The captures by the French in this sector from September 23 to November 1 included 12,000 prisoners, 200 heavy field guns, 220 trench mortars, and 720 machine guns. In ten days, from September 21 to 30, twenty-three German airplanes were destroyed and twenty-eight forced to descend badly damaged.
THE FIRST AMERICAN CASUALTIES
The first list of Americans killed and wounded in combat with the enemy reached Washington on October 17, in an official report from Rear Admiral Sims of an encounter between a German submarine and an American destroyer. One American sailor was killed and five sailors were wounded when the submarine torpedoed the destroyer Cassin on patrol duty in European waters. The destroyer was not sunk and after making a gallant fight reached a British port.
Two days later Rear Admiral Sims reported that the American troop transport Antilles, homeward bound from France, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine on October 17. Seventy men of the 237 aboard lost their lives, including four naval enlisted men, sixteen army enlisted men, three ship's officers, and 47 members of the ship's crew. The Antilles was under convoy of American patrol vessels at the time it was sunk.
FRENCH TRIBUTE TO U.S. DEAD
At the burial on November 7 of the first three American soldiers killed in the trenches in France by a raiding party of Germans, a guard of French infantrymen, in their picturesque uniforms of red and horizon blue, stood on one side and a detachment of American soldiers on the other while the flag-wrapped coffins were lowered into the grave, as a bugler blew taps and the batteries nearby fired minute guns. The French officer commanding in the sector paid an eloquent tribute to the fallen Americans, his words being punctuated by the roar of the guns and the whistle of shells. In conclusion he said:
"In the name of the French army and in the name of France, I bid farewell to Private Enright, Private Gresham and Private Hay of the American army.
"Of their own free will they had left a prosperous and happy country to come over here. They knew war was continuing in Europe; they knew that the forces fighting for honor, love of justice and civilization were still checked by the long-prepared forces serving the powers of brutal domination, oppression and barbarity. They knew that efforts were still necessary. They wished to give up their generous hearts and they had not forgotten old historical memories while others forgot more recent ones.
"They ignored nothing of the circumstances and nothing had been concealed from them—neither the length and hardships of war nor the violence of battle, nor the dreadfulness of new weapons, nor the perfidy of the foe. Nothing stopped them. They accepted the hard and strenuous life; they crossed the ocean at great peril; they took their places on the front by our side and they have fallen facing the foe in a hard and desperate hand-to-hand fight. Honor to them! Their families, friends and fellow-citizens will be proud when they learn of their deaths.
"Men! These graves, the first to be dug in our national soil and only a short distance from the enemy, are as a mark of the mighty land we and our Allies firmly cling to in the common task, confirming the will of the people and the army of the United States to fight with us to a finish, ready to sacrifice as long as is necessary until final victory for the most noble of causes, that of the liberty of nations, the weak as well as the mighty. Thus the deaths of these humble soldiers appeal to us with extraordinary grandeur.