Among the rolling downland and the forests of the Merz are gone

is a hillside with more than 14,000 crosses.

Here the doughboys, the dead of the American Expeditionary Force

in those final weeks of the conflicts on the Western Front, here we find them

buried in the Merz-Argonne American Cemetery. America entered the Great War in April

1917 and brought with it a vast but untrained army. Just like the formation of the

new army, Kitchener's Army in 1914, it took time for the American Expeditionary Force, those units

that would cross to France and take part in the final battles on the Western Front, it took time for them to be trained.

But by that spring of 1918, it was only a matter of months, perhaps even weeks,

before the vast majority of those combat units were ready to be committed to the battlefields.

And the Germans knew that as much as the Allies, which resulted in those

German offensives of 1918, some of which involved American units, but the bulk of the American

Expeditionary Force would not take part in major actions until the beginning of the MERS-Argon

offensive in September of 1918,

when General Blackjack Pershing's troops launched America's biggest offensive,

took part in America's biggest battle since the American Civil War,

a generation or more before.

And in this episode, we find ourselves on those Murs-Argonne battlefields

of those final weeks of the conflict on the Western Front.

When we think of the Murs-Argonne, we think of the Argonne forest,

this vast area of forested ground,

and there are many stories associated with

...