against 278 allied battalions. The artillery employed is not given, nor is anything said of losses except that they were very heavy. Truly, however, the writer concludes:

Flanders! The name is heard by everyone in the German Fatherland with a silent shudder, for there, in November, 1914, Germany lost hope of a speedy ending to the war, and all who understood war realized she could never win.

EDITOR'S NOTE.-The machine guns of which the German writer speaks did not exist. The British Army-"the Kaiser's Contemptibles"-of 1914 had about the same proportion of machine guns which the Army of the United

G. A. R., it numbers in its eligibles nearly all able-bodied men of the present generation.

The control of this great embryonic mastodon is in safe hands at present and, it is thought, will remain so.

All Regular Army officers and soldiers should join local camps or chapters and not form separate chapters just for themselves, as this would vitiate the idea of their becoming members.

President Jefferson felt earnestly the need of compulsory training and military service.

Jefferson retired to private life and the country went rashly unprepared to war with Great Britain in 1812. It was a humiliating war for the United States. Our poorly trained militia ran off one field after another and abandoned the national capital to an inferior force of British soldiers. We glimpse conditions from a letter written by Jefferson, September 9, 1814, to John Wayles Eppes:

If our government ever fails it will be from this weakness. No government

can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as of duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. Our country is a desert. None are to be met in the roads but grayheads. About 800 men are gone from it, and chiefly volunteers. But I fear they cannot be armed.

I think the truth must now be obvious, that our people are too happy at home to enter into regular service, and that we cannot be defended but by making every citizen a soldier, as the Greeks and Romans, who had no standing armies, and that in doing this all must be marshaled, classed by their ages, and every service ascribed to its competent class.

C

HEADQUARTERS TWENTIETH INFANTRY, FORT RILEY, KANS., May 14, 1919. ERTAIN conclusions drawn from acknowledged facts with regard to the Regular Army appear contrary to all laws of logical reasoning.

I have before me the Saturday Evening Post of May 10 containing an article by George Patullo, "Who Won the War," and an unsigned article which I am inclined to think is not from the pen of any particular soldier, but rather the work of a staff writer who feels that he is putting into expression about what the average doughboy feels upon discharge.

Mr. Patullo, I believe, was a member of the 1st Officers' Training Camp at San Antonio, Texas, and, having been a correspondent with the Army in France practically since its arrival, should be fairly well qualified to report upon its accomplishments.

The following are some of his statements made in the above-mentioned article:

In May and June he broke through

the French front to the Marne and almost reached Compiegne. No reference to American troops here; but who stopped the Boches? Paris seemed to be doomed. The French were aghast, but suddenly the enemy hordes were thrown back and held. Ask the mayors of Meaux and adjoining towns; go ask the inhabitants of the Chateau-Thierry region. They know; so do all of us who were up there or in France at the time. The 2d Division of the Americans did it.

FACTS THAT ARE IGNORED

"The civilian population will never forget," said the mayors of Meaux and

the neighboring districts in a letter to the commanding general of the American forces on the Marne, "that, beginning in the month of June, when their homes were threatened by the invaders, the 2d Division victoriously stepped forth and succeeded in saving them from the impending danger. The mayors, who were eye-witnesses of the generous and efficacious deeds of the American Army in stopping the enemy advance, send this heartfelt expression of their admiration and gratitude.'

At this time no troops except the Americans were seriously fighting the boches. Strategetic retreats were the vogue; sometimes at a run, again at a walk. Rearguard actions were the fashion-and all honor to the men who stood and died, to gain time for their comrades.

I went to the Chateau-Thierry sector, and to other sectors as well, in those tragic days, and I pledge my word of honor that never have I seen the morale of fighting forces lower than it was among the Allies at that period. They didn't seem to have a punch left in them. They were sullenly awaiting the next onslaught, fearful of its success, almost hopeless of their ability to stop the boches. And then a small force of Americans did the trick tem

porarily and presto!-hope revived.

The 3d Division came back at the boches on July 15 like a sledgehammer. It hurled the Germans out of all their gains in that sector, and when the desperate struggle was over 5,000 enemy dead lay in the area the 3d held.

THE MEUSE-ARGONNE OFFENSIVE

So the 1st and 2d American Divisions, with the famous Moroccan Division-than whom there are no storm troops on earth more fiery-constituted the head of the spear in the Soissons battle of the Marne-Aisne offensive. With them in that grueling and costly. struggle were six other American di

And now we come to the MeuseArgonne offensive, the greatest battle in American history. In that long-drawn struggle, which began on September 26 and did not end until the finish, the Americans employed more than 800,000 men and suffered close to 150,000 casualties. Surely this ranks with any offensive ever undertaken by either the French or British. The French effectives in the Argonne offensive were in the neighborhood of 320,000 men.

They told us we could not do it. The French were willing to bet five to one that the dense Argonne Forest, with its frowning ridges and hills and deep ravines, could not be taken. They exclaimed at the very thought of such an undertaking, predicting unspeakable losses. Well, the losses came-nobody can deny that-but the Americans broke the German line of its pivotal point and forced a precipitate retreat all along the front. Sickening as were our casualties, they were not out of proportion to the importance of the feat. And had not the Argonne position been forced a spring campaign might have been necessary, with double the toll of dead and wounded.

This situation compelled an immediate withdrawal by the boches from the Aisne-Sambre front, and accounts in a measure for the rapid advance of the French and British armies during the closing days of the campaign.

Of the divisions mentioned by Mr. Patullo, the 1st, 2d, 3d and 4th Divisions are Regulars, their junior officers being drawn from West Point, the ranks of the Regular Army and from the officers' training camps; the regimental, brigade and division commanders being Regulars, of from twenty to forty years' experience.

The divisions taking part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, the greatest battle in American history, were the 1st, 2d, 3d, 4th, 5th, 26th, 28th, 29th,

The

80th, 81st, 82d, 85th, 90th, and 91st. From the 77th to 91st inclusive these were National Army divisions. company officers and majority of the battalion commanders of these divitraining camps, where they received sions were products of the officers' their instructions from Regular Army officers detailed by the War Department. The division, brigade and regimental commanders and most of the staff officers were Regulars.

Would it not be natural to conclude that divisions which accomplished what these divisions did, as recorded by Mr. Patullo and many others, must have been trained, guided and led by officers of some considerable degree of merit?

Give the enlisted man his just dueand I believe the American soldier to be the best in the world-it is hardly likely that twenty or thirty thousand men composing such a polyglot mass as was the 77th, for instance (the regiment recruited from New York City), could have involved itself, without proper leadership, into the fine organization which fought so creditably through the Argonne.

I have before me the New York Times of Sunday, May 11, with its illustrations of these finely trained troops parading up 5th Avenue. Have many people a clear conception of the magnitude of the task involved, in creating out of the conglomerate mass of men. assembled at Camp Upton in the fall of 1917, an organization with a soul and purpose striving towards one goal, such as the 77th and other divisions became in less than a year? How contrary to all the facts of life would be the thought that in one year the untrained bodies of men assembled at the