—and of an inscription carved thereon which proclaimed that hereafter the Thistle of Scotland would forever flourish beside the Lilies of France. In that great fight not merely unity of command, but unity of sentiment, seem to have come to their own at last.
The Allied counter-attack struck deep along the whole line. Soissons and Montdidier, we hear, are once more in our hands; while farther north, in Flanders, the British Third and Fourth Armies are sweeping forward for the last time in the blood-soaked valley of the Lys.
As for the American share, we have not heard too much, but what we have heard is enough to make us tingle. We hear of great work by the Regulars of the First, Second, and Third Divisions; by the Twenty-sixth—the Yankees of New England—and by the Forty-second Rainbow Division, from Yaphank. It is also reported that other American Divisions made no small impression upon Brother Boche—the Fourth, the Twenty-eighth; the Thirty-second, and the Seventy-seventh.
The Twenty-seventh and Thirtieth, we understand, are somewhere with the British opposite the Hindenburg Line near Cambrai. Doubtless we shall hear something of them too, in due course. Great days, great days! But to what a fever of exasperation are we aroused, who are not there ourselves!