18G IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



the old days. It was at the Marne that Napoleon met his defeat. It was 

 at the Marne in '71 during the Franco-Prussian war that the Germans 

 won. And so they began to drive down and across the Marne, and — then 

 something happened! Pershing said this, he said: "We want to be in 

 this fight; take our men, use them anywhere; that is what we are here 

 for; brigade them with your men," and then Foch took those marines, 

 those sterling American soldiers of the sea, and straight into the brazen 

 face of the enemy, flushed with victory, he threw like a thunderbolt the 

 might and power of free American manhood. It was the spirit of Amer- 

 ica that inspired those boys to do it. Then the great retreat of the enemy 

 began. But that was just the beginning. St. Mihiel salient had stood 

 there for four years, a menace to Paris, a menace to the western front. 

 For four years it had stood there, and our boys were told to take it. They 

 said to themselves in spirit, not in words, "We will match the poilu at 

 Verdun with his 'They shall not pass' with another sentence, 'It shall not 

 stand' ". And they looked at St. Mihiel and that morning when they 

 started they said, "It shall not stand!", and in twenty-four hours they 

 had wiped out the St. Mihiel salient and started the drive northward 

 which eventually put the American soldier at Sedan, potentially threat- 

 ening the lines of communication of the German armies on the entire 

 western front. And every history that is written for the next thousand 

 years will record that this great ambition of the Central Powers which 

 threatened to dominate the world and make this a world in which the 

 common man would do only the thing that he was told to do, that that 

 thing reached its peak at a certain time on the western front, and that 

 what tipped the scales and sent the Hun back, never to recover, was the 

 brave boys, the free sons of this America, singing under the stars and 

 stripes. , 



Now let me tell you two or three historical incidents that are of in- 

 terest to me. Of this great dial of history, they say that the "Mills of 

 the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small". Back in 1776, 

 when American soldiers were wintering at Valley Forge, Kosciuszko, a 

 young Polish nobleman, came over here and offered his services to 

 Washington, with whom he fought at Yorktown, and served our nation 

 splendidly. He went back to Poland and there found his country engaged 

 with Russia, Prussia and Austria, in a war against dismemberment. 

 Poland was defeated and he taken captive. When he was released from 

 prison he was offered his sword, but he refused it, saying: "I have no 

 need of a sword, as I have no country", and he went off to France and 

 died there in exile. This man that helped us to win our freedom never 

 lived to see us repay Poland for his gift to us, but the other day our 

 American president announced as one of his fourteen points that some- 

 thing should come into being — what is it? A reunion of Poland, with 

 thirty-million of souls, and so I cannot but think that we are repaying 

 by that act what was done for us, for you and me, by Kosciuszko at the 

 time this nation was born. 



Then there was another, von Steuben, who served on the staff of Fred- 

 erick the Great. While von Steuben was on a visit to Paris in 1777 he 

 was asked by the French to go to America to train the colonial soldiers 



