THE
THE END OF THE
IN THE WEST
MWOR.-GEHCTJX
SIR- E- MAUWCE
K-lCv.*-s^,
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BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE
JACOB H. SCHIFF
ENDOWMENT FOR THE PROMOTION
OF STUDIES IN
HUMAN CIVILIZATION
1918THE LAST FOUR MONTHSThe Last Four Months
The End of the War in the West
By
MAJOR-GENERAL SIR F. MAURICE
„	K.C.M.G., G.B.
With Two Maps
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1019PREFACE
Who won the war? is a question that has been
often asked. In the countries of all the great Allied
Powers there have been found those who answered
it to their own satisfaction as patriots, because it
is easy to demonstrate that the war would not have
been won, as and when it was won, had any of
those countries failed to do what it actually achieved.
Most of us, however, are agreed that victory was the
result of combination, and I am convinced that that
opinion will grow stronger the better the story is
known. During the struggle the news we received
of the doings of the armies of our Allies was natur-
ally even more limited than was that of the doings
of our own men, and it was not easy to allot to each
its place in the general scheme.
In this book I have sought to give a picture of
Foch’s great campaign and to sketch in due propor-
tion the parts which went to make up the whole. The
splendour of the achievements of our army is, I
believe, enhanced when they are given their proper
place in the frame. I have reduced my descriptions
of the battles to the simplest terms, because my object
is to explain the broad causes of success and of failure,
and there is danger in entering into details of opera-Preface
tions on so vast a scale of losing sight of the wood
for the trees. As no story of a campaign can be
complete unless it describes the intentions, aims and
feelings of the enemy, at least at the most critical
periods, I have collected the best information avail-
able on these points from captured documents or from
publications in Germany. Fortunately, there has
in that country been considerable public discussion
between Hindenburg, Ludendorff and their critics
as to the conduct of the former during the period
with which I am here chiefly concerned, and material
has not been lacking. Ludendorff’s Reminiscences
have appeared while this book was in the press. I
have throughout referred to the German edition, as
at the time I write the English translation has not
been published. I owe grateful thanks to Captain
C. T. Atkinson for kindly reading the proofs and
for many valuable suggestions.
F. MAURICE.
London,
August, 1919.CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
WHAT WENT BEFORE
Unity of Command—The British Reverses in the Spring .	1
CHAPTER II
FOCH VERSUS LUDENDORFF
Foch on the Defensive—Breaking the Barrier in the
West—The Rival Methods .	.	.	55
CHAPTER III
THE PREPARATION FOR ARMAGEDDON
The Second Battle of the Marne—Haig’s Offensive—The
Americans at St. Mihiel .....	93
CHAPTER IV
ARMAGEDDON
The Hindenburg Line—The American Battle of the Meuse-
Argonne—Gouraud in Champagne—Haig Breaks the
Hindenburg Line—KingAlbert’s Advance into Belgium
—The Result of Armageddon ....	129
CHAPTER V
LUDENDORFF TRIES TO RALLY
The Delays to the Allied Advance—The Difficulties of
the Americans—Ludendorfl’s Plan of Retreat—How
it was Defeated .	.	.	.	.	.	.182
CHAPTER VI
"THE LAST PUSH
The American Advance to Sedan—Gouraud Reaches
M6zieres—The British enter Maubeuge and Mons—
The Condition of the German Army—Was the
Armistice Premature ? .	.	.	.	.	.	210
viiMAPS
I. The Western Front .	. In pocket at end of book
II. The German Defensive System .	. To face page 176THE LAST FOUR MONTHS
CHAPTER I
/
WHAT WENT BEFORE
Unity of Command—The British Reverses in the
Spring
In Europe 1917 jvas a year of disappointment for
the arms of the Allies; only in Asia, where our
earlier ventures had failed, did fortune smile on us.
At the beginning of that year Ludendorff and
Hindenburg brought off their first coup on the
Western front, when they withdrew the German
forces from the awkward position in which they were
placed as the result of the first battle of the Somme,
and retired behind the Hindenburg line, which then
first became famous. By this manoeuvre they
checked the plans of the Allies and brought about
the failure of General Nivelle’s great offensive upon
which such high hopes had been set. The result of
this failure had been to throw a great strain upon
the British army, which had to obtain for the
French the time to recover. In the battle of Arras
we had won the greatest success yet gained by
British arms in France, but Haig had been forcedThe Last Four Months
to continue that battle to the stage when, the enemy
having recovered from his first shock, progress was
slow and losses were heavy. In June Plumer had
brilliantly cleared the Messines Ridge and obliterated
the Ypres salient, which for nearly three years had
been a sore spot on our front; but the French still
needed relief, and at the end of July the long, slow
struggle which ended on the Passchendaele Ridge
had begun. Then, just at the time when the German
forces had been so weakened by that battle that there
was good prospect of reaping at Cambrai the fruits
of the year’s campaign, there had come the surprise
of Caporetto, the collapse of the Italian army on
the Isonzo, its retreat with very heavy losses to
the Piave, and the dispatch of large forces from
France to the help of our Ally. In this year the
Germans committed one of their cardinal blunders in
proclaiming unlimited U-boat .warfare, which added
decisively to the number of their foes; but the con-
sequences to themselves of that blunder were not
immediate, while we at once saw our sea communi-
cations endangered and our people threatened with
very serious privation if not starvation. In Mesopo-
tamia Maude overcame the Turkish army at Kut
and drove their beaten troops through Baghdad,
while Allenby ended the year’s campaigns with a
triumph at Gaza and Beersheba and with the capture
of Jerusalem. But history will certainly count the
entry of the United States of America into the warWhat Went Before
and the Russian Revolution as the two outstanding
events of 1917, the two events which exercised the
most far-reaching influence upon the course of the
war.
Early in the year it had become apparent to the
military authorities of the Allies that the results of
the Russian Revolution would be felt before the
military power of the United States could become
effective on the Western front. In short, it was
clear that the Germans were going to get a start in
the race, just as they got a start in 1914, and that
consequently the Allies would be faced with a period
of danger in which they would have to stand on the
defensive.
At a meeting of the Allied Commanders-in-Chief
and chiefs of staff held in Paris in June, 1917, to
consider the military policy of the Allies in these
circumstances, it was recommended that some
machinery should be established to ensure “ unity
of command.” This was by no means the first time
that this question had been mooted. In quite early
days in the war various tentative proposals had been
put forward with the object of ensuring better
control and greater unity of action amongst the
forces of the Allies, but the political difficulties had
always proved insuperable.
Soon after Mr. Lloyd George became Prime
Minister of Great Britain, a serious attempt was made
to reach a practical solution at a conference between
3The Last Four Months
the French and British Governments at Calais in
February, 1917, and for the great offensive campaign
planned for the spring of that year on the Western
front the French Commander - in - Chief, General -
Nivelle, was given complete control. Unfortunately,
the failure of General Nivelle’s campaign gave a set-
back to “ unity of command,” and encouraged those
who were opposed to it in the belief that it was not
desirable to place the army of one nation directly
under the command of the general of another. It
was not then recognised that there was a very
important difference between entrusting the supreme
command to the Commander-in-Chief of one army,
whose mind and thoughts must necessarily be chiefly
concerned with his own men and his own front, and
placing it in the hands of one man who could stand
back and look upon the front as a whole, free from
the burden of the special charge of any one part of
it. Also there was the question of finding the one
man. Nivelle had failed, Joffre was on the shelf,
and Foch was still under the shadow of his failure
to take the Vimy Ridge in 1915. Thus, in spite of
the recommendations of the Allied generals, nothing
was done until the disaster to the Italian army at
Caporetto produced a crisis.
Mr. Lloyd George, with his usual energy in
an emergency, then proposed that a conference
should be held between the British, French and
Italian Governments for the purpose of establish-
4What Went Before
ing an Allied organisation for the better control
of the war. That conference was held in November,
1917, at Rapallo, on the Italian frontier, and it
.was then that the Supreme War Council, commonly
known as the Versailles Council, was established.
One of the objects of that step was to put the
conferences of the Allied statesmen on a surer
and more businesslike basis than had up till then
existed. Before the Versailles Council was instituted
the Allied Governments used to confer at irregular
intervals when they had important questions
to discuss, but there was no organisation avail-
able to prepare beforehand the business for such
meetings or to supervise the execution of the
decisions which were reached. For these reasons the
Versailles Council supplied an obvious need and was
a step in the right direction; but it did not and could
not provide the means of exercising effective military
command. In the first place the Council had no
executive authority; it could only advise. In the
second place the military representatives who formed
the main part of the permanent organisation of the
Council were each of them responsible to their own
Governments, and had to refer back all important
questions for the instructions of those Governments.
Therefore decisions could only be reached slowly and
after discussion, whereas in war it is essential that
military decisions should be taken quickly and in
accordance with one clear policy. The military side
5The Last Four Months
of the Versailles organisation was of value in collect-
ing and bringing together information from each of
the Allied armies. This enabled it to tender general
advice as to the policy to be followed several months
ahead, but it was quite incapable of dealing with
day-to-day emergencies or of issuing orders to the
Allied Commanders-in-Chief.
After the Versailles Council was established at
Rapallo Mr. Lloyd George came home through
Paris, where he made the famous speech in which he
commented scathingly on the conduct of the war by
the Allies. He asserted that each of the weaker
members of the Alliance had been sacrificed in
turn, while France and Great Britain were knocking
their heads against what he termed the impenetrable
barrier in the West. This speech aroused a great deal
of criticism. That criticism was mainly of two kinds.
There were those who realised that the Versailles
Council did not provide for the danger which was
facing us, that it did not, in fact, produce effective
“unity of command.” These critics were not
opposed to “ unity of command,” but were opposed
to what they regarded as an inadequate measure.
The second group of critics was opposed to the
Versailles Council because they were suspicious of
any weakening of the control of Parliament over the
Army, and they regarded an attempt to place the
military forces of the Allies under an international
organisation as a blow at the sovereign rights of the
6What Went Before
people. This group may be regarded as composed
of out and out opponents of “ unity of command ”
in any form. A good deal of confusion was caused
by lumping these two bodies of critics together and
-by classing the many soldiers who desired “unity
of command,” but refused to recognise the Versailles
Council as a practical military organisation, with
those who were opposed to “unity of command”
mainly for political reasons.
While these discussions were going on the
Germans were acting, and from the beginning of
November onward they were moving troops from
the Russian to the French front as fast as their
trains could carry them. It was calculated that the
Germans would be able to increase their strength
on the Western front between the beginning of
November and the end of April by not less than a
million and a half of men, and that they would be
able to bring over a very large number of aeroplanes
and heavy guns which they would no longer require
on the Eastern front. In these circumstances the
military authorities of the Allies began pressing their
Governments for more effective measures to meet the
coming blow, and amongst those measures there was
a demand for something better calculated to ensure
“unity of command” than the Versailles Council.
Keen observers in the United States of America,
standing at a greater distance from the war and able
to take a calmer and more general view of the whole
7The Last Four Months
vast conflict, had long been insisting on the need for
really effective unified control, and at the time of
the Rapallo conference the United States Govern-
ment had proposed that the Versailles Council should
be vested with executive authority. The French
Government was frankly in favour of the appoint-
ment of a generalissimo, but as this office would
naturally fall to a French general there was some
reluctance to appear to force it upon an Ally, and
Mr. Lloyd George was not ready to go so far.
This, then, was the direction in which matters
were moving at the beginning of 1918, when a con-
ference was held at Versailles to consider the Allied
plan of campaign for that year. At that conference
it was decided to form an Executive Military Council,
composed of a French, a British, an American and
an Italian general, with General Foch as chairman,
and that this body should be given authority to
co-ordinate the strategy of the Allied Commanders-
in-Chief, to create a general reserve to be under its
control, and to employ that reserve in accordance
with the needs of the situation.
The institution of this body produced another
crisis, for the British Chief of the Imperial General
Staff, Sir William Robertson, objected that no com-
mittee could exercise effective command, and he asked
to be permitted to resign rather than to work with it.
The British Government offered him the alternative
of becoming the British representative on the Execu-
8What Went Before
tive Council or of remaining as Chief of the Staff
and working with the Executive Council. Sir
William Robertson replied that, as he did not believe
that the Executive Council could be an efficient
military organisation, he could not work with it in
either capacity, and his resignation was accordingly
accepted.
These various events all produced the impression
that British soldiers were in general opposed to
“unity of command.” In fact, however, many of
them had long been working hard to find some
solution of the difficulties which stood in the way of
the realisation of what they regarded as a necessary
measure. The majority of them were, however,
certainly opposed to what they considered to be an
ineffective compromise. The history of war teaches
that committees have never been able to command,
that they lead invariably to delay and compromise,
and these things are fatal in war. The Austrian
- Aulic Council and the Dutch Field Deputies of the
War of the Spanish Succession have been deservedly
held up to ridicule by all history, and most soldiers
were whole-heartedly opposed to proposals which
appeared to savour of the repetition of such ill-advised
measures. However, the length of the war, its
enormous cost in life and treasure, the many failures
of the Allied generals, and the fact that the hopes
which they had expressed had been very rarely
fulfilled, all tended to confirm the statesmen in
9The Last Four Months
their view that what was needed was more effective
political control. A single Commander-in-Chief
would naturally possess a position of far greater
authority even in his own country than would a
committee, jvhile the influence of a foreign Govern-
ment upon the Commander-in-Chief who commanded
their troops would be very limited indeed. When
to those who held these views was added the influence
of those who looked with suspicion upon ‘4 unity of
command ” as constitutionally an unsound measure
there were very strong forces arrayed on behalf of
the compromise. So, as the crisis approached, the
supreme direction of the military forces of the Allied
and Associated Powers in the Western theatres of
war was in the hands of a polyglot committee, each
member of which was responsible to a separate
Government, and immediately this committee set to
work its clumsy machinery began to creak.
Then suddenly the blow came. On March 21
forty German divisions were flung against the four-
teen divisions of the British Fifth Army, which was
driven back. By March 25 there appeared to be
great danger that the Germans would succeed in
capturing Amiens and in separating the British from
the French army. By that time almost the whole
of the British reserves had been drawn into the fight,
and Sir Douglas Haig did not feel that he was strong
enough to ensure the safety both of Amiens and
of the Channel ports, while General Petain was
ioWhat Went Before
doubtful whether he could send Sir Douglas
Haig sufficient troops to make Amiens safe
and at the same time secure his own front and
cover Paris.
It was a grim crisis, probably the most serious
of all the many crises with which the Allies had been
faced in the course of the war. It happened that at
this time Lord Milner, the Secretary of State for
War, and General Sir Henry Wilson, the new Chief
of the Imperial General Staff, were in France, having
gone there to report to the British Government and
to concert with the French Government upon such
measures as seemed best in the emergency. Sir
Douglas Haig and his generals were naturally fully
occupied with the military situation, and it was
arranged for their convenience that a conference
should be held on March 26 at the little town of
Doullens. That conference was attended by M.
Poincare, the President of the French Republic,
M. Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, M.
Loucheur, the French Minister of Munitions, who
represented the French Government, Lord Milner,
who represented the British Government, Sir
Douglas Haig and the four Army Commanders of
the British army, Sir Henry Wilson, General
Petain, and General Foch.
When he was presenting the baton of Marshal
of France to General Foch M. Poincare told us that
a conversation held in the garden of the house atThe Last Four Months
Doullens in which the conference was held had con-
vinced him that the baton was coming to Foch.
The Executive Council of generals had, as had been
anticipated, proved to be too slow and cumbrous to
deal with a real emergency, and already at this early
stage it was in a state of suspended animation and
had to be replaced promptly by something more
adequate. In fact, the situation was so serious that
immediate action had to be taken. There was no
time to refer back to the Allied Governments for
authority and approval, and in that day of stress
common sense prevailed. Political difficulties
vanished, and General Foch was given authority to
co-ordinate the action of the Allied armies on the
Western front.
