WHY THE TIDE WAS FATED TO TURN
These are soul-stirring days. To live through them is a glory and a solemn joy. The words of the poet resound in our hearts: "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world."
Events have shaped themselves in accordance with the eternal law. Once again the fundamental lesson of all history is borne in upon the world, that evil—though it may seem to triumph for a while—carries within it the seed of its own dissolution. Once again it is revealed to us that the God-inspired soul of man is unconquerable and that the power, however formidable, which challenges it is doomed to go down in defeat.
A righteous cause will not only stand unshaken through trials and discomfiture, but it will draw strength from the very setbacks which it may suffer. A wrongful cause can only stand as long as it is buoyed up by success.
The German people were sustained by a sheer obsession akin to the old-time belief in the potent spell of "the black arts" that their military masters were invulnerable and invincible, that by some power—good or evil, they did not care which—they had been made so, and that the world was bound to fall before them.
The nation was immensely strong only as long as that obsession remained unshaken. With its destruction by a series of defeats which were incapable of being explained as "strategic retreats," their morale crumbled and finally collapsed, because it was not sustained, as that of the Allies was sustained in the darkest days of the war, by the faith that they were fighting for all that men hold most sacred.
To those who were acquainted with German mentality and psychology, it had been manifest all along that when the end foreordained did come, it would come with catastrophic suddenness.
WHERE THE TIDE TURNED
It is the general impression that the tide of victory set in with Marshal Foch's splendid movement against the German flank on July 18th. That movement, it is true, started the irresistible sweep of the wave which was destined to engulf and destroy the hideous power of Prussianism. But the tide which gathered and drove forward the waters out of which that wave arose, had turned before. It turned with and through the supreme valor of our marines and other American troops in the first battle at Château-Thierry and at Belleau Wood, in the first week of June.
The American force engaged was small, measured by the standard of numbers to which we have become accustomed in this war, but the story of their fighting will remain immortal and in its psychological and strategic consequences the action will take rank, I believe, among the decisive battles of the war.