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Vive la France!

Chapter 2: AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT
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About This Book

A collection of frontline reports recounts life and combat on the Western battle-lines, following French and British operations in sectors such as the Vosges, Alsace, and Champagne. It blends descriptive scene-setting of trenches, artillery barrages, mines, gas and aerial encounters with accounts of assaults, captured positions, prisoners, and the work of medics and hospitals. Photographic impressions and campaign vignettes convey the physical destruction, scale of ordnance, improvisations of field services, and the endurance and sacrifices of soldiers amid sustained offensive and defensive operations.

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

For the assistance they have given me, and for the innumerable kindnesses they have shown me, I welcome this opportunity of expressing my thanks and appreciation to his Excellency Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand, French ambassador to the United States; to Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Times and The Daily Mail; to Ralph Pulitzer, Esq., president, and C. M. Lincoln, Esq., managing editor, of The New York World; to Major-General Ryerson, of the Canadian Overseas Contingent; to Captain Count Gérard de Ganay, who was my companion from end to end of the western battle-line; to Messrs. Ponsot, Alexis Leger, and Henri Hoppenot, of the Bureau de la Presse; to Lieutenant-Colonel Spencer Cosby, military attaché of the American embassy in Paris; to Captain John W. Barker, of the American Military Mission in France; to Honorable Walter V. R. Berry; to Charles Prince, Esq., Herbert Corey, Esq., Lincoln Eyre, Esq., and William Philip Simms, Esq., who on a score of occasions have proved themselves my friends; and finally to James Hazen Hyde, Esq., whose kindness I can never fully repay. To each of these gentlemen I owe a debt of gratitude which I shall not forget.

E. Alexander Powell.
Hôtel de Crillon, Paris,
November, 1915.