Even then our Government was a little frightened
of calling a spade a spade, and was at pains to explain
that Foch had not been appointed Generalissimo;
but both the soldiers and the public hailed the
Doullens decision with such enthusiasm and with such
complete disregard of the niceties of official termin-
ology, that after some further discussion and some
skilful and tactful handling of the position by M.
Clemenceau, Foch, on April 14, was nominated
Commander-in-Chief of the Allied armies in France
and Belgium.
It has often been asked who was mainly
responsible for the appointment of General Foch.
There is no question but that Mr. Lloyd George
12What Went Before
worked for “unity of command.” The difficulty
with him was that he did not understand fully the
essential conditions of military command, and that
for the sake of political considerations he was pre-
pared to be content with something which fell short
of military necessity. It is also certainly the case
that the Government of the United States desired
to achieve “unity of command,” and that their
influence was a most potent factor in bringing about
the result which was eventually achieved. The con-
ference at Doullens had been assembled in such
haste that there was no time to obtain the presence
of General Pershing, who was down in the south at
Chaumont. Immediately General Pershing heard of
the decision of the conference he wrote to General
Foch his well-known letter of March 28 offering the
new Generalissimo every man he had available.
There never was any doubt but that the decision
would be cordially welcomed and approved both by
the statesmen and the generals of the United States,
though in point of fact neither were represented
when the decision was reached. This decision was
probably mainly due to the influence at the con-
ference of March 26 of M. Clemenceau, who had
been quietly preparing the way for the appointment
of a Generalissimo, Lord Milner and Sir Douglas
Haig.
There were rumours flying about at the time that
Sir Douglas Haig and the British generals looked
13The Last Four Months
askance at the appointment of General Foch, but
these were absolutely devoid of any foundation in
fact. General Foch’s appointment was welcomed
immediately by both Sir Douglas Haig and his Army
Commanders, and there has been no better example
of loyal co-operation in war than that between Sir
Douglas Haig and Marshal Foch.
But, when all is said and done, the man who
brought about “ unity of command ” was Luden-
dorff. It was the emergency created by his great
drive upon either side of the Somme which produced
clear thinking and prompt decisions. Boswell once
remarked to Dr. Johnson that few people allow
themselves to think clearly about death, but that
when a man is threatened with death he usually
behaves with resolution. And so it was at Doullens
on March 26. Ludendorff had dealt a deadly blow
to the Allies, and under the menace of that blow
the gentlemen assembled in the little town of
Doullens concentrated their minds, behaved with
resolution, and took what was probably the most
momentous decision made during the course of the
great war, while those who had been hesitating on
the bank found when they had taken the plunge
that the waters were not so cold as they looked.
I have spoken of Ludendorff as the controlling
mind at German Headquarters. In the middle of
the campaign of 1916 Falkenhayn, whose plans for
the capture of Verdun had failed ignominiously, was
14What Went Before
removed from his position as Chief of the Great
General Staff, and Hindenburg, with Ludendorff as
his first assistant, was brought over from the Russian
front to succeed him at Great' Headquarters. The
pair had not been there very long before it became
clear that Hindenburg was little more than a figure-
head and Ludendorff was de facto chief of the
German war organisation. Hindenburg had gained
the deep gratitude of the Berliners by his great
victory of Tannenburg, won at a time when they
were trembling in their shoes at the Russian invasion
of East Prussia. We built high hopes upon the
Russian “ steam roller,” and during the first months
of the war the German public regarded it as being
as formidable as we did. They were never easy in
their minds until the Russians were driven back, and
when this result was achieved they contrasted Hin-
denburg’s performances—with armies composed at
first largely of second-rate troops—and the manner
in which he restored the military efficiency of their
feeble Austrian Ally, with the failure of their
generals in the West, who, though they had the
pick of the German army at their disposal, had not
achieved victory.
Hindenburg’s square head, his burly figure, his
strong character, his contempt of the arts of peace,
of which many stories were in circulation, made him
an admirable embodiment of Prussian militarism, a
living exponent of the gospel of might is right which
T5The Last Four Months
the German people had adopted with enthusiasm.
He provided the Kaiser with just the personality
needed at Great Headquarters to keep the war fever
in the Fatherland at boiling point. Ludendorff,
who did his work at the office desk and was first and
foremost a military thinker, could never make the
same appeal to the popular imagination as did his
chief. The pair, therefore, made an excellent com-
bination. The Germans have always been good at
such combinations, at providing the strong personality
or the royal personage with just the right brain.
The classic example is that of Blucher and Gneisenau
in the closing years of the Napoleonic wars. Blucher
was then the personality, Gneisenau the brain.
Both of them came to England for the fetes which
followed the peace of 1815, and it is told of Blucher
that he then made a bet in a London drawing-room
that he was the only man in the room who could kiss
his own head. He won his wager by walking up to
Gneisenau and giving him a smacking kiss on both
cheeks. I doubt if Hindenburg were ever so frank
as Blucher, but the relations between him and
Ludendorff were very much those of their prede-
cessors of one hundred years before.
By placing the supreme control of the Allied
armies in the West in the hands of Foch, one of the
essential preparations to meet the German menace
was completed just in time to prevent disaster, but
it was already too late to take those others which
16What Went Before
might have saved us from such shocks as caused us
to tremble for our safety. At the end of 1917 the
man power of France, in the fourth year of the fierce
struggle in which she had, until the summer of 1916,
borne the brunt of the fighting, was approaching
exhaustion, and the French Government was no
longer able to keep up its forces on the Western
front at full strength. The British army was wearied
by the campaign in Flanders, and was grievously
disappointed that the brilliant promise of the tank
attack at Cambrai in November had ended in one
more check. Both we and our French Allies had
had to weaken materially our forces on the Western
front in order to bring help to our friends in the
Southern theatre of war. The collapse of Russia was
definite and complete, and German divisions were
streaming from the Eastern to the Western front.
It had become a certainty that early in 1918 ,we
should be confronted in France and Flanders by
almost the full military power of Germany. The
one bright spot in the picture was the arrival of the
first American divisions in France, but there was
little prospect that America would be able to solve
the vast problem of creating armies and transporting
them three thousand miles across the Atlantic in time
to make her strength felt in France before the late
summer. Prudence therefore demanded that we
British should do everything that was possible to
increase our forces there,
c	17The Last Four Months
Allenby’s victory at Gaza and Beersheba and
his brilliant pursuit ending in the capture of
Jerusalem had disorganised the Turkish army pre-
paring near Aleppo under German leadership for the
recapture of Baghdad, and had made our position
in Asia secure. Two British divisions had been
moved from Salonika, and a third, composed largely
of Territorial battalions brought from India, had
been created in Egypt, to reinforce Allenby for the
campaign in which he broke through the Turkish
lines on the southern frontier of Palestine. His
artillery and aircraft had also been increased, and
later a veteran Indian division had been moved from
Mesopotamia to Egypt, while the Indian cavalry
regiments which had been serving in France were also
sent there. Allenby’s force was, therefore, very con-
siderably stronger than that which had for a long time
protected Egypt by covering the routes across the
Sinai desert. North of Jerusalem, in the hills of
Judaea, it was much better placed than it had been
opposite Gaza. On one flank lay the Mediterranean,
on the other the Dead Sea, while east of the Dead Sea
spread the desert, of which our Arab friends were
daily gaining more effective control. In March,
1918, Allenby had under his command an army of
three mounted divisions, one mounted brigade, and
eight infantry divisions of an approximate strength
of 170,000 men, of whom about 150,000 were white
troops and 20,000 native troops. In India Sir
18
\What Went Before
Charles Monro’s expansion of the Indian army was
well developed and a steady stream of Indian troops
for service in Palestine was assured. We should,
therefore, have incurred no risk whatever in the
East by sending Haig at the beginning of 1918 a
considerable reinforcement of white troops from
Palestine. Not a man, however, was moved from
the East to reinforce Haig until after the German
blow had fallen and our armies had suffered the most
serious reverse which befell us during the .whole
course of the war.
In January, 1918, the fighting strength of our
army in France had been much diminished as a result
of the prolonged fighting which had begun at the
end of July-, 1917, in the attack on the Flanders
ridges, and had not ended till the German counter-
attack at Cambrai had been checked, well on in
November. Hardly a battalion, a battery, or a
squadron had its full complement of men. This had
been expected, and indeed it was a normal experience
of the war on the Western front, for while great
battles were in progress the losses exceeded the flow
of drafts from home. The period during which hard
fighting took place on the British front normally
lasted from March to November, and consequently at
the beginning of the year the fighting strength of the
army was usually at its lowest. During the winter
and early spring conditions of weather and of ground
put a stop to operations on a grand scale, with theThe Last Four Months
result that the losses were comparatively small; this
then was the time to bring the army up to strength
in preparation for the campaign which might be
expected in the spring. It wTas necessary that the
preparations for filling the gaps in the ranks should
be made a long time ahead, for it took from four to
five months to train a recruit to take his place in
the ranks in France, and the process of calling him
up often took as long as from two to three months
from the time he received his first notice. Therefore,
arrangements for filling up the ranks during the early
months of the year should have been well in hand
by the previous summer.
In December, 1916, the ranks of the fighting
troops had been heavily depleted by the long and
bitter struggles of the Somme and the Ancre, but by
April, 1917, on the eve of the battle of Arras, the
ranks were again full, and Haig had been provided
with considerable additional reinforcements; in fact
at that time the fighting strength of our army was
almost at the highest point it ever reached. We
then still had divisions at home which could be
sent out to reinforce the army in France, and were
able to bring back troops from Egypt, because
by advancing into the Sinai desert and gaining
control of the wells, which provided the only water
available for a force advancing to attack Egypt, we
could defend that country much more economically
than if we held the long line of the Suez Canal.
20What Went Before
In 1918 \ve had in England no divisions which could
be sent to Haig, and it was therefore the more
necessary, in view of the danger which threatened
us and of the fact that five divisions had been sent
from our army in France to Italy, to bring back
to France every man who could be spared from
the more distant theatres of war, and to make our
ranks up to their full strength. Yet none of these
measures was taken. In March, 1918, Sir Douglas
Haig’s fighting strength was weaker by over 42,000
men than it had been on January 1, 1917; there had
been some increase in artillery and a considerable in-
crease in aircraft, tanks and machine-guns, and a very
large increase in labour formations, both British and
coloured; but unarmed labourers and Chinese coolies
were not the kind of reinforcements Sir Douglas
Haig needed to fight Germans, though they were
invaluable to him for other purposes. His deficiency
of infantry—the essential arm, whether for offence
or defence—was greater by more than 100,000
men than it had been at the beginning of 1917.
A comparison of the strengths on the eve of the
battle of March, 1918, with those in January,
1917, is, however, misleading, for it is a comparison
of a period when the ranks ought to have been full
with a period when they were naturally empty; the
only fair comparison is between the position in
March, 1918, and in March, 1917. On the latter date
the rifle and sabre strength of the army in France
21The Last Four Months
—that is, the number of men available for duty in
the trenches—was greater by 180,000 men than it
was at the former.
During the early months of 1918 the drafts sent
out from home fell so far short of Sir Douglas Haig’s
requirements that it was impossible for him to main-
tain his army any longer at the strength at which
it had been during the previous autumn. Accord-
ingly, between the middle of January and the middle
of February, three battalions out of the thirteen in
each of the British divisions were broken up, and
the men in them were used to take the place of drafts
from home to fill up the ranks of the remaining bat-
talions. This measure, which was the consequence
of the failure of the Government to provide the
drafts, caused a drastic change in the organisation
and tactics of our infantry at a critical period when
there was no time to accustom commanders and
troops to the new conditions. Worse still, it adver-
tised our weakness to the army, and was the reverse
of encouraging to men who were preparing to meet
a great attack. Nor was this all. Owing to the
decline of the strength of the French army the
French Government became more and more insistent
that we should take over a longer stretch of the
front. Petain at this time thought it extremely
probable that the German attack would be directed
against him, and he did not feel himself able to meet
such an attack unless we relieved some of his troops.What Went Before
When the length of front held by us and by the
French was compared it appeared at first sight that
France was bearing a very undue share of the burden;
but the burden borne by troops in trench warfare
cannot be estimated merely by the length of the
line they hold. The French, for example, held a
very long line in Alsace and Lorraine, where for
months on end a serious bombardment was almost
unknown, and the trenches could be very lightly
held, because the Germans on this front were not in
strength and showed no disposition to attack. On
the other hand, the enemy had always kept a large
proportion of his troops in the West opposite the
British front, while the climate and soil of Flanders
made this, for many months in the year, one of the
most exacting parts of the whole line. A still more
important consideration was that only on a compara-
tively small part of the French front would loss of
ground bring with it very serious consequences, while
the British front north of the Somme covered so
narrow a strip of country in front of the Channel
ports that almost every yard of it was precious.
However, after prolonged negotiations between the
two Governments, and after the question had been
referred to the new Versailles organisation for
examination, the French arguments prevailed, and
Haig, in order to meet the wishes of the British
Government, agreed with Petain to take over an
additional twenty-eight miles of front and to extend
23The Last Four Months
his front south of the Somme as far as the Oise.
This extension made the length of our line 130
miles, the greatest length of front we had ever held,
while the number of rifles available to hold it was
approximately equal to that in March, 1916, when
the length of our front was eighty miles and the
Germans still had great armies on the Russian front.
The new front taken over from the French fell
to our Fifth Army, which, though it was urgently in
need of rest, had in the few weeks preceding the
German attack to familiarise itself with fresh ground
and to work incessantly at the erection of defences.
Actually, then, our preparations for meeting the
threat which the Germans held over us were that we
had agreed with our Allies to invest the supreme com-
mand in the hands of an executive committee, we
had abolished two of Haig’s cavalry divisions, had
reduced the number of infantry battalions at his dis-
posal by close on 25 per cent., had made an important
alteration in the organisation of our infantry, and
had at the same time increased our liabilities by
taking-over twenty-eight miles of new front, this new
front being not less important than our positions in
Flanders, for it covered the roads to Amiens and
Paris.
It will naturally be asked how it came about that
we did not do more to prepare for the great German
attack, which was expected long before it took place.
Mr. Lloyd George was confirmed by the result of
24What Went Before
the third battle of Ypres in his opinion that the
position on the Western front was one of stalemate.
We and the French had made attempt after attempt
to break through the German trenches when our
numerical superiority over the enemy had been
greater than his wras expected to be when he had
brought his troops across from Russia. In April,
1917, on the eve of General Nivelle’s offensive,
it had been calculated that the Allies had on the
Western front a superiority of 600,000 rifles and
5.000	guns. In the spring of 1918 it was estimated
that the Germans might have a superiority of
300.000	rifles and that their preponderance in
artillery would not be considerable. Mr. Lloyd
George believed that the whole experience of the
war on the Western front had shown that the
Germans would require a far greater numerical
superiority than they appeared likely to possess in
order to endanger our position. He doubted if the
Germans would make the attempt, but was quite
certain that the Allied forces in France and Belgium
were strong enough to stop them if they did. He
believed that victory could only be won by taking the
way round, by knocking down Germany’s props. He
had held this view from the early days of 1915, when
the trench barrier was first established between the
North Sea and the Swiss frontier. He had first
advocated reinforcing Serbia with the object of attack-
ing Austria and bringing in the other Balkan States
25The Last Four Months
on our side. Then, when he failed to carry his argu-
ments in favour of that enterprise, he had proposed
to attack Austria through Italy. Both these opera-
tions were now out of the question ; the Allied armies
in these theatres could only be reinforced to the
necessary extent at the expense of the Western front,
and if he did not think it necessary to strengthen that
front he was not rash enough to weaken it; but by
leaving Allenby the troops he had in Palestine, and
by reinforcing him from India, he believed that it
would be possible to defeat Turkey, who was very
shaky. Victories in Asia Minor would, he hoped,
encourage the Allied peoples to hold on during 1918,
while America was preparing her armies and shipping
them to France, and it would be time enough to
consider in 1919 whether it was worth while to defeat
the German armies in the West. lie had to provide
labour for the munition factories, for the coal mines,
and for the shipyards to meet the submarine menace.
