port or the manner in which it should be provided, is by such a decree made certain by requiring that the obligation be met by paying a certain amount of money, and paying it to the wife. Thereafter the husband's obligation is measured by the decree, but the fundamental obligation continues. The decree is, in fact, a judicial determination of the fact that the obligation exists, although the parties are sepa rated."

IS ONE WHO DREW UP A WILL ESTOPPED TO RECEIVE THE BENEFITS OF HIS OWN MISTAKE?-The question whether one can take advantage of his own mistake is discussed in the recent case of Reed v. Hollister, 186 Pac. Rep. 819. In this case it appeared that defendant, an attorney, drew up a will for his mother, by which she attempted to exercise a power of appointment with respect to a fund of $40,000 created by the will of her deceased husband. The trustee of the fund refused to recognize the bequests in the will as a proper exercise of the power and turned the entire fund over to the defendant, to whom it would have descended, under his father's will, in default of the exercise of the power of appointment by the widow. Under the will, which was an attempt to exercise the power of appointment, defendant would have received $8,000. The Supreme Court of California held that defendant was estopped to claim such fund and having received it from the trustee under his father's will he was to be regarded as a constructive trustee and required to pay the bequests made in the will which he himself drew up. On this point the Court said.

"The circumstances attending the execution of the wiil of Philoclea A. Hollister, and the fact that both she and the defendant, who prepared the will, understood that the third clause was an execution of the power of appointment, would be sufficient of itself to raise an implied or constructive trust against the defendant. Whether the defendant, as legal adviser of his mother, was mistaken in his understanding as to whether said third clause was an exercise of the power of appointment, is unimportant, for it would be in the highest degree inequitable, and not to be countenanced by a Court of equity, to permit an attorney at law, under whose direction and suggestion a will has been prepared, to himself seize and appropriate a part of the estate, which the testator intended, and which the attorney himself intended at the time the will was drawn, to go to another legatee or devisee. It seems that under such circumstances the attorney might well be held to be estopped to claim such bequest."

It seems to us that the Court's decision proceeds on the wrong theory. There is no estoppel in this case, because there was no misrepresentation of a fact by the defendant. Moreover, the defendant is not asserting a right

from which assertion he can be estopped by reason of some former misrepresentation of a fact. If defendant, on the other hand, is to be held liable as a constructive trustee, he must be found to have intentionally misled the testatrix in executing the power of her will, and such action would then constitute such fraud in the acquisition of the fund as to create a constructive trust in favor of those defrauded of their interest under the will of the testatrix. A mere mistake in the matter of advising the testator in making her will cannot make the defendant responsible as a constructive trustee. Moreover, in this case the trust fund belonged to an entirely different estate and was under the control of the Courts of another state. Defendant was awarded the fund by those properly in control of the fund, and, it seems to us, that the proceedings in this case should have been brought against the trustee of the fund who had the right to deter mine, in accordance with the law of the state, where the power was created, whether the power had been properly exercised and who was entitled to the fund in default of the proper execution of the power.

THE RECORD OF THE "RAINBOW DIVISION" IN THE WAR AS TOLD BY A LAWYER.

It is very easy to start talking about the war, but it is much harder to stop talking about it. The fact is that anyone who saw our men fight over there is so filled with admiration for what the American soldier did that he seizes with eagerness on every chance to tell the people at home about their acts. As Congressman McKinley said, it American organization, American brains, that let the men fight at the front. You can go farther than that and say it was America's immense resources in material and men and money that won the war. We did win the war. What fighting we did, compared to the three and a half years of the Allies' fighting was very small, but it

was

*[This interesting address by Col. Noble B. Judah of the Chicago bar before the Illinois Bar Association is really classic in its descriptions, and we find it a pleasure to comply with the suggestion that we give our readers the opportunity to enjoy it.-Editor.]

Mountains, in Lorraine, a quiet sector as it was called. There were a great many places on the Western front where no big offensive was to be feared, but where constant fighting was going on and where new troops could be trained. And we went into a sector of that kind.

