Page:Fred Arthur McKenzie - Americans at the Front (1917).djvu/44

 and the spring and summer campaign of 1915. In the autumn they took part in the great Champagne attacks, a splendid and costly effort.

One can read in the letters of this young man that have been published with his poems, the development of his manhood. He had broadened, deepened, and his admiration for France, ever intense, was now taking a deeper tone. He had come to actualities. In the hour of disappointment his affection for France was stronger than ever. "We failed," he wrote, after one fight. "This affair only deepened my admiration for, my loyalty to, the French. He is a better man, man for man, than the German. Anyone who had seen the charge of the Marsouins at Souain would acknowledge it. Never was anything more magnificent. I remember a captain, badly wounded in the leg, as he passed us, borne back on a litter by four German prisoners. He asked us what regiment we were, and when we told him, he cried, Vive la Legion, and kept repeating Nous les avons. Nous les avons. He was suffering, but oblivous of his wound, was still fired with the enthusiasm of the assault and all radiant with victory. What