This was the push that brought the break.  Germany still had her armies intact on the soil of other countries, and was a consolidated force, tired though not beaten.  But the fat and filthy “Czar” Ferdinand of Bulgaria sat in voluntary exile, eating like bread the ashes of repentance, and mingling his drink with weeping; so that his country, yellow at best, and frightened by the fear of being done to as it had done by Serbia, quit abruptly, without shame, almost without firing a shot.  With that defection the last wisp of Germany’s long cherished dream of a boche Middle-Europe and a boche empire stretching from Berlin to Bagdad, faded forever.  In October, 1918, Austria consented to a reconstituted independent Bohemian state, and with apparent readiness granted self-government to Hungary.

Meantime, in September and October, 1918, the American and allied armies chased the Germans from the coast and far into the interior of Belgium, the Belgian army, financed by the United States, taking part in that operation.  Town after town, city after city in Belgium and France fell to the American and allied forces, so that the German government (October 27) addressed a note to the President of the United States asking him to intercede with our allies for an armistice and a conference for discussion of terms of peace.  This led to four exchanges of notes, in which Germany’s expressions were specious, and assumed a right to negotiate.  The last of these notes was submitted by President Wilson to the allied council at Paris; and the council answered by referring the whole question of armistice to Marshal Foch and the allied military chiefs.

THE “CROOKED KAMERAD”

In those same months of September and October, 1918, Austria and Turkey made proffers of separate surrender.  This was the logical sequence of a “crooked kamerad” peace-offensive inaugurated by Germany as soon as she found herself being rolled, helplessly, toward the Rhine.  It was at once the most vicious game that her genius for the vicious had ever prompted, and it was put forward at the very time when the fourth liberty loan was in course of being floated.

Our soldiers on all fronts had often suffered through a trick of false surrender by German soldiers.  It is best described by one of our boys who was lying on a table in a base hospital, waiting his turn to be operated upon, when he heard another who was being wheeled out from the operating room and was muttering through the ether fumes: 

“Fired at me ten feet away, he did, point blank, and then he dropped his rifle and stuck up his hands and called me ‘Kamerad’!  Kamerad, the dirty crook!  Didn’t I stick ’im pritty, Bill”!

It had been a common thing on the western front for a group of boches to come running toward the American lines unarmed, with their hands in the air, crying “Kamerad!  Kamerad!” And then, when our men went out to receive them, fall flat, to make way for a force of armed boches immediately behind them, who opened fire—­plain murder as ever was done.