He could only obtain the soldiers needed to keep our
troops in France up to strength by raising the age
limit for the draft, and he dreaded the political effect
of doing this if he left Ireland exempt, while the
problem of forcing conscription on Ireland was one
which he did not care to face. He considered that by
instituting the Versailles Council and its later develop-
ment, the Executive Military Committee of the
Council, he had counterbalanced the advantage which
the Germans had in the West in a single homogeneous
26What Went Before
army under one commander, and he refused both
to meet the demands of the soldiers for men to fill
the depleted ranks in France and to transfer troops
from Palestine to France. He was, in fact, sincerely
convinced that the barrier in the West .was impene-
trable alike by us and by the Germans.
Though the procession of German troops from
East to West had begun in November and continued
steadily throughout the winter and spring, it was not
until March that Ludendorff’s fighting strength on
the Western front was approximately equal numeri-
cally to that of the Allies. It is not possible,
however, to estimate correctly the power of opposing
armies merely by counting heads, and Ludendorff
had many factors in his favour which added materially
to his strength. For a long time before he opened
the campaign of 1918 there had been little or no
fighting on the Eastern front, which became for him
a vast rest camp and training centre in which his
men could be prepared for work elsewhere. Thus
while our men and the enemy opposed to them were
engaged in desperate and exhausting fighting, large
German forces were quietly preparing elsewhere for
their next effort. The collapse of Russia and the
failure of the 1917 campaign to yield any decisive
results had thrown us on the defensive, and had given
Ludendorff the opportunity, of which he skilfully took
full advantage, of playing upon the fears of the Allied
commanders and of keeping each of them under
27The Last Four Months
threat of attack. Further, in March, 1918, Luden-
dorff had large reserves of trained men still in the
East, ready to come across. Actually between March
and the end of May, when his strength was at its
highest, his forces were increased by sixteen divisions
and a large amount of heavy artillery. Therefore
Ludendorff had an important reinforcement at hand
in March, and the Allies had no corresponding reserve
which could be ready until long after the German
commander had his on the spot.
The extreme advocates of the policy of seeking
victory by the way round failed from the first to
recognise that the German forces on the Russian front
were a potential reserve for their armies in France,
and that at any time from the beginning of 1915
onwards the German leaders might have reversed the
process which they carried through after their defeat
in the first battle of Ypres, have stood on the defen-
sive in the East and sent all troops not necessary for
defence there to the West. Even before the U-boats,
Gothas and Zeppelins became as dangerous as they
subsequently were, it was clear that, if the Germans
reached Calais and Boulogne, Great Britain would be
in danger of starvation and of invasion, and that her
army in France would have a very precarious line
of communications with the Motherland.
The importance of protecting Paris needed no
discussion. In September, 1914, Joffre, backed by
the French Government, had made all possible pre-
28What Went Before
parations for continuing the war even if the capital
fell to the enemy, but the moral effect which the
success of a second German attack on Paris might
have had is incalculable, and the safety of Paris ought
not in any circumstances to have been risked. It is
an old and well-established maxim of strategy that
before launching out upon an offensive enterprise a
general must look to the safety of the vitals both of
his army and of his country. The Channel ports
and Paris were the vitals of Great Britain and of
France.
The moment these were seriously threatened the
Government perforce took in haste the measures
which might have been carried through at leisure.
The application of the Military Service Acts was
extended, drafts were rushed out from home, and
every British soldier who could be spared from the
East was brought to France. Just as the Germans
forced “unity of command” upon us, so they
compelled us to discard the errors in our strategy.
But it is now time for a word as to the events which
brought these things to pass.
By the middle of February, 1918, it had become
apparent that the Germans were pushing forward
their preparations for a great offensive with all possible
energy, and there were already indications that they
intended to attack the British right, held by our Fifth
and Third Armies. Ludendorff was, however, much
too skilful to confine his preparations to one part of
29The Last Four Months
the front, and these pointed to the possibility that
the attack on our right might be a preliminary to a
greater blow against our line farther north, or against
the French to the south. The northern portion of
our front was but fifty miles distant from Calais and
sixty miles from Boulogne; therefore, in the north
every yard of ground was of value to us, and if the
Germans had broken through even to a depth of
twenty-five miles we should have been in dire straits,
for they would then have gained possession of the hill
of Cassel which dominates the Flanders flats north-
wards to the coast on either side of Dunkerque,
would have forced the Belgians to fall back, could
have shelled and bombed the harbours, and have
hemmed the Allied left flank into a position from
which issue would have been wellnigh impossible.
In the south we had more elbow room, for our front
between St. Quentin and the Oise was over ninety
miles from the coast, and could, in case of emergency,
be more quickly reinforced by the French than could
our line in Flanders.
Sir Douglas Haig, therefore, felt bound to keep
the greater part of such reserves as he had at his dis-
posal, north of the Somme. Gough’s Fifth Army
held the line from our point of junction with the
French on the Oise not far from La Fere to Gouzeau-
court, south-west of Cambrai, a distance of about
forty-two miles. On the whole of this front Gough
had fourteen divisions and three cavalry divisions,
30What Went Before
eleven of his divisions being in the line, and the
remainder in reserve, each of his divisions in the line
holding on an average 6,750 yards of front. Byng’s
Third Army on Gough’s left held a front of about
twenty-seven miles with fifteen divisions, eight of
them being in the line and seven in reserve, the
average length of front held by each division being
about 4,700 yards. Gough’s liabilities, therefore,
were very considerably greater than Byng’s, and the
reserves of the Fifth Army were much weaker than
those of the Third, while, as it turned out, Gough had
to bear by far the greater weight of the German
attack.
Throughout the winter Ludendorff had been plan-
ning, with the method and care of a trained German
mind, how to achieve his object and to solve the
problem of breaking through the trench barrier, a
problem to which all the generals on the West, on
both sides, had hitherto found no answer. All were
by this time agreed that the method of attack by
means of a great and protracted bombardment, fol-
lowed by an infantry assault pressed through upon
one part of the front, was a failure. The immense
and lengthy preparation which this form of battle
involved made any surprise impossible, as sooner or
later the defender’s reserves came up, and the battle
ended in a slogging match in which the assailant
gained little return for very heavy losses. Ludendorff
probably realised that it would be out of the question
31The Last Four Months
to keep all his preparations for attack secret. No
camouflage could altogether conceal from our air
observers that something was afoot, and some in-
formation would certainly have been elicited from the
prisoners taken in the daily skirmishes of trench war-
fare. But he conceived that it would be possible to
deceive us as to the weight of the blow which he
meant to deliver, and to achieve some measure of sur-
prise by keeping the great part of his artillery and the
bulk of his attacking divisions at a distance from the
battlefield until the last possible moment. This
method had the double advantage of keeping us in
uncertainty both as to the strength of the attack
and as to whether it would be made in more than
one place, for, in the weeks preceding the battle, he
placed his reserves so that they could be moved as
readily against our northern front, or even against
the French front, as against our right flank.
He decided, then, to have no long preliminary
bombardment, which would have given us a definite
indication of his plans, and, as we had found to our
cost, would so destroy the surface of the ground and
break up the roads and the railways, as to make it a
matter of great difficulty to get the reserves forward
when they were needed. He also decided to bring
up his attacking divisions at the last moment by train
and by rapid marches under cover of darkness. This
was the essence of his plan and the feature in which it
differed most from other attacks which had been tried
32What Went Before
in the West. In the details of its execution there
was also much that was new. Ludendorff and his
staff had studied very carefully all the previous attacks
which had been carried through both by us and by the
French, and he found that opportunities had often
been missed because parts of the attacking line had
been checked at strong points held resolutely by the
defenders, and the remainder had waited for these
to be reduced; he also maintained that the progress
of the Allied infantry had been delayed by too
frequent reliefs. He therefore determined that as a
principle he would follow up success wherever it was
won, driving in at such weak points as he discovered,
and that he would not delay his advance in order to'
overcome centres of resistance against which his pro-
gress was checked. In order to develop this method
of attack to the utmost he devoted the winter to
selecting from his army the best and bravest of his
soldiers and putting them through a special form of
training. These men, whom he called “ storm
troops,” were to lead his attacks, with orders to press
forward as far and as fast as possible, while they were
given the assurance that where they were successful
they would be immediately supported by the reserve.
He impressed upon his infantry divisions that they
must go forward to the utmost powers of their
endurance without expecting relief, and practised
them in making long advances, carrying food for
several days.
D
33The Last Four Months
By March 19 Haig’s Intelligence Department had
discovered that the German preparations for attack
on the Third and Fifth Armies were nearly complete,
and it was anticipated that the battle would begin
on March 20 or 21. The attack actually opened
shortly before 5 a.m. on the 21st with a bombardment
of the greatest intensity against the whole front held
by those armies, while in order to keep us in doubt
till the last possible moment as to their intentions, the
Germans simultaneously bombarded parts of our
northern line and the French fronts on either side of
Reims. For about five hours a perfect hurricane of
shell was hurled against Gough’s and Byng’s
defences, and it has been stated by German officers
that the rate of fire was so rapid that many of their
guns became red hot. Then, shortly before 10 A.M.,
the German infantry advanced. This five-hour bom-
bardment may be compared to our artillery prepara-
tion for the first battle of the Somme, which lasted
seven days'. The battle had not been long in progress
before it became clear that Ludendorff was throwing
his whole weight against our right, and, therefore,
though Haig had guessed accurately both the time
and the place at which the attack would be made,
Ludendorff had won the first move by getting all his
reserves in motion first. This much was due to his
skill, but he was also greatly favoured by fortune.
The early months of 1918 had been phenomenally dry,
but March 19 had been a day of drizzle sufficient to
34What Went Before
damp the surface of the hard ground; on the 20th
the sky had cleared and the sun had drawn up a dense
blanket of fog which, on the 21st, enveloped the whole
battlefield, with the result that in few places was it
possible to see more than fifty yards. We often
during the war created artificial fogs and blanketed
v
successfully the enemy’s deadly machine-guns by
means of smoke clouds, the preparation of which had
cost us much time and trouble. Ludendorff was pro-
vided by Nature with a more effective screen than we
had ever been able to produce.
Our system of defence was an adaptation of that
which had been used by the Germans with consider-
able success in the third battle of Ypres; that is to
say, it consisted, in the first place, of an outpost zone
covering the area which, as experience told us, would
probably be most heavily bombarded by the enemy.
This outpost zone was lightly held, and the troops in
it were intended, after giving warning of the German
advance and delaying it to the best of their power, to
fall back on the battle positions behind. The strength
of these battle positions depended greatly upon the
cross fire of guns and machine-guns, and upon a
series of elaborate strong posts so placed that the
garrison of each could see under normal conditions
both the enemy, at whom they were to fire, and the
neighbours with whom they were to co-operate. This
system, which later more than justified itself when
there was no fog, was unsuitable when guns, machine-
35The Last Four Months
guns and infantry were blinded. The only answer
to the fog was to strengthen the infantry holding the
trenches, but for this there were not men available
unless they were taken from the already weak reserve.
Nor was the fog the only stroke of fortune which
favoured the Germans. Gough’s front ran roughly
north and south till it reached the River Oise, and
then bent back south-eastwards along the northern
bank of the river. In this portion of its course the
Oise runs through a wide and normally marshy valley,
such as no great attacking force could cross in an
ordinary spring. It had, therefore, not been expected
that the German attack would include this sector,
which was lightly held. In fact, one of the arguments
which the French had put forward in order to induce
us to extend our front so far south was that no large
number of troops would be required to defend the
Oise, where our line would be so strong naturally as
to be impervious to attack. The Oise line had always
been regarded as a quiet sector. Being very short of
troops, Gough had decided to hold this, apparently
the least vulnerable part of his front, with a series of
posts, and not to have a continuous line of defence.
The dry weather, however, enabled the Germans to
cross the marshes without difficulty, while the fog
allowed them to penetrate between the posts, often
unobserved. The result of this was that the enemy
were able to get behind our defences further north
and cut off the defenders.
36What Went Before
It is not my purpose to describe the struggle in
detail. My object is to make clear the causes which
led to the defeat of the Fifth Army and to show that
they were beyond the control of the brave men of
whom that army was composed. From the first day
of the battle Ludendorff flung sixty-four divisions
against the Third and Fifth Armies. Of these sixty-
four at least forty attacked the fourteen divisions and
three cavalry divisions of Gough’s Fifth Army, while
the remaining twenty-four fell upon Byng’s fifteen
divisions. It is, therefore, in no way surprising that
the Fifth Army was overwhelmed.
The news that it had been overwhelmed came as
a rude shock to the public at home. It seemed in-
conceivable that the Germans should have been able
to break so completely 'through such elaborate
defences, manned by British troops, when we had,
despite lavish supplies of guns and munitions and the
incomparable valour of our men, only been able by
continuous effort and at an appalling cost to achieve
much smaller ,results. Wild stories were flying about
of the breakdown of the Fifth Army, and it was
whispered in the drawing-rooms of London that the
men had not fought as they ought to have fought.
In the confusion and uncertainty of retreat the true
facts could not be discovered and made known, with
the result that for long imputations rested upon the
Fifth Army which were wholly contrary to the truth.
Eager to find some silver lining to the cloud, the
37The Last Four Months
public fastened upon the glorious defence of the Third
Army and contrasted it with Gough’s apparent
collapse.
I have no desire to minimise in any way the splen-
dour of the achievement of Byng’s men, but I trust
I have made it clear that the burden which Gough’s
troops had to bear was incomparably the greater. In
the first stage of the battle very nearly twice as many
German divisions attacked Gough as fell upon Byng.
Each of Gough’s divisions had on the average to hold
nearly 50 per cent, more front than had Byng, while
the Third Army reserves were nearly twice as strong
as those of the Fifth, yet at the end of the first day’s
battle Gough’s left, where the gallant 9th Division
beat off all attacks, had given less ground than some
of Byng’s divisions further north had been compelled
to yield.
By the evening of March 21 our battle positions
had not been penetrated except on the extreme right,
where the Germans had crossed the dried-up bed of
the Oise, but during the night and the next morning
the enemy, helped by the fog, had discovered three
weak points in our front, and, true to Ludendorff’s
principle, had pressed his advantage at these points
till the line crumbled. These were days of gallant
and desperate fighting against overwhelming odds,
passing all preconceived standards of endurance and
of self-sacrifice. The garrisons of many of our works
held out long after the enemy, pouring through gaps
38What Went Before
in our line, had swept beyond them and completely
cut them off. As in the days of the crisis of the first
battle of Ypres, cooks, signallers, servants and odd-
job men of all kinds rallied round the headquarters of
battalions and fought on long after hope of support
had gone. The Germans, surging past these devoted
bands, which stood out here and there along the front
like rocks surrounded by the incoming tide, pressed
back Gough’s right, and, as by the evening of the
22nd, he had thrown in all his available reserves, and
only one French division had as yet arrived to help
him, he felt that there was no alternative but to fall
back to the Somme.
