Twenty-ninth from New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia; the Thirty-fifth from Kansas and Missouri; the Thirtysixth from Texas and Oklahoma; the Seventy-eighth from western New York, New Jersey, and Delaware; the Seventy-ninth from northeastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia; the Eightieth from Virginia, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania; and the Ninety-first from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. Detachments from each division were now arriving in Belfort to reconnoiter the trenches they were to occupy. But the Germans must know nothing of the change in plan; all must be done most secretly.

That would be difficult in Belfort. The Alsace front had been quiet so long that this influx of American generals and other officers almost made Belfort's famous rock-hewn lion sit up and take notice. Those who indeed did sit up were the German agents who had found this city with its many blond, German-speaking Alsatians a happy huntingground, with plenty of cover. It was only ten miles from German soil, only a few miles farther from Switzerland, hotbed of spies and a center of the German spy system. As the news spread, much of Belfort's male population converged upon the Tonneau d'Or, to stand in the lobby and crane eager necks, every moment becoming more curious and more excited.

They saw General Bundy leave to stir up what had been the quietest sector of the Western Front, a rest-cure, where French soldiers, and German

too, were sent after exhausting service, for a well earned repos. There in the trenches, they smoked their pipes for hours without hearing a gun fired and looked out upon a NoMan's-Land overgrown with daisies; or else, in a forest glade a few hundred yards from the front line, sat safely at rustic tables and drank the fine foaming beer of Alsace. It was a good old war. The trenches must be held, of course, but in a spirit of live and let live. The French troops enjoyed the scenery, of which there was plenty. The deep green fir forests, the swift-rushing streams, the villages, varicolored and oddly designed, set amid the blue Alsatian mountains-they really are bluemade it a land of pure delight.

As the sector of this paradise that seemed most promising for attack lay between Altkirch and Thann, General Bundy paid a visit to MajorGeneral Charles G. Morton, commanding the Twenty-ninth Division, one of those designated for the attack, which was already in the line. Major-General W. M. Wright, commanding the Seventh Corps to the north, was directed to submit a plan for an attack through the Belfort Gap. General Wright submitted the plan but advised against such an attempt, saying, "Too many casualties for the return we would get."

Colonel Conger called on the staffs of the Seventh and Eighth French armies, commanding in Alsace; and backed by orders from General Pétain, who was in the secret, he got them to give up their battle-maps to the Americans, who, he said, were making an étude. That aroused some perturbation among our French allies. Quoi donc, they wondered,

was this American étude all about. Did their sometimes too ardent allies propose to stir up this rest sector with alarums and excursions? They hoped not-most sincerely they hoped not.

But it looked so. All along the twenty-mile front selected for the attack, American reconnaissance parties were now examining trenches, dugouts, gun-positions, rest-billets, which they believed their respective divisions were soon to occupy. It was too bad, Colonel Conger told them, that this could hardly fail to cause talk by the French troops and even by the Alsatian civilians who, in this peaceful sector, were permitted to remain in their homes close to the front. Colonel Conger expressed a pious hope that the German observers would not see the unusual activity in these usually almost deserted trenches.

Meantime the Sixth Corps staff had prepared a tentative plan for the coming attack, containing many recommendations as to how the secretly forming American First Army could most readily break the German front in the Gap of Belfort and cut the Rhine bridges near Mulhouse. This plan Colonel Conger took to Chaumont, to show it to General Pershing.

Immediately on his return, on September 3, Colonel Conger sought a conference with General Bundy. General Pershing, he said, not only approved the plan but had decided to make the attack even more extensive than had been contemplated. He especially liked the recommendation that as soon as the Rhine was approached, the Alsace attack should be followed and supported by a second attack to the north, in the Vosges

Mountains, launched by French and American troops there, including the Sixth Regular Division. He wished the staff to study that problem a little more fully.

What General Pershing actually had said was something like this:

"We can't have the St.-Mihiel attack ready until September 12. We'll have to string out this Alsace affair a little longer, and this seems the best way."

