Excerpt from The Peak of the Load: The Waiting Months on the Hilltop From the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes to the Second Victory on the Marne I have had a rather busy two weeks, dur ing which, for many reasons, I have not felt in the spirit to sit down and write you the long letter I know you expect in response to your great epistolary cry of triumph after the Declaration of War. Personally, after the uplift the decision gave me, came a total collapse and I had some pretty black days. I had to. Fight against the fear that we were too late, and the conviction that, if we were really to do our part at the front, the war was still to last not one year, but years. An army can not be created in a day, and the best will in the world, and all the pluck I know our lads to have, will not make them, inside of at least a year, into a fighting army fit to stand against the military science of Ger many, and do anything more serviceable than die like heroes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.