Now the trenches were just what the word means, ditches in most places full of water; when we went in they were very full; it was winter and snow was still on the ground. The trenches are six, seven or eight feet deep; in front of them a strip of wire, perhaps two or three beds of wire twenty or thirty feet wide, then No Man's Land, then on the other side the German wire and German trenches. We had a front of about eight miles. At some places we were fifty feet from the German trenches, at other places six or seven hundred yards; part of the land was open, part of it was woods; and we proceeded to have some fine experience. We were in for four months. The fighting was guerilla and patrol fighting, but it let our men get their hands in; they found the Germans weren't any better than they were. They met them hand to hand in the trenches and No Man's Land and they gained confidence in themselves.

When we went in the French had used the sector as a rest sector. Every night they pulled back their outposts. There were many French villages right in the trench systems, of course shot to pieces, destroyed. But every village in France has houses made of stone and is a natural fort and at night the French in this sector withdrew into the villages and stood on the defensive. The Americans didn't understand that. We wanted to fight, and the first week we were in the trenches our Alabama regiment ran into a German patrol in our own trenches. The Germans had come in expecting the French were still there and they struck the Alabama men. Ten Germans came into the trenches; we killed two and took two unwounded prisoners. That was first blood for us. Right next was our New York regiment, and there was rivalry all the time between New York and Alabama and New

York wanted prisoners. So they got permission to send a patrol over into the German trenches. Right opposite the New York regiment's sector was a little old destroyed village of perhaps two dozen houses. We knew there was a small German outpost there; the village was right in the wire, and the plan of our patrol was to go in through the wire, get back of the town and come out through it. We could not send a big patrol across No Man's Land. There would be too much noise, but we could send a small patrol out. We sent out a lieutenant and seven men of this 69th Irish regiment. Lieut. Cassidy was in command, O'Leary was his sergeant and Kerrigan was his corporal. They went out with their hands and faces blacked so they could not be seen in the dark, and armed only with hand grenades and trench knives. The American trench knife was a handy weapon for close fighting with a three-cornered blade and on the hilt indentations like brass knuckles. They got across No Man's Land, which was there about four hundred yards wide; they went in, four on each side of the town, and they came down through it and then ran into the German outpost of about ten men, a sergeant in command; he was on watch and saw our men come in. Just as he saw them, Kerrigan and O'Leary jumped him. Kerrigan was an ex-New York policeman and O'Leary had been an insane asylum keeper. All they had was their trench knives but there wasn't much left of the German sergeant and they brought the rest of his outfit back across No Man's Land.

The Germans were strong and of course they came back at us. And we had, in four months in that sector more than two thousand casualties, but we never lost an unwounded prisoner and no German ever got inside our lines. The thing that astonished the French was the fact that these new, green men and officers could fight, and fight well and coolly. The first small raid made by the Germans on our Iowa regiment was a very severe one at one point in the line. They isolated one of our strong points with

a heavy box barrage. In this outpost we had eight men under the command of a sergeant. Fourteen Germans surrounded the post and tried to gobble it up. We had two killed and several severely wounded. Of the fourteen Germans that came over, eight were killed, four were prisoners and two got back alive. At dawn, in the trenches we saw those men that had just come through fighting, fine, big, husky Iowa boys; their breakfast had just come up, and here were two of them sitting on the firing steps; four feet away from them was one dead German with his head blown off and one German so badly wounded he could not be moved; the rats were already at the dead one, and these two big husky farmer boys were sitting, eating their breakfast and talking about the fight as unconcernedly as could be.

We had daily fighting of that kind for nearly three months. But we wanted to get into big fighting farther north. When General Pershing made his famous offer to Marshal Foch after the German offensive of March 21, to take all the American forces there were in France, just four American Divisions that were fit to fight, the 1st, 2nd, 26th, and the 42nd. They were the only ones that had ever been in

the trenches.

In March the Germans jumped off in their first great offensive of 1918 and pushed the British back, and again in April they pushed the French back. In the middle of May they pushed the French and the British back, and in those offensives the 1st Division got into the fight at Cantigny on April 28 and the 2nd Division at Belleau Woods in June. Finally, on June 21, the orders came for us to leave the trenches and entrain and they said we were going to Soissons where the big fighting was going on. But they unloaded us near Chalons, just south of Rheims.