A bridgehead position had been prepared around
Peronne on the east bank of the river, but there
had been no time to complete the defences along
the river itself. When the troops arrived in
their new positions, to which they withdrew during
the night, hard pressed by the enemy, they found
only some rudiments of trenches with little or no
wire in front of them. Many strange and baseless
reports were circulated to account for this fact. It
was said that Gough, being a cavalry general, had
refused to allow his rear lines of defence to be wired,
and had even ordered wire to be pulled up in order
that the cavalry might have free scope. The fact is
that the southern portion of Gough’s front had only
been taken over from the French about seven weeks
before the German attack began. During the early
39The Last Four Months
part of the winter the French had been able to hold
this portion of the front very lightly, so that the troops
they had there were not sufficiently numerous to main-
tain even the existing defences in good condition, and
they had made no attempt to construct the new works
necessary to withstand a great German attack. The
country had been devastated by the battles of 1916,
the roads were in bad condition, there was no light
railway system, the broad gauge system was defective,
and, as all the villages had been gutted, there was no
shelter for the troops. An immense amount of work
had, therefore, to be done by the Fifth Army, the
men labouring incessantly at the construction of
defences in the battle zone and at improving the
defective communications. The sole reason why the
line of the Somme was not fortified was that there had
been neither time nor labour available for the purpose.
Gough had early realised that it was very probable
that he would not have the time he needed to com-
plete his rear lines of defence, and in February had
asked our Intelligence Department to use every device
at their disposal to cause the Germans to delay their
attack.
Owing to the difficulty of carrying out a uniform
retreat to the Somme of the whole line in the dark a
gap occurred in our front in the neighbourhood of
Ham, and Germans succeeded in getting across the
river at that place. Although very elaborate prepara-
tions had been made for blowing up the Somme
4oWhat Went Before
bridges, and the men and explosives for this work
were on the spot, yet the enemy’s artillery, following
up our retreat closely, in a number of cases exploded
the charges prematurely, and in others cut the leads
and so prevented the complete destruction of the
bridges. The Somme, like the Oise, was, in conse-
quence of the abnormally dry winter, very low, and
the enemy was able to cross at many places where in
ordinary times the river would have been impassable.
The result of this combination of untoward events
was that by the night of March 23 the line of the
Somme was already in the hands of the Germans on
Gough’s right, and the defence of the river further
north was seriously compromised.
Meanwhile, the enemy had been pressing Gough’s
left, while it was falling back north of the Somme
in conformity with the retreat of the centre of
the Fifth Army behind the river, and the situation
at the junction of the Third and Fifth Armies
became critical. The Third Army, which, during
the 23rd, had repulsed repeated attacks by the
enemy in mass formation and had given very little
ground, was consequently compelled to swing back its
right across the Somme battlefields. During the
22nd the Germans extended their gains west of the
Somme against Gough’s right, and on his left had
seized the heights north of the river and west of
Peronne. Both flanks of the defenders of the river
line at and south of Peronne were thus endangered,
4iThe Last Four Months
and there was no help for it but to fall back
again.
The loss of the line of the Somme was a very
serious matter, for the Germans now entered upon
the zone in which were placed our depots, stores and
hospitals. These had all to be abandoned or evacu-
ated hastily, and consequently great quantities of war
material of all kinds fell into the enemy’s hands; much
suffering was caused to the sick and wounded, of
whom numbers had to be left untended and without
shelter alongside the railway lines in the rear until
the hospital trains could pick them up; the telegraph
and telephone communications were disorganised, and
the difficulties of organising defence increased as the
danger grew. It was clear that the main object of
the Germans was to reach Amiens and that the weight
of their attack was falling upon the Fifth Army. So,
in order to allow Gough to devote his whole attention
to the enemy advancing south of the river, Sir
Douglas Haig placed that portion of the Fifth Army
which was north of the Somme under Byng, and it
then became a part of the Third Army. This new
right of the Third Army was pressed back north of
the Somme, and the Fifth Army south of the river,
finding its flank exposed, had to continue its retreat.
It was now the sixth day of the battle, March 26.
The danger of the Germans reaching Amiens and
driving in a wedge between the British and French
armies was very nigh. Haig had ordered his last
42What Went Before
reserves to the point of danger, and it was doubtful
whether Petain would be able to send the French
reserves to the battlefield in time. It was, as I have
said, in this emergency that the conference at
Doullens appointed Foch to the supreme command,
and by so doing inspired the weary leaders and their
men, battling against great odds, with fresh con-
fidence. Already, though they did not yet know it,
the valour and endurance in adversity of our men was
being rewarded, for the Germans, equally weary,
could not sustain the momentum of their attack. Our
airmen, who watched the long-drawn-out struggle
from above, have described how, in its last stages, the
infantry upon both sides were too exhausted to move,
save at a slow walk, and would lie for hours opposite
to each other without firing, having lost the energy to
load and fire, save in a real emergency. Ludendorff
had, as I have said, planned to get the last ounce out
of his men, and in order to avoid loss of time in reliefs
had left them to fight on until sheer exhaustion made
them almost impotent. He had hoped that before
that stage of exhaustion was reached he would have
driven a wide breach in our line, but he had not
reckoned with the doggedness of the British infantry-
man, whose spirit kept him fighting long after he
ought to have collapsed. The line, though badly
bent, was still a fine, held by battalions reduced to
the size of companies, brigades to the strength of
weak battalions, but still held.
43The Last Four Months
This was the state of affairs while Ludendorff
was trying to get up fresh troops to the front and
Foch was hurrying up the French reserves from
the south to our aid, and it was then that an
improvisation of Gough’s gave just the time needed
for our Allies to come up. He directed General
Grant, his Chief Engineer, to assemble every man
he could collect from his training schools, his en-
gineers and the odds and ends of troops employed
in special jobs behind the army, and form them into
a reinforcing force. Later, as the Chief Engineer
was required for his proper duties, the command of
this miscellaneous body was given to General Carey,
who happened to be free, and it became known to
fame as Carey’s Force. It was joined by Canadian
and American railway construction engineers, who
were engaged in laying railway lines in the neighbour-
hood of Amiens. These men, though but few of
them had had any real military training, volunteered
to fight, as had the American railway engineers who
had fought with Byng’s men when the Germans made
their counter-attack at Cambrai in November, 1917,
and were the first American soldiers to take part in
battle on the Western front. With this exception
this little band of Carey’s consisted almost wholly of
men included in the fighting strength of the Army,
but, being hastily brought together, they lacked the
equipment of an organised force. Nevertheless, this
reinforcement, together with the skill and devotion
44What Went Before
of our cavalry, who, on our right, repeated in even
more trying circumstances their achievements during
the retreat from Mons, and with the aid of divisions
brought up to Amiens from Gough’s extreme right
as they were relieved by the French, just enabled the
battered remnant of the Fifth Army to bar the direct
road to Amiens until the arrival of the Australians
from the north and of the French troops from the
south once more established a firm barrier against
the tide of the German invasion. By the evening
of March 28 the worst of the crisis was over, though
the great battle was by no means ended.
On that day the Germans made a desperate effort
to drive in at Arras, an effort designed to force us
out of the Vimy Ridge, one of the main pivots of our
defence. This attack, which involved the right of
Horne’s First Army as well as the left and centre
of Byng’s Third Army, was delivered by the enemy in
great strength, but it failed disastrously. When it
ended, the Germans had gained a portion only of our
outpost positions, and our battle positions had every-
where resisted their assaults. This time there was no
fog to help the enemy, and Haig’s system of defence
was completely successful. It is not too much to
say that this costly repulse doomed Ludendorff’s
campaign to failure.
We have the evidence of captured documents and
of Ludendorff’s statements in his “ Reminiscences ”
that the chief object of this campaign was to separate
45The Last Four Months
the British from the French army, the capture of
Amiens being only a means towards that end. The
danger of the Germans realising this plan would
have been much greater than it actually was had
they managed, as Ludendorff intended, to make a
wide breach north of the Somme, for they would then
have used that river between Peronne and Abbe-
ville to hold off the French reinforcements coming
up from the south, while they attempted to drive
the British army into the sea, and, of course, the
farther north the breach the longer it would take the
French troops to reach the danger point. When one
recalls how very near the Germans were to creating
a real breach south of the Somme and how the French
reserves came up only just in time to prevent such a
calamity, there is little difficulty in imagining how
much greater the peril would have been had the Third
Army given way, and in appreciating the wisdom of
Sir Douglas Haig’s decision to keep the greater part
of his very limited reserve north of the Somme. I
believe it was the stout resistance of the Third Army
upon March 23 and the retirement of the Fifth Army
behind the Somme upon that day which induced
Ludendorff to follow what he believed to be the line
of least resistance, and to strike for Amiens by the
southern bank of the Somme. Then when he found
that he could not overcome the resistance of the Fifth
Army before the French came up, and realised that
he would have to call a halt on the southern part of
46What Went Before
the battlefield to rest and relieve his exhausted men,
he made the desperate attempt of March 28 to return
to his first idea of creating such a breach north of
the Somme as would enable him to roll up our line
and force us back on the ports. From this second
danger Byng’s Third Army saved us. Checked on
the northern battle-front, Ludendorff, on April 4,
made one more attempt to reach Amiens by the
southern route in a battle which lasted till the even-
ing of the 5th; but Foch’s vigorous methods had
already brought up sufficient French troops, and
again our cavalry covered themselves with glory,
while four Australian brigades had strengthened our
front south of the Somme, so that the great German
effort to drive a wedge between the Allied armies
wore itself out.
Hardly had one crisis passed before another arose.
On April 9 the Germans attacked and overwhelmed
the Portuguese holding a portion of the Flanders
front to the south of Armentieres. Haig had greatly
weakened his forces in the north in order to find troops
to save Amiens, and the divisions sent to the Somme
had to some extent been replaced in Flanders by ex-
hausted divisions withdrawn from that battlefield and
hastily reconstituted with reinforcements sent out
from England. Thus our men passed from one fiery
trial to another. This Flanders battle had been con-
sidered and rejected by Ludendorff when he formed
his original plan, but, finding that his troops on the
47The Last Four Months
Amiens front were checked and that his Seventeenth
Army, which had attacked Byng and Horne, had
been so severely handled as to be incapable, for a
time, of further effort, he determined to revert to it
and to drive for the Channel ports.
By the evening of April 9 the Germans had forced
their way across the River Lawe, midway between
Armentieres and Bethune, and had made such
progress as to endanger our hold upon both towns.
Bethune was saved by the splendid defence of the 55th
West Lancashire Division of its front about Festubert
and Givenchy. Sir Douglas Haig mentions as one
of the many gallant deeds performed by this division
the story of a machine-gun which was kept in action,
although the Germans had entered the rear compart-
ment of the “ pill-box ” from which it was firing, the
gun team holding up the enemy by revolver fire from
the inner compartment. Not many months before
this same division, under the same commander, Sir
H. Jeudwine, had given way before the German
counter-attack at Cambrai, when weary, weak in
numbers, and holding a very extended front. It had
then been subjected to a great deal of ill-founded
criticism, but in this battle it sent a proud answer
to its critics and told them that the simple process
"of judging by results, which has so often been com-
mended, is rarely applicable in war, and that the
popular cry for victims when things are not going
well is wrong in nine cases out of ten.
48What Went Before
At the other end of the break the enemy made
more progress, and despite the stout resistance of the
9th Division on the Messines Ridge, .worked his way
to the north and south of Armentieres, at the same
time deluging the town with gas shell to an extent
which made life in it impossible. It was therefore
abandoned on the 10th, while the next day Merville
fell. The Germans now began a dangerous move-
ment towards Hazebrouck, the central railway junc-
tion of Flanders, and on the 12th it was as near
capture as Amiens had been during the crisis of the
March battle. So serious was the position that
extensive preparations were made for flooding the
approaches to Dunkerque and Calais and for sending
back to England from those ports all personnel not
immediately needed for their working ; while, in order
to shorten his fronts and to get reserves to meet this
new German rush for Calais, Haig, with a sad heart,
ordered a withdrawal from the Flanders ridges, which
had been won at such cost in the previous autumn,
to a line just covering Ypres. But once again British
troops, never so brilliant as in a defensive battle
against great odds, surpassed all expectation. On the
13th the remnants of the 29th and 31st Divisions,
strung out on a very wide front, contested every foot
of ground with bullet and bayonet, and beat off a
succession of fierce attacks from early morning until
late afternoon, so gaining time for the 1st Australian
Division, railed up from the Somme, to detrain at
e	49The Last Four Months
Hazebrouck, come forward and help to save that
town.
The most pressing danger was then averted; but
the Germans, though foiled in their attempt to open a
direct way to Calais and Boulogne, still fought fiercely
to extend their gains. On the 15th the arrival of
reinforcements enabled them to capture Bailleul, and
the strain upon the British army had become all but
insupportable. Two-thirds of the divisions engaged
in the Flanders battle had been through the fiery
trial of the Somme. As fast as they were withdrawn
from the first battle their ranks were refilled with
the drafts from home, which were composed mainly
of boys of nineteen and under, and they were sent
north. It was these splendid youths, many of whom
went into the maelstrom of battle within a few days
of landing in France, with little opportunity of
getting to know their leaders or of accustoming
themselves to strange and terrible conditions, who
saved the Channel ports. But Haig could not go on
indefinitely reconstituting his shattered divisions and
sending them back into battle, and he was very near
the end of his resources. By the middle of April,
however, French troops had come to our aid, and with
their help repeated attacks by the Germans in the
neighbourhood of Kemmel on the 16th and 17th were
repulsed, and thereafter for a time the battle in
Flanders died down.
The interest then shifted to the southern battle-
50What Went Before
field, where on April 24 the Germans made a last
attempt to break through to Amiens, and for a time
were in possession of Villers-Brettonneux. This was
one of the few attacks made by the Germans in which
they used tanks with success, and it was their tanks
which cleared a way into the village for the German
infantry. The situation was highly critical, for
Rawlinson, who had assumed command on the
Amiens front on March 28, was very weak, Haig
having called upon him for every man he could
spare to nourish the battle in Flanders, while if the
Germans had managed to establish themselves a very
short distance to the west of Villers-Brettonneux
they would have been able to look down upon Amiens.
It was no time for hesitation, and a brilliant counter-
attack made on the night of the 24th, before the
Germans had time to establish themselves in their
newly-won positions, saved us in yet another crisis.
In this counter-attack, which was made by troops of
the 4th and 5th Australian Divisions, by a mixed
brigade made up from the 18th and 58th Divisions,
and by part of the 8th Division, which had been
holding the village and its neighbourhood, Villers-
Brettonneux was recaptured and the gate to Amiens
was securely locked.
Two days later the battle broke out again in
Flanders, and on April 25 the enemy, reinforcing his
troops on the Kemmel front with five fresh divisions,
succeeded in breaking in on either side of Kemmel
SiThe Last Four Months
Hill, which was at the time held by the French, and
in cutting off the garrison. This w'as a very serious
blow, for in Kemmel Hill the enemy obtained a
grand observatory, from the top of which he could
overlook all our lines as far north as Ypres and could
watch all the roads and railways leading thither from
as far west as Poperinghe. Therefore a further with-
drawal of our front in the salient became necessary.
In the result, however, the gain of Kemmel proved
to be the enemy’s undoing, for it encouraged him
to make a great attack on April 29, which extended
from near Bailleul to the north of Ypres. The
German infantry came on in massed formation with
bayonets fixed, and were completely repulsed by our
troops and by the French and Belgians on our flanks.
On our front, between Kemmel and Ypres, the
enemy’s repeated and heavy assaults were all beaten
back by the 21st, 49th and 25th Divisions, which,
except at one point to the south of Ypres, yielded
not a yard of ground. This failure was hardly less
important in its effect on the campaign than that
which the Germans had suffered on March 28, and,
as will be seen, these two triumphs of our defence
over the enemy’s attack went far in preparation for
the victories which came later in the year. On
April 30 the battle came to a close with the recapture
of the village of Locre, on the Bailleul-Ypres road,
to the west of Kemmel, by our French Allies.