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When the battle of Alsace was originally discussed at First Army headquarters, between General Pershing and General Hugh A. Drum, it was agreed that as few as possible should be in the secret. So Colonel Conger set the staff to work on this new phase of the battle plan. The stern businesslike silence of this group of American officers, working day and night in their centrally located but tightly closed headquarters, heightened the tension of the crowd in the Tonneau d'Or lobby. Belfort buzzed with gossip.

Now was the time, Colonel Conger decided. Surely reports of what was going on must have reached Germany. Now was the time to furnish confirmation that Hindenburg and Ludendorff could but accept as proof that a strong American attack in Alsace was coming. He had been encouraged by the frequent appearance of several gentlemen in the hotel, even in his own corridor. He hoped they were the very gentlemen he was looking for.

Then came the crowning episode, the turning-point in the great battle of Alsace. In his room in the Tonneau d'Or, Colonel Conger sat himself

down and wrote a letter to General Pershing. He put much into that letter. He reported that all was ready for the big attack through the Belfort Gap, if General Pershing would but set the date.

Colonel Conger made a copy of the letter, using a brand-new sheet of carbon-paper. When he had finished, he held up the carbon-paper to the light. Every word to the American commander-in-chief stood out, clearly stenciled. Colonel Conger crumpled up the carbon-paper and threw it into the waste-basket. Then he left the room.

For five minutes this clever intelligence officer walked about the lobby of the Tonneau d'Or. Then, too anxious to wait longer, he returned to his room. The wastebasket was empty! It had taken no longer than that.

With the comfortable feeling of a task well done, Colonel Conger went again to Chaumont, and the door of General Pershing's office in Barrack B was closed tightly after him, perhaps to bottle up the laughter of the C.-in-C. at what his Sherlock Holmes had to report.

"It's working fine," he said. "String it out just a little longer." So back to Belfort went Colonel Conger, to assure his little group of earnest workers that General Pershing was well satisfied and that, even though they had heard with alarm that some of their seven divisions were moving directly away from Alsace, all was going "according to plan." General Pershing now wanted a special study made of the ground in the Vosges where the northern attack would be made, to support the one in Alsace.

The reconnaissance parties had finished their work, and were sent to tell their division commanders that they had made good progress in preparing for an Alsace attack, while General Bundy and General Wells went to Remiremont, in the Vosges, thirty miles northwest of Belfort, the headquarters of General Wright's Seventh Corps. There they studied roads and the supply situation in the event of an advance from that quarter. General Wells was beginning to ask himself some questions about this rather lengthy preparation for an attack by troops that marched away from the place where it was to be made, when the dénouement came.

General Pétain, commander-inchief of the French Army, appeared suddenly in Belfort. He held, rather ostentatiously, a conference of all the corps and division commanders in the region. To the German agents who reported the conference, it doubtless looked like part of the preparation for battle. What really happened was that General Pétain thanked the assembled generals for their coöperation with the Americans in preparing the battle of Alsace, and told them, for the first time, that the battle was never to come off. It was, he explained, a ruse. eral Morton was at the conference, and it did not take him long to reach General Bundy. "Have you heard that this is all a fake?" he asked.

Gen

"No," said General Bundy, "I have not, and it doesn't matter. We have obeyed our orders. If it isn't a fake, we are ready to attack as soon as our troops arrive. If it is a fake, it's a good one, and I hope it works."

It took a real soldier to forget professional dignity and say that. He

realized, of course, that not one more person than was absolutely necessary, no matter how trustworthy, could have been safely informed of the plan-that secrecy was essential. The end justified it all. The stirring up of the silent places in the Alsace front had its result. The Intelligence Section found soon after that three German divisions, thirtysix thousand men, had been moved from near St.-Mihiel more than one hundred miles southeast to the region of Mulhouse, to help repel the expected American attack. Then on September 12 the American people and the world were electrified by the first terse United Press despatch sent by F. S. Ferguson, announcing that the real attack upon St.-Mihiel salient had commenced. It was instantly and completely successful. The German reserves there were too weak for a counter-attack. The ruse had worked.

