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Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:
     Among the many books I discarded when I left Scarsdale was General Pershing's "My Experiences in the World War".  As you may deduce from the title, he wrote it before they had begun to number world wars.  Now I wish I had kept it, to check on some details of these reminiscences.  At hat time I had no idea that I should ever be writing about my own experiences under Pershing's command.  So I keep finding that memory has misled me.  For example I wrote you that the First Division's attack on Cantigny took place in April 1918, when actually, I find, it was in May.
     During the last ten days of July the Germans retreated slowly north northward from Chateau-Thierry.  They planted numerous machine guns to cover their getaway.  The emplacements were so well camouflaged that they could rarely be spotted from the air.  American and French troops pressed hard after the Germans, but their infantrymen had to offer themselves as targets to find out where the machine guns were.  So the operation was a costly one for the allies.  At Fere-en-Tardenois, near the middle of the old salient, there is an American cemetary.  There is another at Belleau Wood.
     We stayed at Francheville through July.  The front had been 20 miles away when we moved there, and now it kept getting further away.  Around the end of the month the Germans had reached and crossed the Vesle river.  That stream rund through Reims, which had remained in the hands of the French, and thence westward to join the Aisne at Soissons.  The Germans decided to make a stand at the Vesle, and for over a month they repelled American attempts to cross it.  General Bullard's Third Corps played a leading part in all that campaign.  One of his divisions was the 32nd, a National Guard unit from Wisconsin and Michigan.  It had some hard fighting in pursuit of the Germans as far as the Vesle.  There it was relieved about the middle of August.  Florence's brother Bernard was in the 32nd.  He was killed just south of the Vesle.  When Florence first told me about him she thought he had been killed at a village called Dravigny.  Later she heard that it was at another village called Chery-Chartreuve.  I knew both places well from the air, and in 1938, with Helen, I revisited them.  Both had been destroyed in