For the Expeditionary Corps, as for the Americans two decades later, it was all intensely frustrating—the enemy’s elusiveness, his capacity for surprise and for striking at any moment, and the impossibility much of the time of telling friend from foe. It was a war without fronts, where the enemy was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Time and again French units would move into a target area in force, only to find no one there; the adversary had vanished, as if vaporized. So the French would pull out—for they had not nearly enough troops to occupy permanently the sites they had taken—and
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