strength to the responsibilities it had assumed. The Yanks were no longer on the way; they were here—here in number sufficient to enable us to lend a strong and ever-strengthening hand in the turning-back of the enemy and in bringing closer the certainty of a complete triumph over him. It was the Glory of the Coming. Moreover it should not be forgotten in the reckoning-up of causes and results that the lodging of the allied command in the hands of one captain—the most powerful single factor in inspiring victory—was brought about largely through American insistence upon the election of a single leader and a unified leadership for all the forces of the confederated nations in the field of the western theatre of the war.

I sometimes think the most splendid thing I have seen in this war was not some individual act of heroism, or devotion, or resolution—glorious though it may have been. I sometimes think the most splendid thing I have seen was the making-over of nations, literally before my eyes, in the fiery furnace of this war. I have seen little Belgium wearing the marks of her transcendent sacrifice and her unutterable suffering, as the Redeemer of Man wore the nail-marks of His Crucifixion; I have seen Britain transformed from the fat, contented, slothful, old grandmother of the nations, sitting by the chimney-piece and feeding herself torpid on her plenty, into the militant Britain of yore that has put so many millions of her sons into khaki and so many of the ladies of Germany into mourning; I have seen France become an incomparably glorious model, before all the world for all time, of the heights to which a free people may rise in defence of national pledges, national integrity and national existence; and I have seen my own country taking her proper place, in the most desperate emergency that ever confronted civilisation, as a people united, determined, valiant and steadfast—the spirit of the New World binding herself with steel grapples to the best that is in the Old World and inevitably taking the first steps in the long-delayed campaign of understanding and conciliation and renewed affection with our kinspeople and our brethren of the British Isles who speak the same mother-tongue which we speak and with whom we are joint inheritors of Runnymede and Agincourt.

As I write these lines, victory appears to be very near. Seemingly, it is coming one year sooner than we, who were in France and Belgium in the first months of 1918, thought it would come. And speaking for my fellow-American correspondents as well as for myself, I make so bold as to say that all of us are devoutly hopeful that our leaders will make it a complete, not a conditional victory. For surely those who are without mercy themselves cannot appreciate and do not deserve mercy from others. To our way of thinking, the vanquished must be made to drink the cup of defeat to its bitterest lees, not because of any vengeful desire on our part to inflict unnecessary punishment and humiliation upon him, but because he who had no other argument than force, can be cured of his madness only by force. We who have seen what he has wrought by the work of his hands among his helpless victims in other lands believe this with all our hearts.

I. S. C.

New York, November, 1918.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. WHEN THE SEA-ASP STINGS

CHAPTER II. "ALL AMURIKIN—OUT TO THEM WIRES"

CHAPTER III. HELL'S FIRE FOR THE HUNS

CHAPTER IV. ON THE THRESHOLD OF BATTLE

CHAPTER V. SETTING A TRAP FOR OPPORTUNITY

CHAPTER VI. THROUGH THE BATTLE'S FRONT DOOR

CHAPTER VII. AT THE FRONT OF THE FRONT

CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE AND AN AUTOMOBILE TIRE

CHAPTER IX. ACES UP!

CHAPTER X. HAPPY LANDINGS

CHAPTER XI. TRENCH ESSENCE

CHAPTER XII. BEING BOMBED AND RE-BOMBED

CHAPTER XIII. LONDON UNDER RAID-PUNISHMENT

CHAPTER XIV. THE DAY OF BIG BERTHA

CHAPTER XV. WANTED: A FOOL-PROOF WAR

CHAPTER XVI. CONDUCTING WAR BY DELEGATION

CHAPTER XVII. YOUNG BLACK JOE

CHAPTER XVIII. "LET'S GO!"

CHAPTER XIX. WAR AS IT ISN'T

CHAPTER XX. THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

CHAPTER XXI. PARADOXES BEHIND THE LINES

CHAPTER XXII. THE TAIL OF THE SNAKE

CHAPTER XXIII. BRICKS