as it has in sickness. A step which, taken today, may lead to assured victory, taken tomorrow may barely avert disaster. All the Allies have discovered that. It was a new country for us all. It was trackless, mapless. We had to go by instinct. But we found the way, and I am so glad that you are sending your great naval and military experts here just to exchange experiences with men who have been through all the dreary, anxious crises of the last three years.
America has helped us even to win the battle of Arras. The guns which destroyed the German trenches, shattered the barbed wire—I remember, with some friends of mine whom I see here, arranging to order the machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them—you got your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has also had her training. She has been making guns, making ammunition, giving us machinery to prepare both; she has supplied us with steel, and she has all that organization, and all that wonderful facility, adaptability, and resourcefulness of the great people which inhabits that great continent. Ah! It was a bad day for military autocracy in Prussia when it challenged the great republic of the west. We know what America can do, and we also know that now she is in it she will do it. She will wage an effective and successful war.
There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace. To this I attach great importance. I am the last man to say that the succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I do not mind saying that I rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations—the course of human life—for God knows how many ages. It would have been tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by flinging herself into this great struggle.
I can see peace coming now—not a peace which will be the beginning of war, not a peace which will be an endless preparation for strife and bloodshed, but a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and Europe—poor Europe!—has always lived under the menace of the sword. When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule. It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank from it—shrank and shuddered—and never would have entered the caldron had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would have been no war. Strange things have happened in this war. There are stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly.
There are times in history when this world spins so leisurely along its destined course that it seems for centuries to be at a standstill; but there are also times when it rushes along at a giddy pace, covering the track of centuries in a year. Those are the times we are living in now. Today we are waging the most devastating war that the world has ever seen; tomorrow—perhaps not a distant tomorrow—war may be abolished forever from the category of human crimes. This may be something like the fierce outburst of winter, which we are now witnessing, before the complete triumph of the sun. It is written of those gallant men who won that victory on Monday—men from Canada, from Australia, and from this old country, which has proved that in spite of its age it is not decrepit—it is written of those gallant men that they attacked with the dawn—fit work for the dawn!—to drive out of forty miles of French soil those miscreants who had defiled it for three years. "They attacked with the dawn." Significant phrase!
The breaking up of the dark rule of the Turk, which for centuries has clouded the sunniest land in the world, the freeing of Russia from an oppression which has covered it like a shroud for so long, the great declaration of President Wilson coming with the might of the great nation which he represents into the struggle for liberty, are heralds of the dawn. "They attacked with the dawn," and these men are marching forward in the full radiance of that dawn, and soon Frenchmen and Americans, British, Italians, Russians, yea, and Serbians, Belgians, Montenegrins, will march into the full light of a perfect day.
THE FIRST TO FALL IN BATTLE
During the trench warfare, it was customary to raid the enemy trenches at unexpected hours, sometimes during the night, often during "the sleepiest hour," just before the dawn. In such a raid made by the Germans in the early dawn of November 3, 1917, fell the first American soldiers to die in the World War.
The Germans began by shelling the barbed-wire barrier in front of the trenches where the Americans were stationed for a few days, taking their first lessons in trench warfare. A heavy artillery fire was then directed so as to cover the trenches and the country immediately back of them. This prevented reinforcements coming into the trenches. Following the barrage a large number of Huns broke through the barbed wire and jumped into the trenches.
The Americans did not fully understand the situation, for it was their first experience with a trench raid. A wounded private said, "I was standing in a communicating trench waiting for orders. I heard a noise back of me and looked around in time to see a German fire in my direction. I felt a bullet hit my arm."
Three Americans were killed. They were the first fighting under the American flag to fall in battle on the soil of Europe. They were—
Corporal James B. Gresham, Evansville, Indiana.
Private Merle D. Hay, Glidden, Iowa.
Private Thomas F. Enright, Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
On November 6, three graves were dug. On one side of them stood a line of poilus in their uniforms of horizon blue and red, and on the other a line of American soldiers in khaki. The flag-covered caskets were lowered, as the bugler sounded "taps," and the batteries fired minute guns.
Then the French officer in command of the division, amid the broken roar of the minute guns and the whistle of shells, paid a tribute to the dead.
"In the name of this division, in the name of the French army, and in the name of France, I bid farewell to Corporal Gresham, Private Hay, and Private Enright of the American army.
"Of their own free will they left a happy, prosperous country to come over here. They knew war was here. They knew that the forces battling for honor, for justice, and for civilization were still being checked by the forces serving the powers of frightfulness, brute force, and barbarity. They knew that fighting was still necessary. Not forgetting historical memories, they wished to give us their brave hearts.
"They knew all the conditions, nothing had been hidden from them, not the length and hardship of the war, not the violence of battle, not the terrible destruction of the new weapons, not the falseness of the enemy. Nothing stopped them. They accepted the hard life, they crossed the ocean at great peril, they took their places at the front beside us; and now they have fallen in a desperate hand-to-hand fight. All honor to them.
"Men! These American graves, the first to be dug in the soil of France, and but a short distance from the enemy, are a symbol of the mighty land that has come to aid the Allies, ready to sacrifice as long as may be necessary until the final victory for the most noble of causes, the liberty of peoples and of nations, of the weak as well as the strong. For this reason the deaths of these humble soldiers take on an extraordinary grandeur.
"We shall ask that the mortal remains of these young men be left here, left with us forever. We will inscribe on the tombs, 'Here lie the first soldiers of the Republic of the United States to fall on the soil of France for liberty and justice.' The passer-by will stop and uncover his head. Travelers and men of feeling will go out of their way to come here to pay tribute.
"Corporal Gresham, Private Hay, Private Enright, in the name of France, I thank you. God receive your souls. Farewell."
As the French officer wished, there they remain. Soon a worthy monument will be erected upon the ground where they fought and now lie asleep in death. Americans of this