I cannot speak to the great American public about our wounded, without saying how much we appreciate the fact that it has followed them, with admirable solicitude, all the length of their hard Calvary.  Its stretcher-bearers have helped us rescue them at the front, its ambulances have carried them to our hospitals, where they have found its doctors, its nurses to tend their wounds, its offerings of all kinds to assure their material well-being and their moral comfort.  And in after-care it has not been less solicitous:  teaching the blind, reeducating the maimed and giving them the costly apparatus which take the place of their lost limbs.  When they could not survive, despite efforts of science and devotion, it contributed toward assuring the future of their widows and orphans.

America to-day gives us even her blood; she has from the first given us her gold, given her heart!

Copyright, Catholic World, October, 1918.

* * * * *

The great series of battles, known in general as the Battle of Picardy, formed a prelude to the final acts of the war.  A stirring account of these battles is given in the narrative which follows.

THE BATTLE OF PICARDY

J.B.W.  GARDINER

[Sidenote:  Possibly the decisive battle of the war.]

[Sidenote:  Germany will emerge victor or vanquished.]

On March 21st, 1918, Germany opened the great engagement which will probably prove to be the decisive battle of the war.  This designation has already, but not altogether correctly, been given to the Battle of the Marne.  The Marne did decide that the Germans were not to capture Paris in their first great rush through Belgium and France.  It did not only halt the German advance, but threw it back behind the Aisne, thus preventing Germany from winning the war in 1914.  But it did not defeat the German army decisively.  Nor did it make an ultimate German victory impossible.  It left the German army still in the field, its strength practically unimpaired, still capable of strong defense, still with great striking power in attack.  It made possible for the future a decisive Allied victory, but it did not achieve it.  The German defeat at Verdun, indeed, did more harm to the German army, lessened to a greater extent its power of defense and its strength to attack than did the Marne, because through the French defense and counter-efforts, the German army lost nearly half a million men.  But the battle now raging, which for convenience of reference is called the Battle of Picardy (although it embraces Picardy, Artois, and Flanders), will do more than did either the Marne or Verdun.  It will place irrevocably and unmistakably upon Germany the laurel of victory or the thorny crown of defeat.  It is, therefore, the decisive battle of the war.  It is the final struggle of the civilized world against the domination of the beast.  It is Germany’s final effort, and, in order that this may be appreciated, it is necessary only to recount the conditions which impelled Germany to take the offensive at this time.