In rather less than six weeks the Germans had
52What Went Before
flung no fewer than one hundred and forty-one
divisions against the combined British and French
forces. Fifty-five infantry divisions and three cavalry
divisions of Haig’s army had stayed the attacks of
one hundred and nine German divisions. The third
German campaign of conquest in the West had been
defeated by the grit and endurance of the British
soldier, and by the timely appointment of Foch to
the supreme command, but at a terrible cost. Our
casualties amounted to more than 300,000 killed,
wounded and missing—that is, very nearly double
our losses in the eight and a half months of the
Dardanelles campaign, and over 70,000 more than
our losses in the three and a half months of the third
battle of Ypres. In that battle we had captured
24,600 prisoners and 64 guns, and we had gained
possession of the Flanders ridges. At the end of the
battles of March and April we stood “ with our backs
to the wall,” we had lost 70,000 prisoners, 1,000
guns, 4,000 machine-guns, 700 trench mortars, 200
tanks, and an immense quantity of stores.* The
worst result of the strain which had been thrown
upon our army was that eight of our divisions had,
in consequence of our heavy losses and of our lack
of means to replace them promptly, to be reduced to
skeletons, and were for a considerable period unable
* The figures of losses of material are those given by the Ministry of
Munitions, and represent the replacements necessary after the battles.
The actual captures by the Germans were somewhat smaller.
53The Last Four Months
to fight even defensively in the line, while the Portu-
guese contingent had disappeared as a fighting force.
Such was the price which ,we had to pay for our
failure to prepare adequately for a menace which had
long been foreseen. Had the Government taken in
time the measures which it had been urged to take,
the reduction of two cavalry divisions and of more
than one hundred infantry battalions might have been
avoided, and both Gough and Byng might have had
sufficient men to have enabled them to hold their
battle positions against all attacks, while Haig’s
reserve might have been increased by at least two
divisions. Our men had shown coolness, courage,
determination and endurance in adversity which pass
all understanding and are beyond all praise, but they
should never and need never have been called upon
for such sacrifices as they made without stint and
without complaint.
54CHAPTER II
FOCH VERSUS LUDENDORFF
Foch on the Defensive—Breaking the Barrier in the
West—The Rival Methods
Foch made his name before the war as a military
thinker. First as a professor and then as chief of
the French War College, he acquired a European
reputation, and to have been a student under him was
regarded as a special distinction by the officers of the
French staff during the war. While at the War
College he published two books which were regarded
by the military world as the most inspiring and
thoughtful studies of war which had appeared since
Clausewitz produced his great work. It was these
books which caused Lord Roberts to predict, some
ten years before Germany threw down the gauntlet,
that when the great European struggle, for which
he was urging Great Britain to prepare, came, the
world would hear of Foch, who was then unknown
outside professional circles. This reputation of
Foch’s had been built up by writing and by study.
It was the reputation of a theorist, and since war is
a very practical business, even the greatest of theorists
is regarded more or less with suspicion until he has
proved hiniself in practice. There were many in the
S5The Last Four Months
French army before the war who looked upon Foch
as a bookman. It was the way in which he covered
the withdrawal of the French army from Lorraine,
when Joffre’s first offensive failed, and above all his
brilliant blow delivered on September 9, 1914, near
the marshes of St. Gond, in the first battle of the
Marne, which showed the .world that Foch was as
good at practice as at theory.
Great as were these early achievements, I doubt
if anything shows Foch’s mastery of his craft more
clearly than his handling of the situation in the days
which followed his appointment to the supreme com-
mand. The fate of the world hung in the balance,
and there was no time for hesitation or delay. The
new Generalissimo had to form a headquarters
rapidly, and to organise in the midst of a great battle
the machinery necessary for the command of five
million men extended over a front of four hundred
and fifty miles, tasks which, in the circumstances,
would have taxed the capacity of any ordinary man.
Not only did he do this, but he had not been in the
saddle many hours before he made his personality felt.
The success of Ludendorff’s attempt to separate the
British from the French army and to capture the
great railway junction of Amiens depended almost
entirely upon the progress he made before the French
reserves from the south reached the battlefield. The
French staff had worked out the movements of troops
towards Amiens with their usual care and precision,
56Foch versus Ludendorff
A systematic flow of divisions to the point of dangei
had been arranged for, but Foch wanted a flood, not
a flow.
-It has often been objected that the tendency of
war schools is towards pedantry, that their students
are inclined to be too much tied to the methods which
they have learned during their course of study; and
it might have been expected that Foch, who repre-
sented the essence of the teaching of the modern war
colleges, would have been predisposed in favour of
staff routine, but he fairly astounded the experts by
his methods. It is the sign of the master that he
makes system his servant, that he has the technique
of his profession under his control, that he knows
when to put rules aside and when to follow them. In
that first week which followed the fateful meeting
at Doullens of March 26, when he was given supreme
control, Foch tore up all staff time-tables and by any
and every means, orthodox and unorthodox, rushed
troops to the point of danger. They were brought up
by train, by marches, in motor-lorries, in ’buses ; with
or without transport, with or without their proper
complement of supplies and ammunition. The point
was to get to the battlefield men who could fight;
details of organisation could be straightened out after-
wards. So by inspiring those under him with his own
fierce energy, Foch in the first ten days of his tenure
of command brought to the battle nearly twice as
many troops as had been estimated for by the French
57The Last Four Months
staff, and by so doing built up a barrier against which
the waves of German troops beat in vain.
I saw Foch at the beginning of April, when he
had been in control about a week, at his temporary
headquarters in the town hall of Beauvais, and thus
early he was satisfied that he had the situation in
hand. Despite the immense burden and responsi-
bility on his shoulders, he was perfectly confident and
cheerful. He leaned back in his chair smoking his
inevitable cigar and looking at the great map on the
wall opposite on which each day’s progress of the
German offensive was marked in colour; he pointed
out how that progress was steadily diminishing, how
the marks on the map grew closer together, just as
do the circles made by a stone thrown into a pond
before the last ripple disappears. “ I am still fight-
ing,” he said, “ and I have first to stabilise the front
of battle. Ludendorff will probably try again, but he
won’t get through. In a few days more I shall have
his progress permanently blocked.” The day after I
left Beauvais, on April 4, Ludendorff, sure enough,
did make another great effort, but it ended in disaster
for the Germans, and the front was stabilised.
I saw Foch again just a fortnight later, on
April 16, at the height of the second crisis of the
spring of 1918, when the Germans were on the out-
skirts of Hazebrouck, and appeared to be well on
the road to Calais and Boulogne. Foch had then
moved his headquarters to a small chateau behindFoch versus Ludendorff
Amiens, and the organisation of his staff was more
or less complete. Despite this second shock and the
exhaustion of the British army, Foch had not lost
one bit of his confidence. There were many
criticisms in England at this time that he was leaving
our army without support, and that the French
should take a greater share in bearing the burden of
meeting the great German offensive. But Foch
had himself measured accurately both the German
strength and the endurance of the British army, of
which he had ample experience during the first battle
of Ypres, when he helped us to stop the first German
rush to Calais. It is the experience of every com-
mander on the defensive in battle to receive urgent
appeals for reinforcements from his hard-pressed
front. His quality as a general is tested by his ability
to appreciate these appeals at their proper value, to
know when and in what strength to send help from
his precious reserves and when to disregard the appeal
altogether. His chance of winning the battle depends
upon his having reserves to use at the right time and
place, and if they are weakened too soon all hope of
victory is gone.
On Ajpril 16 the situation still looked doubtful
on our front in Flanders; but Foch thought other-
wise. “ The battle in Flanders is practically over,”
he said; “Haig will not need any more troops from
me.” Not even the loss of Kemmel a few days
later ruffled him. He was right, and the battle in
59The Last Four Months
Flanders ended in a complete repulse of the second
German effort to break through.
Foch used to impress upon his students the
supreme importance in war of the will and spirit of
the Commander-in-Chief. The commander, he said,
is the sword of his army. The general who refuses
to admit the possibility of defeat can compel victory ;
a general who thinks he may be beaten is halfway
on the road to defeat. In those dark days of the
spring of 1918 Foch did not fail to put these principles
of his into practice, and it was his courage and resolu-
tion which laid the foundation of victory. He was
nobly supported by Sir Douglas Haig, whose calm,
unruffled temperament enabled him to stand the
appalling strain which began when his right crumbled
on March 21 and continued until June, when the
arrival of British reinforcements from the East and
the steady growth of the American army allowed him
to breathe more freely. But for Foch an even more
severe trial was coming. He believed that the most
dangerous course which Ludendorff could take, and
therefore the most probable one, was to continue the
attempt to separate the British from the French
army, and he accordingly took measures to meet such
an attack by the Germans.
There was at this time much talk of Foch’s
“ army of manoeuvre,” but it never existed, save
in the imagination of those critics who had got hold
of the term from a superficial study of Napoleon’s
60Foch versus Ludendorff
strategy. Foch had all he could do to stop the holes
which Ludendorff was making in the Allied front by
sending divisions to reinforce the armies which were
being pressed back. In order to have fresh divisions
ready for this purpose he had to place in the line
other divisions which had been sorely battered in
battle and filled up with recruits whose training had
been cut short. As soon as the battle in Flanders
was ended Foch arranged with Haig to send down
to the Chemin des Dames, on the Aisne front,
five British divisions, of which four had fought the
Germans both in the March battle on the Somme and
in the April battle in Flanders, and the fifth had been
heavily engaged in the former battle. The Chemin
des Dames ridge was looked upon as a position of
great strength, and Foch did not think it likely that
the Germans would attack it. He therefore withdrew
from it a number of fresh French divisions, which he
placed in reserve ready to meet the attack which he
expected Ludendorff to renew upon Amiens, and
replaced them with tired French and British divisions.
While the Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht had
been endeavouring to force his way to the Channel
ports, the German Crown Prince had been resting his
troops which had taken part in the Somme battle,
and he had a great number of divisions in reserve
down the valley of the Oise. These divisions were
so placed that, while they threatened an attack upon
Amiens, they could be moved just as quickly against
6sThe Last Four Months
the Chemin des Dames. Ludendorff was, in fact,
playing again the game he had played in March, and
on May 27 he surprised the French and British troops
on the Chemin des Dames by much the same methods
as he had used against the British Third and Fifth
Armies. Again the boys, of whom the British
divisions were in great part composed, covered them-
selves with glory on the right of the battle front, and
saved Reims by their tenacity in ten days of battle
which took the place of the rest they had been
promised; but the Allied centre was overwhelmed,
and the German Crown Prince drove straight
through to the Marne, where his further progress
was just checked in time by the arrival at Chateau-
Thierry of American troops. This German drive
brought the enemy within forty miles of Paris, and
was a heavy blow both to Foch and to the French
people. Simultaneously with the Crown Prince’s
attack, “ Big Bertha ” began bombarding Paris, and
a number of air raids were made upon the French
capital, from which an exodus began very similar to
that which had taken place in 1914 before the first
battle of the Marne.
Foch was now in the most trying position in
which a Commander-in-Chief. can be placed in war.
The enemy had deceived him and the capital of his
country was in danger. Soldiers know that the
general who makes no mistakes in war achieves
nothing, and they understand how difficult it is for
63Foch versus Ludendorff
a commander who has been forced to stand on the
defensive to divine what the enemy may do next;
but the statesmen and general public of democratic
countries very rarely appreciate the difficulties and
limitations of defence, and the general who has failed
to foresee and provide for an emergency is usually
looked at askance by them. Therefore, in any
circumstances the position of a Commander-in-Chief
whose troops have been worsted in battle is not
enviable, but his troubles and responsibilities are
increased tenfold when he is in command not only
of troops of his own nation, but of the armies of
Allies. One of the greatest tributes to Foch’s
strength of will and character is that in this time of
trial he kept the confidence of the Allied armies and
of the Allied Governments, and both M. Clemenceau
and Mr. Lloyd George deserve their full share of
credit for the trust which they reposed in him
despite the inauspicious overture to unity of com-
mand. The days were now fast approaching when
this trust was to have its reward.
Ludendorff’s March offensive had led to an appeal
from the British Government to the United States
of America to expedite the dispatch of troops to
France. This appeal met with a prompt and warm
response, and resulted in one of the most remarkable
achievements of the whole war. Just as in the March
crisis Foch had hastened the arrival of the French
reserves, so by one means or another the transport
63The Last Four Months
of men across the Atlantic was increased until from
the month of June onwards 300,000 American
soldiers were brought over each month, a feat of
transportation which is without parallel in the history
of war. This feat, which upset all Ludendorff’s
calculations as to the rate at which American troops
could reach France, was made possible by the spirit
and enthusiasm of the American people, by the
supremacy of the British Navy, and by the self-denial
of the British people, who, in order to save tonnage to
bring American troops to France, willingly accepted
restrictions upon imports into Great Britain which
imposed upon them very real privations.
By the beginning of June these measures had
begun to take effect, and the number of American
divisions in France mounted very rapidly. At the
same time a steady stream of seasoned British troops,
withdrawn from other theatres of war, was pouring
into France, and, owing to the respite which Luden-
dorff allowed the British army while he was forcing his
way toward the Marne, there was time for Sir Douglas
Haig to assimilate and train the drafts sent out from
England. This work of reconstructing the British
army was much helped by the arrival on the British
front of several American divisions, of which some
went into the line and thus enabled British divisions
to be withdrawn for rest and training.
So it came about that though by the middle of
June the Germans were within forty miles of Paris
64Foch versus Ludendorff
and within forty miles of Calais and Boulogne, and
Ludendorff had still strong reserves at his disposal,
yet the danger of a crushing German victory was
daily growing smaller. This was shown by the result
of Ludendorff’s fourth offensive, which took place
in the second week of June, and was intended to
improve the position created by the German Crown
Prince’s surprise at the Chemin des Dames. The
drive to the Marne had left the Germans in possession
of a triangular salient some twenty-six miles deep
and about thirty-three miles wide at the base along
the Aisne, the apex of the triangle being at Chateau-
Thierry. The triangle was somewhat confined for the
assembly of large forces within it, and Ludendorff
wanted more elbow room. Therefore one of the
Crown Prince’s generals, von Hutier, attempted to
widen the base of the triangle to the west of Soissons
by an attack delivered between the Amiens and the
Marne salients. The immediate objective of this
attack was Compiegne, and had von Hutier succeeded
in taking that town he would have linked up the
two salients and have given Ludendorff a much more
convenient front for an attack upon Paris. Foch,
however, was ready, and foiled von Hutier by a
counter-attack which was an earnest of what was to
come later. The Germans did not reach Compiegne,
their position for an attack upon Paris was not
appreciably improved, and they got little return for
very heavy losses.
F
65The Last Four Months
After von Hutier’s attack was brought to a stop
Ludendorff set about preparing for his great effort.
As to the result of this effort the Germans were more
blatantly confident and boastful than they had been
any time since their first victories of August, 1914.
They said that the British army had been exhausted
by its defeats in the spring, and that we had no
men with which to make good our losses. They said
that it was utterly impossible that America should
have in the time created armies fit to fight in battle,
that the Allies were bluffing when they spoke about
the large number of American troops in France.
They said that the Allies had not at their disposal
the shipping to make such movement of troftps
possible. The U-boats had seen to that.* Luden-
dorff informed his Government on the eve of the
battle that victory was certain, a fact not mentioned
by Ludendorff in his “ Reminiscences,” but disclosed
by von Hintze, who was then Secretary for Foreign
Affairs. As to the quality of the American troops,
the German authorities issued this remarkable state-
ment :
“ Demonstrations against the war are the order
of the day in New York. Of the enthusiasm
♦“Russia collapsed. There then arose the possibility ■which, before
the autumn of 1917, no one had contemplated of seeking to bring about,
a decision of the war during 1918, by an attack on land, which would be
certain to succeed if by that time the U-boat campaign had reduced
tonnage to an extent which made the rapid transport of American troops
impossible, or if our submarines were able to hit some of the enemy’s
transports. According to the reports made by the Navy this was to be
expected.’’—Ludendorff, p. 332.