So the same game was tried again. Immediately after its victory at St.Mihiel, the American First Army swung into preparations for a second and greater blow at the Germans in the Meuse-Argonne region northwest of St.-Mihiel. Now if the Germans could be made to believe that five hundred thousand American troops, with guns and supplies, were moving from the St.-Mihiel region not northwest but southeast, in exactly the opposite direction from that in which they really were going, the First Army would again be able to surprise the enemy. General Pershing, General Drum, and Colonel Howell held a conference at First Army headquarters at Ligny-en-Barrois, out of which grew the battle of Lorraine.

This was a more elaborate "battle" than that of Alsace, for all were learning by experience. It was decided to create the impression that American reserves were moving, and that other preparations were afoot for a great converging attack upon the powerful German fortress of Metz, a natural sequence to the St.Mihiel victory.

About September 15 German observers stationed on the Vosges foot-hills in the Lunéville sector, quiet as Alsace since the disturbing Rainbow Division had left, reported that Allied aviators were becoming very inquisitive about the German rear areas. Planes with the red, white, and blue marking were flying far behind the lines, evidently seeking photographs and information. This was one of the early premonitory signs of a far-reaching offensive. It was followed by another, equally well recognized. The Allied artillery aroused itself from its wonted lethargy, and began dropping shells far behind the German lines, upon points untouched for years. The artillery fire was so handled that German observers, noting every detail, could conclude only that preparations were being made for the barrage and concentration fire that precede and accompany an attack.

Then Brigadier-General S. D. Rockenback, commanding the First Army tanks, received a mysterious order to send twenty-five tanks on "a "a mission extremely extremely dangerous, that must be handled with great discretion." General Rockenback was then making every effort to assemble as many tanks as possible for the Meuse-Argonne. The A.E.F. never

had tanks enough, and for this attack had no heavy tanks at all. The tank commander could not spare twenty-five light tanks and said so, but General Pershing ordered that they be sent anyway.

So the twenty-five tanks, commanded by officers especially chosen for gallantry, reported to MajorGeneral Joseph T. Dickman's Fourth Corps in the old St.-Mihiel salient. The young officers, fully understanding that this was a desperate job, agreed that rather than be captured they would kill themselves.

On the night of September 21-22, German listening-posts in the Hindenburg Line, across the Woëvre plain, heard the unmistakable clatter and rumble of tanks behind the American lines. Next morning, their observers spotted tank tracks leading from one patch of woods to another. There were a good many tank tracks. The next night the noise was repeated, with even more tracks the following morning. A large force of tanks seemed to be concentrating behind the American lines, and tanks are used only in attacks. The young officers succeeded so well that they brought down a terrific German bombardment.

At the same time, only a few miles away, the greatest military figure of the war stepped for a moment upon the scene and played a brief "bit" in the farce. Marshal Foch, Allied commander-in-chief, made a flying visit to Alsace and Lorraine in his special train. He and General Pershing went over the St.Mihiel battle-field just as the tanks were assembling; and the next day found the director of all the Allied armies holding conference in the

In the meantime, down around Lunéville, Colonel Conger had a set-back. The reconnaissance parties had worked so well in Alsace that he tried them again. Each division in reserve of the First Army sent to Lunéville a party of officers and men, who sallied forth to go through the trenches and get from the French occupants information necessary for an American relief. They were enthusiastic too enthusiastic, when they proudly reported back to Colonel Conger that they had taken pains not to arouse the suspicions of the German observers, crouching with glasses in the tree-top observation-posts of that wooded sector.

"Good Lord!" said Colonel Conger to himself. "What have they done?" They had borrowed French uniforms and worn them all the time they were under German observation! Some other way must be found to complete the Germans' deception. The Meuse-Argonne attack was to begin September 26, now only a few days off.

So

But General Drum's First Army staff was not lacking in resource. while the Germans prepared for trouble in the Lunéville sector and beyond St.-Mihiel, their wireless stations east of Verdun, seeking to