America's Part-Henry J. Reilly

The author is peculiarly well qualified to perform the task set him in writing this book.

Both his training and his experience have fitted him to an exceptional degree.

The primary requisite for such a work as this is the ability to accumulate the pertinent facts and the possession of a background of knowledge and experience such that the facts accumulated can be properly grouped together and analyzed to produce the truth.

Such qualifications produce a good commanding officer in battle and good reporter in peace.

General Riley's record shows him to have been both.

He has seen war on three continents, North America, Asia, and Europe.

In 1913, while in Mexico as a newspaper correspondent, he saw various combats between the different factions.

In the attack on Monterrey, he accompanied the attacking Carranzista infantry.

As a young cavalry lieutenant on leave from the Philippines, he saw something of the closing scenes of the Russo-Japanese War.

As a newspaper correspondent in China in 1925, while on a campaign with a Chinese force, he was captured by the opposing cavalry in the closing phase of a two days battle.

He arrived in France in 1914, just after the first battle of the Marne.

Between then and our entry into the war in 1917, he first drove an American ambulance on the British and French fronts and later as a war correspondent made numerous visits to various parts of the Western Front and during the summer of 1915 to the most vital parts of the German-Russian Front.

He participated in all the combats of our famous 42nd or Rainbow Infantry Division, first in command of a light artillery regiment and then of an infantry brigade.

Besides the distinction of receiving this promotion in battle was the unusual fact of an artilleryman being given an infantry command.

In 1920, he accompanied the Polish army in two campaigns against the Bolsheviki, the first in the spring, in which the Poles took the offensive, finally capturing Kiev, the second in the late summer, when the Poles, driven far back, finally stood on the Vistula, stopped the Bolsheviki, and then attacked, capturing such large numbers as practically to wipe the Bolsheviki army out of existence.

General Riley began his newspaper career in 1912, writing articles on American foreign affairs for the Chicago Tribune.

He continued this work until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

From then until we declared war, he was a war correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and part of the time for the New York Herald as well.

Since his return to this country with the Rainbow Division from the Rhine in the summer of 1919, he has been at various times a special correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in Europe and for the Hearst papers in Eastern Asia and editor of the Army and Navy Journal.

Besides this, he has written for various magazines on foreign affairs and military subjects.

General Riley's qualifications are not limited to participation as an actor in or close spectator of interesting events.

Constant study of our international and military affairs has given him a background from which to judge what he has seen.

He is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point.

Seven years after graduation, he was sent back to that institution as an instructor in history.

During the ten years prior to the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, he not only saw but studied the organization, tactics, and connections with their civil governments of the French, German, British, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Peruvian, Bolivian, Chilean, Argentine, and Mexican armies.