The French command at that time knew that the fourth big German offensive was just about to break. The first three had

been completely successful, and the Germans were advertising in Germany this fourth offensive as the Peace Offensive; it was going to end the war. The line on the Rheims front ran straight east and west from the Argonne Forest to Rheims and to the south around Rheims down to the Marne at Chateau Thierry, where the Germans had been held. About the first of July the French got word from their agents that the big push was coming between Rheims and the Argonne. Rheims and the Argonne. And on July 5 they sent us into line on that front, the only American division. The signs of attack became more imminent every day. The aeroplanes picked up all the signs; troops moving up from the rear at night; their field hospitals being moved up, one of the sure signs of an offensive; the airdromes coming up; and finally, as the day of the attack drew nearer they even bridged the trenches opposite us to get their cannon

across.

We went in on the 5th of July. The night of the 7th we stood to arms all night, but nothing happened. That Champagne country has a chalky soil; if you dig into the ground the air soon hardens the soil and then you have practically stone-walled trenches. The trenches were beautifully organized; they had concrete machine-gun posts, concrete observatories and were entirely dry. The German position was on a long line of crests from Rheims to the Argonne. The French were down in the valley with their first line trenches and the

second line trenches were back about 800 yards on another low crest. General Gouraud, who commanded the Fourth French army, anticipated that the attack would be a severe one and a very critical one for the allied armies, and he worked out a new system of defense. Instead of leaving all his men in the front line trenches to be smashed to pieces by the artillery, he planned to pull them out of the first line before the battle and mass them all on the second line. In the front line he left just a few infantry watchers to send up the rocket signals when the German infantry came over and in the

open space between the first line trenches and the second line he checker-boarded machine-gun nests. They were to use enfilade fire on the German masses as they advanced.

The French made wonderful preparations; they brought in artillery and then. more artillery. When the fight came on, on the ten-mile front where the attack was fiercest, there was a gun to fire for every ten yards of front. I do not mean that the guns were hub to hub; some of them were five hundred yards from the front and some. of them four or five miles, depending on their caliber, but there was a gun on the ground ready to fire, one for every ten yards. And we knew the Germans had just as many or

more.

On the 14th of July we thought surely it was coming. That was Sunday. The French had been getting prisoners every night and the prisoners had been talking. They said the attack was coming and it was going to be big and it was coming on this front. Sunday night, the 14th, the French got six prisoners. They said, "yes, the attack is coming tonight; the artillery preparation is going to begin at five minutes after twelve and the infantry attack at 4:30 in the morning." We got that information over the telephone about 10:45 p. m., with the order that the French counter artillery fire would begin twenty minutes before the German. Our own artillery came in on that. At a quarter to twelve the French fire came down on the whole front and then on our front the guns were going, one for every ten yards. It was just one glare, just one roar. You couldn't see a separate flash, you couldn't hear a separate discharge. The whole sky was red and the roar in the air ran up and down your spine in waves. For twenty minutes we waited. We didn't know whether the German attack was coming or not. If it did not come, the French had shown their hand and it might be very disastrous. But at five minutes past twelve, down came the German fire and then the roar and glare was doubled.

For four hours that artillery fire lasted and then the rockets went up from our front line, the signal that the Germans were coming. Then our artillery fire was shortened and came down on our own front line trenches and the open space from the front back to our crest. The Germans had not expected that; they came across No Man's Land and got into our front line trenches without meeting resistance and came on through en masse across the open. Our guns were firing steadily on that space and the machine guns opened up on them and they simply melted away. And they kept coming on en masse and melting away. By seven o'clock that morning one of the battalions of our Ohio regiment had repulsed nine different attacks. The infantry came on to the attack until 11:00 in the morning. The Germans attacked with twentyfive divisions betwen Rheims and the Argonne and by noon those twenty-five divisions were broken and gone. The infantry fight was really over at 11:00 o'clock, but our guns fired from 10:45 the night before until 3:30 o'clock the next afternoon just as fast as the guns could be loaded and fired.

The attack came from the Argonne to Rheims and they didn't gain a foot. Not on that whole front did they get into the French position except at one place. We had a battalion of the Alabama regiment in reserve right back of that and they went in and cleaned the enemy out. The Germans also attacked west of Rheims as far south as Chateau Thierry, where they crossed the Marne. But the big push came from Rheims to the Argonne. That offensive was the Gettysburg of Germany. At midnight on July 14 it looked as though they would be successful; they had been successful in three offensives; they expected to be successful in the fourth; but they were over-confident and they lost and from then on their power waned. The French had not known what was going to happen. They thought the Germans might go through them and if the Germans had done so and had cut their lines and isolated the