I
THERE had come a post card from Sergeant Jerry Pendleton in France. “We are ready. Everything fine. Watch our smoke!” And right after that the big news began to come in. The Americans hit the spearhead of the German advance on Paris, at a little village called Château-Thierry, difficult for doughboys to pronounce. The Americans furnished two divisions for the great attack at Soissons, which caught the Germans on the flank, and cut the supply lines of their advancing armies. The same fellows that Lanny had met and talked with; they had been training for a new kind of fighting, to attack and keep on attacking, and take machine-gun nests in spite of losses — and now they were doing it! In the few days of that battle the Germans sent in seven divisions to stop the First Division of the Americans, and when they failed, their leaders knew that the tide of the war had turned.
From that time on there was one battle that went on day and night for three months. The fifty thousand sergeants led their million and a quarter men, and the machine guns mowed some of them down and left them crumpled and writhing on the ground-but others got close, and threw their hand grenades and silenced the guns. After three days of such attacks, one of the battalions from Camp Devens, a thousand strong, came out with two hundred men unwounded. But they had taken the positions.
People read about these exploits with pride and exultation, or with shuddering and grief, according to their temperaments. Lanny, who knew more about war than anybody else he met, was of two moods in as many minutes. A poet had expressed his state of mind in alternating verses:
I sing the song of the great clean guns
that belch forth death at will.
Ah, but the wailing mothers,
the lifeless forms and still!
At the country club Lanny had met officers who were now in France, directing this all-summer and autumn battle, and he was proud of these stern, capable men and the job they were doing. As the poet had said:
I sing the acclaimed generals