perspicacity are not quite so jubilant over the effects of the Russian revolution as they were three months ago. They realize that the amazing cataclysm which began in Petrograd on March 13 warded off a treacherous peace between Romanoff and Hohenzollern, but also, alas! that it has effectually eliminated Russia as a fighting factor for the purposes of this year's campaign. Englishmen and Frenchmen are only now beginning to comprehend the immeasurable task that confronts New Russia in the erection of a democratic state on the ruins of autocracy while faced by the simultaneous necessity of warring against an enemy in occupation of vast Russian territory.

To-day there is little inclination in London or Paris to underestimate the providential importance of American intervention. The specter of dwindling manpower in both countries is of itself sufficient to cause them to gaze gratefully and longingly toward our untapped reservoir of human sinews. What is happening in chaotic and liberty-dazed Russia forces Englishmen and Frenchmen, however disconcerting to their pride, to acknowledge the absolute indispensability of American support. There are many among them candid enough to admit that democracy's horizon might now be perilously beclouded if the United States had refrained from playing a man's part in the battle of the nations. In Berlin, too, the true import of America's decision is dawning upon government and governed alike.

Our Allies expect us to justify our world-wide reputation for speed and organizing capacity and to transfer our activities from the forum of Demosthenes to the field of Mars. They are impressed by what we have already accomplished--I write on the day when the arrival of the first American army in France, well within three months of our entering the war, is officially announced. But amid our remote isolation from the scene of the conflict, safeguarded by geographical guarantees that its consuming fires can hardly ever sear our own soil, Englishmen and Frenchmen wonder whether we are able to estimate the magnitude of the effort required of us if we are to rise to the majestic zenith of our potentialities. Some of them, seemingly no wiser for their myopia of recent times, are frankly skeptical on that point.

It is our bounden duty, as I am sure it is our unconquerable resolve, to disillusion our Allies. To us has fallen the privilege of proving that our mighty sword has been drawn in earnest and that we shall not sheathe it until America's plighted word is gloriously made good. "Make Good!" Leaping to the tasks which await us on land and sea with that indigenous idiom on their lips, our soldiers and sailors need crave for no more inspiring slogan. Allied Europe expects us--expects us almost anxiously--to "make good."

London, June 28, 1917.

THE ASSAULT

CHAPTER I

THE CURTAIN RAISER

Countess Hannah von Bismarck missed her aim. The beribboned bottle of "German champagne" with which she meant truly well to baptize the newest Hamburg-American leviathan of sixty thousand-odd tons on the placid Saturday afternoon of June 20, 1914, went far wide of its mark. The Kaiser, impetuous and resourceful, came gallantly and instantaneously to the rescue. Grabbing the bottle while it still swung unbroken in midair by the black-white-red silken cord which suspended it from the launching pavilion, Imperial William crashed it with accuracy and propelling power a Marathon javelin-thrower might have envied squarely against the vast bow. The granddaughter of the Iron Chancellor, a bit crestfallen because she had only thrown like any woman exclaimed: "I christen thee, great ship, Bismarck!" and the milky foam of the Schaumwein trickled in rivulets down the nine- or ten-story side of the most Brobdingnagian product which ever sprang from shipwrights' hands. Then, with ten thousand awestruck others gathered there on the Elbe side, I watched the huge steel carcass, released at last from the stocks which had so long held it prisoner, glide and creak majestically down the greasy ways midst our chanting of Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles. Half a minute later the Bismarck was resting serenely, house-high, on the surface of the murky river five hundred yards away. The Kaiser and Herr Ballin shook hands feelingly, the royal monarch smiling benignly on the shipping king. The military band blared forth Heil Dir im Siegeskranz, and the last fête Hamburg was destined to know for many a troublous month had passed into history.

Countess von Bismarck had missed her aim! I wonder if there are not many, like myself, who witnessed the ill-omened launch and who endow it now with a meaning which events of the intervening year have borne out? For, surely, when the Great General Staff at Berlin reviews dispassionately the beginnings of the war, as it some day will do, there will be an absorbingly interesting explanation of how the machine which Moltke, the Organizer of Victory, handed down to an incompetent namesake and nephew missed its aim, too--the winning of the war by a series of short, sharp and staggering blows which should decide the issue in favor of the Germans before the next snow. The argument has been advanced, in vindication of Germany's innocent intentions, that the Hamburg-American line would never have launched the mighty Bismarck if the Fatherland was planning or contemplating war. But the ship was not to have made her maiden transatlantic voyage until April 1, 1915, the centenary of her great patronym's birth. The German Staff expected to dictate a glorious peace long before that time, and might have done so but for Belgium, Joffre, "that contemptible little British army," and other miscalculations. If the Staff, like Countess von Bismarck, had not missed its aim, the Bismarck would have poked her gigantic nose into New York harbor on scheduled time, a mammoth symbol of Germany, the World Power indeed, and fitting incarnation of the new Mistress of the Seas. Who knows but what perhaps grandiose visions of that sort were in the far-seeing Herr Ballin's card-index mind?

The Kaiser customarily visits the Venice of the North on his way to Kiel Week, the yachting festival invented by him to outrival England's Cowes, and the launch of the Bismarck was timed accordingly. From Hamburg the Emperor proceeds aboard the Imperial yacht Hohenzollern up the Elbe to Brunsbüttel for the annual regatta of the North German Yacht Squadron, a club consisting for the most part of Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck patricians with the love of the sea inborn in their Hanseatic veins. There was no variation from the time-honored programme in 1914. William II even adhered to his unfailing practice of delivering an apotheosis of the marine profession at the regatta-dinner of the N.G.Y.S. aboard the Hamburg-American steamer on which Herr Ballin is wont to entertain for Kiel Week a party of two or three hundred German and foreign notables. There was no glimmer of coming events in the guest-list of S.S. Victoria Luise, for it included Mr. John Walter, one of the hereditary proprietors of The Times,