The strain was great.

But Foch was making his plans; the British Army was being steadily reorganised; the drafts from England were being absorbed and trained under a Commander-in-Chief who, by the consent of all his subordinates, is a supreme manipulator and trainer of fighting men, while never forgetting the human reality which is the foundation of it all.

Soon the number of effective infantry divisions on the British front had risen from forty-five to fifty-two.

And meanwhile American energy was pouring men across the Atlantic, and everywhere along the Allied front and in the Allied countries, but especially in ravaged, war-weary France, the news of the weekly arrivals, 80,000, 100,000, 70,000 men, was exactly the stimulus that the older armies needed.
It was a race between the German Army and the growing strength of the Allies--and it was presently a duel between Ludendorff and Foch.
"Attack! attack!" was the German military cry, "or it will be too late!" And on July 15th Ludendorff struck again to the east and south-west of Rheims.

General Gouraud, who was in command of the Fourth French Army to the east of Rheims, told me at Strasbourg the dramatic story of that attack and of its brilliant and overwhelming repulse.