TWENTIETH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 261 



tion itself, were saved. And so we can say that France saved the 

 war ! 



But that was a war of a thousand miracles. Time and again the 

 very fate of the world seemed to hang in the balance. The peak of 

 the crisis came in the spring of 1918. That was the time when 

 Marshal Haig gave that now famous statement: "We are fighting 

 now with our backs against the wall." That is the time that Lloyd 

 George exclaimed, "It has now become a race between America and 

 time." That was the time when Paris and the channel ports were 

 fairly rocking before the approaching tread of the conquering Hun. 

 No ; it wouldn't quite be fair to say that America won the war, and 

 yet this is an eternal verity, had it not been for America that war 

 was lost. Just at a time when the thinning ranks of our valiant 

 allies faltered in Picardy and fell back at Kimmql Hill, America 

 poured forth such a reservoir of power that four months from the 

 day of the July drive in Chateau Thierry, Germany was crushed 

 and beaten into helpless and hopeless submission. Who won the 

 war? What boots it who won the war! Honor to whom honor is 

 due. There is glory enough for us all. It was not the courage of 

 any particular army nor the valor of any one navy ; nor was it the 

 strategy of any general or the wisdom of any statesman, but the 

 winning of that war was a supreme triumph of right over wrong. 

 During the period of the war, between the contending lines in far- 

 away France, there was a narrow strip of land 400 njiles in length, 

 but exceedingly narrow, and they called it "no man's land." It was 

 so narrow that the human eye could compass it, so narrow that the 

 bullet of a rifle could cross it, and yet that narrow strip of land 

 was the widest expanse that ever existed on this planet, because it 

 was the dividing line between justice and injustice. We long have 

 been taught to regard the Atlantic as a wide and pathless ocean, 

 so wide that it takes the fastest vessels seven days and nights to 

 cross it, and yet during the war that ocean became so narrow and 

 its shores came so close together that hearts touched ; because the 

 men on one side and the men on the other side were fighting a com- 

 mon battle for honesty and righteousness and civilization, and for 

 humanity. Such was the spirit of the war. 



And yet with what spirit are we now approaching the problems 

 bequeathed by the battlefield to the councils of peace? We have 

 fought that war in vain ! We betray our soldier dead ! Unless we 

 are willing to bend our energies for the purpose of helping to make 

 a recurrence of that awful holocaust forever impossible. That was 