66Foch versus Ludendorff
announced in the Entente reports there is no trace
amongst the Americans who have been called up for
military service. Soldiers on embarkation almost
make a despairing impression, and are kept together
by a police force which has been specially created
for the purpose.’’
This is but one of a large number of official
and semi-official pronouncements distributed to the
German press and amongst the German troops
during the summer of 1918, and this policy of decep-
tion was, I believe, one of the contributory causes
of the suddenness of the collapse when things began
to go wrong. Soldiers and people then discovered
that those in authority over them had either been
lying to them or had been hopelessly wrong in their
judgment, and they lost faith just at the time when
faith was most needed. It is not at present easy to
determine how far these misrepresentations were
deliberate on the part of the German authorities and
how far the responsibility lay with agents who sought
for and sent in information which .would be pleasing
rather than the truth. The German spy system has
always been held up as a model of efficiency, and
the popular belief was that the Germans knew every-
thing which .went on inside our lines or took place
at our most secret councils. It is certainly true that
the German spy system was very elaborate, and that
it gave their authorities good information upon points
of detail, but the test pf any system of intelligence
67The Last Four Months
is the correctness or otherwise of the impression
which it creates in the minds of the generals and
statesmen who use it, and at every great crisis in
this war the German intelligence system created a
wrong impression.
In July, 1914, the Germans believed that Belgium
would be terrorised into submission and that Great
Britain, being fully occupied with Irish and labour
troubles, would not fight. A month later, before
the first battle of the Marne, they held that the
British army had been annihilated and that the moral
of the French troops was broken. The Kaiser had
arranged the details of his entry into Paris, and had
ordered a gala luncheon at the Hotel Majestic, near
the Arc de Triomphe. In the spring of 1917 they
believed that Great Britain was on the verge of
starvation, and that six months of unrestricted
U-boat warfare would bring us to our knees.* They
were so completely out in their understanding of
the psychology of the American people that they
did not understand that an order to the United States
not to send across the Atlantic more than one vessel
a week, which was to be painted in a particular way
and to follow a particular route to a particular British
port, would infallibly arouse and unite all classes in
an irresistible enthusiasm for the war. In September,
1917, Ludendorff, in a review of the position which
* Ludendorff thought this would take a year, but believed it would be
accomplished before America could intervene effectively.—p. 249.
68Foch versus Ludendorff
he submitted to his Government, implied that Great
Britain, France and Italy were on the verge of
exhaustion, and that their internal condition was
more precarious than that of Germany, whose
military position was far the stronger. No account
was taken in this document of the effect of America’s
economic and financial aid to the Entente. In July,
1918, before the second battle of the Marne, the
Germans were equally out in their count, and they
christened beforehand the battle which they were to
fight the “ Friedensturm,v the attack which would
bring peace—of course a German peace. The Kaiser
had a grand stand built for himself on a wooded height
overlooking the Marne, and to this he mounted on
the morning of July 15 to see his troops advance to
victory.
While the Germans were busy with their prepara-
tions for winning the war by one great final blow,
Foch was also at work. He had divined Ludendorff’s
plan, and he was quite certain that the Germans
meant to attack upon both sides of Reims—that is
to say, that the German Crown Prince would renew
his attempts to get to Paris. It happened, however,
that the other Crown Prince, the Bavarian Rup-
precht, had strong reserves in Flanders, and a short
advance there would, as I have already pointed out,
place the German guns within range of the Channel
ports. Foch had been wrong in May, and he might
be wrong again this time. He was himself confident
69The Last Four Months
that he was right, but he had to convince the Allied
statesmen that he was right, for he did not feel
himself strong enough to deal with the German Crown
Prince without drawing upon Haig for troops, and
thus weakening the armies covering the Channel
coast. He first sent southwards the eight French
divisions jvhich had been aiding us in Flanders, and
asked Haig to move four British divisions to the
neighbourhood of Amiens to relieve four more French
divisions. This was a very serious reduction of Haig’s
strength; but Foch was not satisfied, and he asked
that these four British divisions should be handed over
to him for the counter-offensive which he was plan-
ning, and that yet other four British divisions should
take their place about Amiens. Haig being re-
sponsible to his Government for the safety of his
army and the ports, felt that he must obtain their
concurrence in this last step, though he was quite
ready to take the responsibility upon himself of
advising them to concur. It does honour to Foch,
to Mr. Lloyd George, and to Sir Douglas Haig
that in this critical time they all agreed. Both the
British Government and the British Commander-in-
Chief supported Foch, decided to back his judgment,
and to accept the danger of weakening the British
forces in the north, and he was thus enabled to mature
his plans for the defeat of Ludendorff.
Many a general’s plans in war have been upset
because he was compelled by a nervous Government
70Foch versus Ludendorff
to strengthen the defence of some point which they
held to be vital to the national safety. The instances
are few in which a Government has shown itself ready
to shoulder such responsibility as Mr. Lloyd George
undertook on this occasion. Yet with the memory of
what happened in April and May he had every excuse
for hesitation. Fortunately courage and a readiness
to take risks for a great end are characteristics of
the Prime Minister.
Foch’s plans were based on a prolonged study of
the conditions of trench warfare. The war on the
Western front has been repeatedly compared to a
great siege. That comparison is accurate only up to
a certain point. The conditions of trench warfare
were, after due allowance is made for the changes due
to modern improvements in arms, very like those
which prevailed in some of the great sieges of the
past. There was the same deadly monotony of life
in the trenches; there was a return to the weapons
used in the past in the attack and defence of fortresses
—hand grenades, mortars and heavy artillery; there
were the same hardships to be endured, due to the
stationary life in holes dug in the ground, wet, cold
and mud in winter, heat, dust and flies in summer;
there were sallies by defenders and raids by the
attackers, there were struggles for the outworks, and
when the defenders tried to break out or the attackers
to break in they both began by blasting a great breach
in the defences with a concentrated bombardment of
7lThe Last Four Months
heavy artillery and followed this with an assault by
the infantry. There, however, the analogy ends. In
the old days, once the assailants had broken through
the defences into the town which they protected, their
work was, with some rare exceptions, finished, and the
place was at their mercy, but in the great war the worst
of the struggle then began. The defender, who was
not cooped up in a town, but had ample space behind
his lines and plenty of roads and railways at his dis-
posal, was able to keep his reserves far back, where
they could rest undisturbed by the enemy’s artillery,
and to bring them up fresh to the battlefield at a time
when the attacking infantry was becoming wearied,
when it had been thrown more or less into confusion
by the stress of battle, when the difficulty of sending
forward reinforcements and supplies of food and
ammunition was for the assailant at its greatest. The
essential difference between the siege warfare of old
and the warfare as we have seen it during the great
struggle in Franee and Belgium is that in the former
a successful assault normally finished the business and
brought victory; in the latter, the assault was but a
prelude to a battle with the enemy’s reserves.
From November, 1914, when trench lines were
first established between the North Sea and the Swiss
frontier, all the generals on the Western front,
British, French and German, were at work trying to
solve the problem of how to break through. At first
it was believed that this was mainly a question of
72Foch versus Ludendorff
having sufficient guns and sufficient ammunition of
the right kind, of blasting a big enough hole in the
defences. In 1915 Foch, with British help on his left
flank, tried twice to capture the Vimy Ridge, and both
times he failed with very heavy losses. In the same
year Joffre tried, by a great assault delivered in
Champagne, to burst through the German lines, and
he, too, failed. In the first half of 1916 the Germans,
using much the same method of an artillery bombard-
ment, followed by an infantry assault, tried to reach
Verdun and were defeated. In the summer and
autumn of that year Haig fought the first battle of
the Somme, which relieved Verdun and forced the
Germans to retreat into the Hindenburg line, but
ended there, like the other battles, in the deadlock of
trench warfare. In 1917 General Nivelle succeeded
General Joffre in the supreme command of the
French armies, arid though Haig, in the battle of
Arras, carried out the part assigned to him by
Nivelle, and the British army bit deep into the
German lines, capturing the Vimy Ridge, Nivelle’s
great attack on the Aisne front ended in a failure,
jvhich shook the confidence of the French army.
Up to this time it had been argued that the
success won had been sufficient to warrant the hope
that with more and heavier guns, improved methods
of gunnery and larger supplies of shell, the breach
would be wider and deeper and that the assault
must succeed. So the military policy in the Western
73The Last Four Months
theatre of war during 1915 and 1916 continued
to be to increase the power and duration of the
bombardment, and when a battle did not give
the results expected it was always possible, as the
munition factories of the Allies grew in size and num-
bers, to look forward to a still greater bombardment
next time. But in 1917 the Allies suffered from no
lack of equipment, and it was quite evident that lack
of success was no longer due to lack of shell. The
colossal bombardments which heralded these attacks
literally tore off the surface of the ground. The guns
had done their part, the breach was made, but the
story was always the same. The first bound forward
of the attackers was almost invariably successful, and
they easily overcame such of the enemy as remained
alive in the bombarded area, with comparatively little
loss to themselves. Then up came the enemy’s
reserves, and a slow hammer and tongs struggle
developed, in which the attackers slowly gained
ground at a very high price until gradually the attack
lost its momentum and died away from exhaustion.
Clearly the great bombardment was not the key to the
problem, and it was necessary to look for some other
solution.
During the autumn of 1916 and the summer of
1917 the French and British had fought a number of
what in these days would be called small battles with
complete success, the French around Verdun and on
the Aisne front, the British on the Messines Ridge in
74Foch versus Ludendorft
Flanders. In these battles there .was no attempt
made to push the infantry far beyond the limits of the
area which had been thoroughly pounded in the first
bombardment, and in each of these ground was gained
and a considerable number of prisoners and guns cap-
tured very cheaply. This confirmed the experience
gained in the opening phases of most of the great
battles, namely, that it was comparatively easy for the
guns to win the ground within their range and for
the infantry then to advance and occupy it. The
Allies did not possess a sufficient number of guns to
allow them to deliver a rapid succession of these
punches against the different parts of the front, and it
took a long time to shift a mass of artillery from one
part of the line to another, but it was believed that a
series of such blows delivered on the same front would
end in the exhaustion of the German reserves and in
a break through. This was called the attack with
limited objective. The guns were to bombard an area
of ground and the infantry to go forward and over-
come the Germans, dazed and stunned by the
bombardment; then the guns were to be moved for-
ward on to the ground won, and the process was to
be repeated until the infantry were able to break clean
through.
On this principle the third battle of Ypres was
fought by the British army in the late summer and
autumn of 1917. That battle began on July 81, but,
unfortunately, the month of August proved to be
75The Last Four Months
phenomenally wet and Ludendorff had devised a very
successful answer to this form of attack. The mud
of Flanders proved a terrible obstacle. It made the
bringing forward of the guns and the masses of
ammunition needed to feed them a work almost
beyond human power, and the infantry had to endure
indescribable hardship, .with no cover from the
enemy’s fire save such as could be found in water-
logged shell-holes and trenches pounded by our
artillery into a sticky mess. At every step forward
they sank to their knees or over into the gluey slime,
which the soil of Flanders becomes when tom by
shells and saturated with rain. Added to all this, the
Germans neutralised the effect of the bombardment,
upon which the plan of attack depended so largely for
its success, by withdrawing all but a few men from
the ground which would be most heavily shelled by us,
and by meeting our weary infantry as they dragged
themselves forward through the mud with counter-
attacks by fresh troops. So the fight up the ridges
from Ypres to Passchendaele was a long, slow, costly
business, and it came to an end before the problem
of beating the enemy’s reserves had been solved.
Then a new experiment was tried. Tanks had
been first used by the British army in the battle of the
Somme in small numbers. There are a great many
people who believed, and still believe, that this was a
great mistake; they hold that we should have waited
until we had tanks in large numbers and then sprung
76Foch versus Ludendorff
a great surprise on the Germans. But it is an im-
possibility to simulate in practice the conditions of
war, or to be certain how any new device will turn
out until it has been tried in the field against the
enemy. Further, the efficacy of any device to be
used in war does not depend only, or even chiefly,
upon its own perfections or imperfections; it depends
mainly upon how it fits into the military machine.
All the parts of an army, artillery, infantry, cavalry,
tanks, machine-guns and aircraft have to learn to
work together, to know what each can do and what
are the needs of each, and this can only be learned by
long practice together. The first experience of the
tanks, in the autumn of 1916 and spring of 1917, was
disappointing. They were found to be too slow to
keep pace even with the infantry, they broke down
frequently, and there were many kinds of ground
which they could not get over. In the battle of
Messines the infantry found that the artillery had
done all and more than all that was needed, and for
the most part they did not wait for the tanks. In the
third battle of Ypres the mud proved altogether too
much for the new weapon. So for a time many of
our generals and most of the infantry distrusted the
tanks and regarded them as a failure. This did not
damp the enthusiasm of the experts, who worked in-
cessantly at improving the tanks, at devising new
methods of employing them, and at showing the
infantry how to work with them, and in November,
77The Last Four Months
1917, the tanks got their first real chance. Haig
decided to make a surprise attack on the very strong-
est part of the German front, the Hindenburg line
west of Cambrai.
Hitherto, the time and labour required to collect
a great mass of guns and the huge stores of shell for
them had made it almost impossible to surprise the
enemy, for this involved the extension of railway
lines, the laying of tramways, the construction of
roads, and a great increase in the normal traffic
behind the lines. The German aeroplanes and spies
always found out that something was up. Haig pro-
posed to bring up a large number of tanks secretly at
the last possible moment and to use them instead of
guns to make the breach for his infantry. The
Germans had sent most of their reserves up to
Flanders to meet our attacks at Passchendaele, and,
relying on the strength of the Hindenburg line, had
weakened the Cambrai front. The surprise was com-
pletely successful, and the tanks more than justified
themselves by breaking clean through the most
formidable defences which the Germans had been
able to devise and by preparing the way for the
advance of the infantry. Unfortunately, as I have
already mentioned, the disaster to the Italian army
occurred at Caporetto, and Haig had to send five
divisions southward to the help of our Allies, despite
his urgent request to be allowed to keep at least two
to support his attack at Cambrai. None of our five
78Foch versus Ludendorff
divisions fired a shot before the enemy were checked
on the Piave, and we were furnished with a classical
example of the advantages to a skilful enemy of
interior lines of communication. This reduction in
his strength so weakened Haig that he was unable to
follow up his success, and when the German reserves
arrived they won back a good part of the ground we
had gained.
This, then, was the position at the beginning of
1918, when Ludendorff was bringing his troops across
from Russia and preparing for his great offensive.
The attempt to break through by means of a great
bombardment followed by an infantry assault had
failed, so had the attempt to break through by means
of a series of bombardments and assaults upon one
part of the front; the attack with limited objective,
the short, sharp punch in which the infantry moved
forward and occupied the ground won in a single
bombardment had proved a success, but the results
gained by this method of attack had made little
impression upon the whole long front; the use of
tanks in numbers, in replacement of the prolonged
bombardment, held out promise for the future.
Ludendorff was deeply impressed by our surprise
attack at Cambrai, and believed he could break
through if he brought off a surprise. He had very
few; tanks and no prospects of getting a large
number, for the German munition factories could
not at this period of the war find the necessary
79The Last Four Months
material; they had, in fact, more than they could do
to keep the armies supplied with motor transport.
In 1918 the Germans had barely a score of tanks
of their own manufacture, and these were of a type
little, if at all, superior to our tanks of 1916. They
had added to these by repairing some of the tanks
which they had captured from us, but at no time
did they possess any large number. It does not
appear that Ludendorff was particularly impressed
with the value of tanks before the events of the
summer of 1918 taught him wisdom in this respect.
