They came and came, and kept on coming, and their iron-shod feet flailed
the earth to powder, and there was no end to them.




Chapter 3

Sherman Said It


Undoubtedly Sherman said it. This is my text and as illustration for
my text I take the case of the town of La Buissière.

The Germans took the town of La Buissière after stiff fighting on August
twenty-fourth. I imagine that possibly there was a line in the
dispatches telling of the fight there; but at that I doubt it, because
on that same date a few miles away a real battle was raging between the
English rear guard, under Sir John French, of the retreating army of the
Allies, falling back into France, and the Germans. Besides, in the sum
total of this war the fall of La Buissière hardly counts. You might say
it represents a semicolon in the story of the campaign. Probably no
future historian will give it so much as a paragraph. In our own Civil
War it would have been worth a page in the records anyway. Here upward
of three hundred men on both sides were killed and wounded, and as many
more Frenchmen were captured; and the town, when taken, gave the winners
the control of the river Sambre for many miles east and west. Here,
also, was a German charge with bayonets up a steep and well-defended
height; and after that a hand-to-hand melee with the French defenders on