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It was plain also, in the words of Pershing's report, that because of the inroads made upon British and French reserves, "defeat stared them in the face unless the new American troops should prove more immediately available than even the most optimistic had dared to hope." The first necessity was satisfied early in April.
On the 16th, when McGee reached Ligny-en-Barrois, which had served as General Pershing's field headquarters at the beginning of the operation, he found that his squadron had been withdrawn from the sector and sent somewhere else. Where? No one seemed to know. Furthermore, no one seemed to care a great deal.
Here the two youths won fresh laurels, and both were well on the way to be recognized "aces" by the time Pershing's army succeeded in fighting its way through the nests of machine-gun traps that infested the great Argonne Forest. It was in the autumn of the victory year, 1918, and the German armies were being pushed back all along the line from Switzerland to the sea.
There was little fault to be found with their progress, and while Bulgaria, Turkey, and Austria were collapsing in the East, the Germans were being steadily driven towards disaster on a widening field of battle in the West. Simultaneously with Pershing's destruction of the St. Mihiel salient the British were thrusting the Germans back to the Hindenburg lines between Cambrai and St.
Once Tom and Tack, keeping close together doing scout work, were cut off from their companions. They had ventured too far over the Hun lines, and were in danger of being shot down. But a squadron of airmen from Pershing's forces made a sortie and drove the Germans to cover, rescuing the two air service boys from an evil fate.
General Pershing's telegram as transmitted to the Americans fighting the Bolsheviki in, North Russia was as follows: "Inform our troops that all America resounds with praise of the splendid record that the American Expeditionary Forces have made.
General Pershing's army attacked from the west, south and east all the way from Bouzee to Norroy, and by September 13th had pushed it back to a straight line drawn from Combres to Hattonville. The French attacked at Ailly, the apex of the salient as it was on September 11. The entire operation was conducted with rapidity and with irresistible energy.
When the Allies threatened to appeal to Washington over Pershing's head, President Wilson turned a deaf ear. In the United States, the President sought similar centralization through the General Staff. It was this body which prepared the different plans for the Draft Act, the Pershing expedition, and finally for the gigantic task of putting a million men in France by the summer of 1918.
Margaret's husband was somewhere in France with Pershing's divisions. Margaret was to have news of him this evening, brought by a young English officer, Dawson Hewes, who had been wounded at Ypres, and who had come on a recruiting mission, among his countrymen in America. The only other guest was to be Drusilla Gray. Derry had gone over early to have the twilight hour with Margaret's children.
But I knew while I watched the exquisite effects of brown and silver, produced by the succession of tall, pale trunks rising above the lace-work of the underwood, as scene after scene pressed upon us out of the dark, that we were indeed in a forest country, only some twenty miles away from the scene of General Pershing's drive at the end of last September, when he achieved on the first day an advance of seven miles through difficult country, while General Gouraud was pushing forward in Champagne; and I found myself speculating in the dark on the many discussions I had heard both among English and Americans of that advance, and of the checks and difficulties which, as I suppose is now generally admitted, followed on the first brilliant operations.
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