He had, during the autumn of 1917, prepared an able
memorandum on our methods in attack, in which he
adverted on the dependence of our infantry upon
what he termed material, its failures to seize oppor-
tunities when they presented themselves, and the
delay caused by continually relieving infantry in
the front line. Much that he said was very
true, particularly as regards our reliance upon
bombardment as a means of gaining ground, but
when he included tanks in his condemnation of
“ material ” he forgot that he was writing of a
new weapon capable of improvement. The develop-
ment of aircraft during the course of the war
should have taught him caution. It was not the
tanks of Cambrai which made him think, but the
effect produced by surprise. We lost a great number
of tanks in that battle, because we had not yet learned
how to use them, and did not appreciate their depend-
8oFoch versus Ludendorff
/
ence upon the support of artillery, and Ludendorff,
thinking of the success of the German counter-attack
at Cambrai and of the derelict tanks lying Lwithin his
lines, classed that battle as a “battle of material.”
So he did not press his War Office to find means to
provide him with tanks, and he set about getting his
surprise by other methods. I have already described
those methods and the measure of success which they
achieved. He certainly, in his attacks in the first half
of 1918, gained more ground, took more prisoners
and guns and inflicted heavier losses than any other
general had succeeded in doing on the Western front.
He was very nearly successful in his first drive for
Amiens in March. He failed, as all other generals
had failed, because his progress was stopped by the
defender’s reserves. Just at the time when the Ger-
man troops were wearied, when it was becoming im-
possible to sustain the momentum of the attack by
sending forward fresh troops and supplies from the
rear, Foch brought the French troops from the south
upon the scene.
Then Ludendorff made the mistake of trying for
just a little more. His first effort had worn itself
out by March 29, with the failure of the great attack
upon the Arras front, but six days later, on April 4,
after an interval not long enough for the systematic
preparation of a fresh battle, but long enough for the
Allies to strengthen their forces and improve their
defences, he made another attempt to break through
g	8iThe Last Four Months
which was shattered and only served to deplete his
strength. He repeated this mistake in Flanders at
the end of April, when he thought he had found
another soft spot. At this time it was a question
whether he would be able to keep forces enough in
hand for a last smashing blow before the arrival of
American troops finally turned the scale in favour of
the Allies, and he fell into the same error as every
other German general on the Western front, the error
of underrating his enemy and believing that the next
blow must be the smashing blow. When his first
attack in Flanders had been checked he tried again on
April 29 and suffered a severe defeat. The effect of
his failures of March 28, April 5, and April 29 was
that he required time to make good his losses, rest
his troops, train them and replenish his stores of
munitions. When the Crown Prince’s attacks in
May and June were stopped by the action of the
American troops at Chateau-Thierry and by Foch’s
counter-attacks, Ludendorff needed a full month to
prepare for his last effort, and during that month
the Allied reserves, far from being used up, were
growing daily stronger. The German had failed to
solve the problem. The reserves stood between him
and victory.
A short time before the Germans started their
last offensive battle of the war a meeting of the
Supreme War Council took place at Versailles. The
Allied statesmen were naturally very anxious about
82Foch versus Ludendorff
the situation. The Germans were still within forty
miles of Paris and within the same distance of the
Channel ports, and they had sprung three great sur-
prises upon us in two months. The British generals
had not thought it possible that the Germans would
get almost to the outskirts of Amiens, would cap-
ture Kemmel Hill and menace Hazebrouck; Foch
had not foreseen that the German Crown Prince
would reach the Marne. It was true that the balance
of strength had been steadily shifting in our favour.
The British army had made a marvellous recovery
from its reverses in the spring, and with the arrival
of seasoned troops from Palestine, who had not suf-
fered the heavy losses endured by all our troops on the
Western front and, therefore, had a far higher pro-
portion of men in the prime of life, and of experienced
officers and non-commissioned officers, was in as good
shape as ever. Haig’s strength, which had fallen to
forty-nine effective divisions in May, had risen in July
to fifty-three divisions, and, thanks to the develop-
ment of our munition factories, not only had our
heavy losses in guns and war material been promptly
replaced, but we were stronger in artillery, machine-
guns, tanks and aeroplanes than we had been in March.
When Pershing heard at the end of March that
the conference of Doullens had appointed Foch to the
supreme command he had four combatant divisions
to offer the new Generalissimo, but of these only one,
the 1st American Division, was considered sufficiently
83The Last Four Months
trained to take its place in the line. Early in July
there were twenty-five American divisions in France,
and twelve of them had completed their training and
were ready to take part in battle; such had been the
effect of the speeding up of the transport of American
troops across the Atlantic.
While the forces under Foch’s control had been
growing, Ludendorff’s had begun to dwindle. The
Germans had reached their greatest strength early in
May, when they had two hundred and seven divisions
on the Western front, but they had not found it
possible to replace at once all the losses incurred in the
battles of May and June. Altogether the position
was much more favourable than it had been six weeks
before, yet the fighting strength of the Germans was
still greater than that of the Allies. On the eve of
the second battle of the Marne they had a
superiority of over a quarter of a million rifles;
in guns they were about equal to the Allied
artillery; it was only in machine-guns, tanks
and aircraft that they were inferior. With the
flow of American troops to France assured, Foch
was certain of having an ample reserve in due time,
and Ludendorff had no means of increasing his; but
at the moment the number of American troops
trained to take part in battle was not sufficient to give
the Allies a definite numerical superiority at the front.
So the statesmen were still anxious, feeling that they
could not afford a fourth surprise by the Germans.
84Foch versus Ludendorff
Foch was always and rightly reticent as to his
plans. He would not do more than express his con-
fidence in general terms. The essential difference
between his mind and the minds of the German
generals was that he regarded war as an art, not as
a science. “ There is nothing absolute in war,” is
one of his favourite axioms. He believed it to be
beyond the power of the human mind to foresee all
the factors that would influence the actions of the
opposing general, all the changes and chances on the
front which would influence the actions of opposing
troops and often decide the issue of battles. There-
fore he acted on certain broad principles which, he
was persuaded, governed the application of his art,
just as there are principles which govern the arts of
painting, music and architecture; but he could no
more tell beforehand what form each of his strokes
would take than a painter can tell you beforehand
with what stroke of his brush he will get his effects.
The artist’s strokes depend upon the inspiration and
the circumstances of the moment, but they are not
haphazard strokes. They are all made in accordance
with the principles of art and on a general plan. The
Germans, on the other hand, believed more in the
plan than in the inspiration. They were very good
planners. Von Moltke’s first plan for the invasion of
France was excellent; so, in its details, was Luden-
dorff’s plan for his offensive in March, 1918. Both
failed in the execution of their plans because they
8sThe Last Four Months
allowed scientific planning to take precedence of the
principles of the art. So Foch did not tell the Allied
statesmen assembled at Versailles, in these trying days
when the Germans were engaged in tuning up their
war machines for their last great blow, very much of
his plans. One of them asked him point blank:
“ But, General, if the Germans do make their great
attack, what is your plan? ” and Foch answered by
striking out three rapid blows, with his right, with
his left and again with his right, following these by
launching out a vigorous kick. There was the
principle of the art dramatically described.
Foch had been thinking deeply over the prob-
lems of the war which I have described in the first
part of this chapter—how to break through, how to
defeat the enemy’s reserves, how to apply the old
principles of war to the new conditions of trench war-
fare, which made a war of movement and manoeuvre
as it had been conceived in the past impossible. He
had had his bitter experiences like other generals.
His attacks on the Vimy Ridge had failed, and he
had acquired a reputation in certain quarters of being
reckless, regardless of the lives of his men. States-
men, anxiously watching the appalling casualty lists
and the dwindling man-power of the nation, were
suspicious of a general with such a reputation. It is
not generally known that for a time Foch was under
a cloud. After a nasty motor accident which befell
him in the summer of 1916, he was given the duty of
86Foch versus Ludendorff
studying the possibility of a German invasion through
Switzerland, a job which, for a time, practically put
him on the shelf, and after he had finished that he
was literally placed on the shelf for a few weeks, early
in 1917, when he was actually put on half pay. From
this he was recalled, largely, I believe, through the
influence of M. Clemenceau, who had not then be-
come Prime Minister of France, to be Chief of Staff
in Paris. While in Paris he had time for thinking.
The main facts before him were the failure of the
great assault upon one part of the front, the terrible
cost in life of the slow hammer and tongs struggle in
which it always ended, and the success of the limited
punches. Therefore, as a principle, he determined
not to be drawn into a protracted struggle, not to
attempt the great break through until the enemy’s
reserves were exhausted, and he proposed to exhaust
these reserves by a series of limited punches. Hence
the three short, sharp blows, followed by the big kick.
Not that he had in July, 1918, worked out in detail
the great plan by which the war was won. He could
not have told the statesmen in Versailles whether he
would be ready for the big kick in the autumn of 1918
or whether he would have to wait for it until the
following year. He has said himself that all that he
had in his mind when he delivered his first punch on
July 18 in the second battle of the Marne was to
relieve Paris and that the purpose of the second
punch, made by Haig on August 8, was to relieve
87The Last Four Months
Amiens. It was only when the succession of vic-
tories won by the British army between August 8 and
September 9 began to produce the effect at which
Foch was aiming, the exhaustion of the German
reserves, an effect made certain by Pershing’s victory
of September 12 at St. Mihiel, that he decided on the
great battle which began on September 26 and
decided the result of the war.
All other generals on the Western front had tried
the big kick too soon; most of them had begun with
it and had not thought it necessary or possible to
prepare for the maximum effort of which they were
capable by preliminary fighting. In distant Mesopo-
tamia Maude at the end of 1916 had, by a carefully
planned series of limited attacks, worn down the
resistance of the Turks and had then forced his way
across the Tigris and routed their army; but those
operations were, as. compared with the vast front in
France, on a small scale, and the enemy was very
inferior in skill and equipment to the Germans, so the
application of Maude’s methods to the problems of the
Western front did not leap to the eye. In 1917 Haig
was, as I have said, near reaching the solution at
Cambrai, but the Caporetto disaster supervened, and
Cambrai became a secondary enterprise instead of the
climax of a great campaign. In the spring of 1918
Ludendorff had, as I have pointed out, made a great
advance in battle tactics, but he committed the mis-
take of aiming from the first at a break-through,
88Foch versus Ludendorff
and he allowed himself in each battle to be drawn
too far by his early success, so that he was too late and
too weak when he was ready for the Friedensturm.
Foch had always taught before the war that the
decisive act of the battle in the war of manoeuvre
must be prepared systematically by a number of pre-
liminary combats, and that the opening for the knock-
out blow had to be created. That was a military
doctrine which was universally accepted. He dis-
covered how to apply to the new conditions of trench
warfare these old principles of war, and therein lies
his title to greatness. Fortune favours the brave and
the thoughtful, and Foch was fortunate in that the
fierce struggles which had preceded the turn in the
tide of war had been very far from fruitless. The
great offensive campaigns of the Allies and their
resolute courage in defence had sapped the military
strength of Germany, and in July, 1918, the cream
of her army had perished. Foch had to put the finish-
ing touches to a process which had been long at work.
The advent of the American armies gave him the
men, the vast output of the Allied munition factories
the material, in particular the great improvements
which had been made in the tanks since their first
appearance in battle and the quantities of them avail-
able gave him just the means he needed for carrying
through his scheme. Cambrai had proved that tanks
could replace the long bombardment and obviate all
the slow preparation which it involved.
89The Last Four Months
Even Cambrai had not, however, established that
confidence between the infantry and the tanks which
was essential to success, nor had the co-operation be-
tween tanks and artillery been completely worked out.
Cambrai had shown that tanks are particularly vul-
nerable to artillery fire, and the Germans were known
to have placed a number of guns in forward positions
along their front for the special purpose of dealing
with our tanks. At Cambrai one resolute German
artillery officer, working his gun to the last from
behind a park wall, had knocked out a number of our
tanks as they came in view, much as a sportsman
bowls over rabbits bolting from ferrets in a warren.
Early in July a comparatively small operation carried
out by Rawlinson’s Fourth Army settled all these
problems. Haig was even then planning a battle to
free Amiens, but the clearing of the Villers-Bretton-
neux plateau and the capture of Hamel was a neces-
sary preliminary to the larger adventure. Rawlinson
entrusted this task to the Australian Corps, who were
given sixty of the newest type of tanks to help them.
The choice was happy, for the Australians had had an
unfortunate experience with tanks at Bullecourt in
1917 and were distrustful of them. The work of
infantry and tanks in combination was carefully prac-
tised beforehand, and on July 4, when the attack took
place, it was carried through “according to plan.”
The tanks, working behind a powerful artillery bar-
rage, which protected them from the enemy’s guns,Foch versus Ludendorff
overcame the German machine-guns and drove their
infantry into their dug-outs, where they fell an easy
prey to our infantry. Thereafter, the Australians
could not speak too highly of the tanks, and mutual
confidence was established.
This little engagement, which ended in the cap-
ture of all our objectives and of one thousand five
hundred prisoners, was also noteworthy for the fact
that four companies of the 33rd American Division
took part in it. These men had been training in the
line with the Australians and had eagerly prepared to
join in the fight when at the last moment orders came
up that they were not to participate, as their training
for battle was not completed. Nevertheless, they
went over the top with the Australians, who are
reported to have said of them that the Americans were
good lads but too rough!
With this fortunate experiment faith in the tanks
spread. The commanders already believed in them,
and now that belief in their power to “ make good ”
spread to the ranks. Nor was this the only good
which the action of Hamel brought us. Our reverses
in the spring had naturally affected the moral of the
army. The men had never wavered in their deter-
mination to hold on, to “ stick it out,” but their
confidence in their superiority over the enemy and in
their power to drive him back had been shaken when
they saw him gaining more ground and making larger
captures than either we or the French had ever suc-
91The Last Four Months
ceeded in doing. It was as essential to restore that
confidence before we could hope to attack successfully
on a great scale as it was to establish confidence be-
tween tanks and infantry. Rawlinson, in a series of
minor operations, of which Hamel was the latest and
the most successful, shook the enemy’s confidence
and built up that of his own men, and the brilliant
work of the tanks added the last touch, so that when
the crisis came both men and material were ready.
Tanks made surprise, that greatest weapon of general-
ship, much easier than it had been, they saved life and
economised troops, and, therefore, that quick succes-
sion of punches for which Foch was seeking his
opportunity became possible. The artist had his
materials to hand. Honour to him that he knew how
to use them.
92CHAPTER III
THE PREPARATION FOR ARMAGEDDON
The Second Battle of the Marne—Haig’s Offensive—The
Americans at St. Mihiel
Ludendorff’s Friedensturm was to be developed
from the salient with its head at Chateau-Thierry on
the Marne, which the German Crown Prince had
made in his May attack. The Germans had spent
the time since that attack was stopped in training
their men for just such another assault, and proposed
again to pour in a mass of troops wherever they could
make a hole in the Allied defences. But railways
are necessary to keep a mass of troops supplied with
their needs in battle, and it happened that the only
railways which could be used to supply the German
troops in the Chateau-Thierry salient passed through
the town of Soissons, which lay in the north-west
corner of the salient not far from the German front
line. For his advance upon Paris Ludendorff wanted
railways on the eastern side of the salient as well.
Therefore, the first part of his plan involved the cap-
ture of Reims, so that he might repair and use the
railways running through that city. He intended to
capture Reims by a big attack delivered on the
Champagne front to the east of the town, combined
93The Last Four Months
with another attack to the south-west of Reims.
