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Show II DID THE AMERICANS . FIGHT AT CAMBRA1 1 Soon after the great war opened 'and jjj the French and British Were being C hard pressed in northern France, a jji rumor spread that an -immense army I : of Russians was being landed at Havre, and this rumor became so persistent per-sistent that the Associated Press reported re-ported English news services as stating stat-ing that troop trains, with windows screened wore passing through England Eng-land from the north and were supposed sup-posed to carry 30,000 Russian soldiers. Later, tho story was proved to have been a hoax. So with that in mind, to illustrato how, during war times, a story based simply on deslro can grow to large proportions pro-portions and be generally accepted, even in quarters wtiere authenticity Is domanded, The Standard reproduces repro-duces the following paragraph from a letter written by an English school teacher to W. H. James, 461 Twenty-sixth Twenty-sixth street, Ogden: "Dear Cousin: I will tell you of a bit of news I gathered from a wounded Canadian. You have read of the British reverse at Cambrai. Not only did we lose heavily, but we were very near to being routed. The Germans came up in such numbers that our forces on that particular sector were completely overwhelmed and beaten, and wo would have been doubled up had it not been for General Pershing who. in the nick of time, brought up 50,000 Americans, Ameri-cans, who, fresh and eager for a cut at the Huns, filled in the gap and forced tho enemy to give way." The Canadian may have been in that particular part of the battle where the American engineers threw down their "construction tools and shouldered shoul-dered rifleB to repel the Germans, and with eyes big for the unexpected assistance, as-sistance, have seen nothing but Americans, Amer-icans, but there is no record, either in descriptive accounts of the battle from. American sources or In General Pershing casualty lists, of any great number of our troops having been en-' en-' gaged in halting the German counter attack at Cambrai. But our day is near at hand. At any hour we may hear of 50,000, or six timeB that number of Americans, being under fire. Then the roll of the honored hon-ored dead and the injured will run up into the thousands. |