Page:The history and achievements of the Fort Sheridan officers' training camps.djvu/401

 record vs^hat they had done this book would be complete. We can only introduce into this volume the pictures and final records of those vs^ho never came back.

The Test of Their Training Was the Strength and Spirit of Their

Service — A Matchless, Deathless Record — of Some Among

the Many Who Made the Supreme Sacrifice.

��Extracts from Articles Citations Letters "From Over There'

��THE BATTLEFIELD OF SERGY

(Cabled by an Eye-witness)

The American Front! There's a meadow of memories today at Sergy. Back home Americans may remember the thrill they got when they read in their newspapers how husky American doughboys met the flow^er of the German Army — the picked Prussian Guard — and licked him in good Ameri- can fashion. They may recall that Sergy changed hands nine times in the fighting that swayed back and forth over the town and the field. They may know now, as was stated then, that not a battlefield in all battle-torn France has seen more desperate conflict than this.

But today all is sunny and peaceful around Sergy. One must look be- neath the fast-grow^ing wheat and oats of the green hillside to see the countless evidences of the battle. Only it is a strange carpet and one that has not yet, in a month's time, had time to weave its greenery over bare graves, pitifully bare, under which repose heroic American dead and over w^hich defiantly waves the Red, White and Blue for which they died in glory.

Below the meadow lies Sergy, the powdered ruin of a city, its houses tumbled in shaky cardboard shapes where American artillery and American machine gun fire — even American hands — pulled it down, but it is the ground above that thrills the most. Almost every square yard has its evidence of how Americans fought and died. Not a month's kindly sunshine and cooling rains, not even the Army of Reclamation that travels back of the Army of Occupa- tion has yet effaced these marks of conflict.

The dead are gone, of course. Crosses rear above the grass. The sun slants on American identification discs tacked to the arms, showing where American dead sleep in the peace that knows no wars.

Back in a little clump of woods above the slope, American soldiers evi- dently prepared for battle. Still tucked in a splinter of sapling cut down

by a German shell — is a bit of trench mirror. Some husky American boy smoothed his hair by its reflection, perhaps shaved as he joyously prepared for battle.

Here it was also that these boys stripped for action. An overcoat lies dropped on the ground exactly as it was thrown from some pair of stalwart shoulders as they sturdily bore an American rifle forward toward Germany.

A shattered rifle butt tells another story.

In tw^o or three hurriedly scooped out shelters, there are still blue-green

German uniforms their wearers killed or fled back as the Americans came

victoriously on.

A perfect litter of letters, of shaving paste, of toothbrushes, of extra shoes, of broken belts, predominates everywhere as one walks onward and

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