These attacks were designed to unite on the river
Marne near Epernay and thus cut off Reims and all
the troops defending it. Simultaneously, a third
attack was to be made southwards across the Marne
between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans. When
these attacks had all developed satisfactorily the Ger-
man troops on the western face of the salient between
Soissons and Chateau-Thierry were to come in and
co-operate in the advance upon Paris, and for this
purpose their troops were, at the beginning of July,
reorganised under a general and staff recently brought
across from the Russian front. This was a big
scheme, but there is evidence that it was intended to
be still bigger and that Ludendorff proposed, when
his movement against Paris astride the Marne was in
full swing, to develop yet another attack upon Paris
from the north by issuing from the Amiens salient
Lwhich he had created in March, and that farther north
still Rupprecht .was preparing for an advance ini
Flanders.
Probably owing to the carelessness engendered by
over-confidence the Germans took fewer pains to con-
ceal their intentions before this battle than they had
done earlier in the year, and Foch was ready for
Ludendorff’s first moves, which opened on July 15.*
The great attack to the east of Reims fell upon
♦Ludendorff says that before the battle the coming attack near
Reims was talked of throughout Germany.—p. 535.'The Preparation for Armageddon
the army of General Gouraud, who adopted and
improved upon the same defensive tactics as jve had
intended to use against the Germans in the
March battles, but had been prevented by the
fog from applying successfully with the single excep-
tion of the battle on the Arras front on March 28.
Gouraud, applying these tactics with better fortune
and great skill, foiled the enemy’s plans. He had
the good luck to capture a party of Germans on the
eve of the attack, and from these prisoners he ascer-
tained the exact time at which the bombardment
would open and the enemy’s infantry advance. He
left in his front trenches only a few troops to watch
for and break up the German assault, and withdrew
his main line of resistance behind the area swept
by the full storm of the hostile bombardment,
.while his own guns, which had been reinforced,
poured a tornado of shell upon the German infantry
as it moved forward, with the result that it was a
disordered mass of field-greys which flung itself
against the French battle positions, and except at two
points on either flank of the attack these withstood the
shock. The small breaches which the Germans suc-
ceeded in making were quickly closed, and the attack
ended for them in a disastrous defeat.
This brilliant defence by Gouraud, in the centre
of whose army stood part of the 42nd American
Division, laid the foundation for our subsequent vic-
tories and of itself was sufficient to cause the failure
95The Last Four Months
of Ludendorff’s plan, for one arm of the pincers with
which he had intended to nip out Reims had failed to
act, and twenty-five picked German divisions
specially rested and trained for the enterprise had
been shattered. Throughout the three and a half
years of trench .warfare on the Western front no
attack made on such a scale had met with so little
success in its opening phase. It had come to be
regarded as inevitable that the defender should lose
ground, prisoners and guns. Gouraud lost very little
more ground than that which he had deliberately
abandoned to the enemy, few prisoners and no guns.
While these events were taking place to the east
of Reims the Germans, in their remaining two
attacks south-west of the city and across the Marne
between Chateau-Thierry and Dormans, did make
some progress, and before Foch struck back he wished
to see that front steadied. It was steadied mainly by
the firm courage of the American troops who formed
part of General Degoutte’s army, and particularly of
the 3rd and 28th American Divisions, which held the'
sector east of Chateau-Thierry, and by the stout
resistance of Berthelot’s army on the heights south
of Reims. On the 17th it looked to be possible for
a time that the Germans would force their way up
the Marne valley to Epernay, but the gap which,
they had made ,was not wide enough, and they were
in the position of a man who has got his head through
a fence but finds the hole too small for his body.The Preparation for Armageddon
Then, on the fourth day of the battle, July
18, Foch sprang the first surprise, for ,which he
had been quietly preparing, upon the Germans.
While the enemy were still trying to make pro-
gress from the southern and eastern faces of
the Marne salient, General Mangin attacked the
;western face between Soissons and Chateau-Thierry.
It required great courage and determination to make
that attack as it was made. The Germans had still
a superiority of more than 250,000 infantry on the
Western front, and Foch, as well as Mr. Lloyd
George and Sir Douglas Haig, had to take risks.
When the first plans for that counter-stroke were
made by the French generals on the spot they con-
sidered that the most which they could do was to
attack on a front of some twelve miles. Foch came
down and insisted that the front of attack should be
more than doubled. “ We haven’t the men! ” said
the French generals. “ I know that,” replied Foch;
“ still you must attack the whole of the German
flank.” The spirit which turned the first battle of
the Marne into a decisive victory for the Allies was
to win in the second battle of the Marne another
triumph.
The popular faith in Foch’s army of manoeuvre
led to the belief that the Generalissimo had brought
up large reinforcements of fresh troops at the
right moment and had overwhelmed the Germans
with superior numbers. This jvas very far from
h	97The Last Four Months
being the case, and Foch had, in fact, at his
disposal few troops who could by any stretch
of imagination be called fresh. The French divisions
were tired by the long defensive struggle which
followed on the Crown Prince’s May attack.
The 1st American Division was on its way to
a well-deserved rest after a long spell in the line
on the Montdidier front, the 2nd American Division
had only been relieved in the first week of July after
its bitter struggle in Belleu Wood. Of all the Allied
troops on the western side of the German salient only
the 26th American Division, which had taken the
place of the 2nd north of the Marne, was unwearied by
its previous efforts. But Pershing was as convinced as
was Foch himself of the importance of a counter-
attack against the German flank and insisted that his
1st and 2nd Divisions could and would fight, and they
were brought up to strengthen Mangin’s battle.
The 1st American Division only reached its
positions on the evening of the 17th, while part of
the infantry of the 2nd Division did not come up
until the attack was actually in progress. The
late arrival of this reinforcement helped to keep
the Germans in the dark as to what was afoot,
and Mangin was able to use the great forests of
Villers-Cotterets, which lay behind his post, to screen
his preparations. His method was adapted from
those employed by Haig at Cambrai in the previous
November. He opened with a very short but intense
98The Preparation for Armageddon
bombardment which lasted just long enough to drive
the Germans to their dug-outs and to cut their tele-
phone communication. Then a mass of tanks fol-
lowed the barrage through the German defences, to
be followed in turn by a rush of French and American
infantry. The Germans were taken completely by
surprise.* They had been thinking only of their ad-
vance to Paris, and had neglected their trenches, with
the result that there were none of the formidable rear
lines of defence which they had been wont to throw
up rapidly and skilfully with the aid of the forced
labour of the French peasants and of prisoners of
war.t Mangin’s chief object was to get to a position
from which he could prevent the Germans from using
the railways passing through Soissons. His main
effort had been made between the Aisne and the
Ourcq, the front of battle being extended south of that
river by a French division and the 26th American
Division. By the evening of July 19 Mangin’s guns
dominated both the railway junction and also the
main road connecting Soissons and Chateau-Thierry.
Ludendorff had failed to get Reims, and now had
lost the use of the one artery of supply which enabled
him to maintain the great mass of troops he had
crowded into the Marne salient. His troops across
* Ludendorff mentions that two deserters came over to the Germans
on the 11th and said that a great tank attack was in preparation in the.
Villers-Cotteret forest. As the days passed and nothing happened, the
Germans appear to have believed that this was a false alarm (p. 534).
t Ludendorff makes the influenza epidemic largely responsible for this
neglect. Ibid.
99The Last Four Months
the river, struggling hard to maintain what they had
won, were at once in difficulties, and there was
nothing left but to withdraw them. That withdrawal
.was not easy, for a Franco-American counter-attack
had given the Allies possession of heights on the south
bank of the river from which many of the bridges
.thrown by the Germans could be shelled, while the
enemy’s infantry was continually harassed by attacks
from the air.
Now, as I have explained, the principle upon
which Foch had determined to act was to deliver a
series of punches, each with a definite but limited
object. His idea was to press the enemy so long as
he gave way before the punch, but to avoid a slow,
protracted struggle when the German resistance
began to harden. So Mangin, having achieved his
purpose of taking the railways through Soissons,
stopped, rested and relieved his troops, and it fell to
Degoutte to attack next in a north-easterly direction
from the Chateau-Thierry front against the Germans
yielding on the Marne. The fresh vigour of the
Americans—28th, 3rd and 26th Divisions, with the
4th and 32nd in support—swept the enemy back from
the Marne to the Ourcq, behind which river they
attempted to stand between Oulchy-le-Chateau and
Fere-en-Tardenois. Simultaneously, two of the four
British divisions sent down from the north by Haig,
the 51st and 62nd, reinforced the French and Italian
forces on the eastern side of the salient, and there, too,
iooThe Preparation for Armageddon
but more slowly, the Germans were compelled to give
ground. Meantime, the two remaining British
divisions, the 15th and the 34th,* joined Mangin,
who, on July 23, was ready for another blow. This
was delivered between the Ourcq and Soissons, and
threatened the flank of the Germans opposed to
Degoutte on the Ourcq. Degoutte’s army had been
reinforced by the transfer to it of the 42nd Ameri-
can Division from Gouraud, which relieved the 26th,
and by the appearance in the front line of the 32nd
American Division, which relieved the 3rd, and
under this combined pressure from the west and the
south the German defence between the Ourcq and
the Aisne gradually broke down.
On July 26 the 15th Scottish Division captured
Buzancy, east of the main Soissons-Chateau-Thierry
road, and Degoutte was able to enter Fere-en-
Tardenois. Then followed two days of fierce German
counter-attacks delivered by reinforcements sent
southwards by Rupprecht. These attacks were a
last attempt by the Germans to hold the north side
of the Ourcq valley, and they were broken by the
32nd and 42nd American Divisions. On July 31
the last crisis of the battle was over and the whole
valley of the Ourcq had been won by Degoutte.
Ludendorff now found that he was left with no
* The 51st was the Highland Territorial division, the 62nd the West
Yorkshire Territorials, the 15th a Scottish division of the “second
hundred thousand,” the 34th had beeD reformed of battalions from
Palestine.
IOIThe Last Four Months
leisure to restore his lines of supply, that the salient
was daily getting narrower, and that congestion and
confusion within it left him no alternative but to come
out of it altogether. Accordingly, he retreated behind
the Vesle and Aisne, pressed on all sides by the Allied
forces, which had been strengthened by the 77th
American Division. The Germans got across the
rivers in the first days of August. Paris was relieved
of the menace which had hung over her for six weeks,
and a second time the Marne had proved fatal to
German hopes. It is one of the remarkable coin-
cidences of the war that twice, confident of victory,
the Germans should have crossed the Marne, neglect-
ing to protect their right flank, and that twice a blow
against that neglected flank should have brought their
offensives to ruin. It is little less remarkable that in
the first battle of the Marne the first five divisions of
the British army, crossing the river near Chateau-
Thierry, in their first offensive campaign after the
retreat from Mons, should have advanced north-
eastwards through Oulchy-le-Chateau and Fere-en-
Tardenois to the Vesle and the Aisne, and that the
first American divisions to take part in an offensive
battle should have traversed exactly the same ground.
The Germans behind the Vesle and the Aisne
were posted in strong positions; by withdrawing from
the salient they had extricated themselves from the
difficulties in which Mangin’s blow at Soissons had
placed them and were ready to put up a strong resist-
102The Preparation for Armageddon
ance. Foch thereupon tossed the ball to Sir Douglas
Haig, who, on August 8, attacked the enemy
on the Amiens front. In the battle of Amiens
the 3rd British Corps, with which was a regiment of
the 33rd American Division, the Australian and the
Canadian Corps, belonging to the Fourth British
Army under Sir Henry Rawlinson, attacked the
western face of the great salient, which the Germans
had driven into our front in March, on a front of
about eleven miles, while the First French Army,
commanded by General Debeney and placed by Foch
under Haig’s orders, prolonged the front of battle
by about four miles to the south.
The plan of attack, like Mangin’s, was based
on the experience gained at Hamel and on what
we had learned from Ludendorff’s methods in
the battle of March 21. I have described how,
on that day, the Germans opened a sudden
and intense bombardment from a mass of guns
brought up secretly at the last moment, and
how they profited from the heavy fog which
enveloped the battlefield. In the early years of the
war fog or bad weather of any kind had been regarded
as a fatal obstacle to successful attack, because it
blinded the gunners and prevented them from creat-
ing the breach for the infantry assault. Time and
again in the early days of trench warfare, when the
Germans were firing five shells to our one, a day of
fog had been hailed by our infantry with joy as a day
103The Last Four Months
of rest and of relief from shell-fire. Time and again
attacks planned by us and by our French Allies were
postponed because the weather conditions made it
difficult, or even impossible, for the artillery to ascer-
tain by preliminary trial the exact adjustment of their
guns needed for the bombardment of the targets
allotted to them. This process of registration of
targets had been regarded as an indispensable pre-
liminary of battle, and when a great mass of guns
was to be employed it was a slow and elaborate
business. Time and again it had given us warning of
the enemy’s intention to attack and had warned the
enemy that we were preparing to attack him; it was
one of the factors which had made it all but impossible
to achieve surprise. But by 1918 the development of
scientific gunnery had made it possible to ascertain
for the gunners beforehand the exact adjustment
required to enable them to reach any given target
under any reasonable conditions of weather. So the
slow process of registration became unnecessary. It
was possible to open a great bombardment without
previously alarming the enemy, and, best of all, the
attackers became far more independent of the weather
than they had ever been. Fog became an aid instead
of an impediment to attack, because, under its protec-
tion, guns, tanks and infantry could be massed unseen.
So for this battle of August 8 two thousand
guns were collected on Rawlinson’s front of attack,
many of them being brought into action at the last
104The Preparation for Armageddon
moment, and hardly any had opened fire from their
new positions before they all crashed out together.
A friendly mist covered the final assembly of the
assaulting troops and of the tanks, and these burst
through the enemy’s lines almost simultaneously with
the opening of the bombardment which rolled on
ahead of them in the form of a crushing barrage. In
no battle of the war was the power of the tank better
displayed. The tank of the summer of 1918 was, in
speed, ability to overcome obstacles and turn quickly
in any direction, a vastly improved machine from that
of the Somme battle of 1916. About two hundred
of these were employed in the first line, with as many
more in support, and they not only during the
battle drove avenues for the advance of the in-
fantry through the German defences, overcame their
nests of machine-guns and spread demoralisation in
the German ranks, but, by thus relieving the artillery
of many of the complicated tasks which had formerly
fallen to them in helping the infantry forward, they
also helped the process of simplifying and speeding
up the .preparations for battle.
Haig’s first orders to Rawlinson to prepare for
battle went out on July 13, a little over three weeks
before the attack, while the preliminaries for the great
attacks, which in former years had begun with days
of shelling, had taken months. It had in these cir-
cumstances been impossible to keep secret from the
army what was intended. Talk of the “ next push ”
io5The Last Four Months
went on in every mess, and as .sick, wounded and men
on leave came home items of information were pieced
together. So London usually had beforehand a very
fair idea of what was afoot, and we may be reasonably
certain that what ,was known in England was also
known at the enemy’s headquarters. But the speed
with which the battle of Amiens was prepared made
it much easier to preserve secrecy, and the army had
very little notion of what Haig and Rawlinson were
planning. The men of the Canadian Corps who were
brought down from Arras at the last moment had no
idea where they were going. Their hospitals had
been sent north into Flanders, and the most circum-
stantial reports were in circulation that the Canadians
were going to join Plumer for a great attack on the
Ypres front. Canadian battalions were put into the
line on the Kemmel front, where they were identified
by the enemy. Even King Albert was deceived, and
inquired indignantly why he had not been told of this
offensive which was about to take place on his right.
There were no rumours to attract the enemy’s atten-
tion towards Amiens and many to draw it elsewhere.
The result was that Rawlinson sprang an even
more complete surprise upon the enemy than had
Byng at Cambrai. The tanks, lumbering forward
through the mist, were through the German defences
and amongst the troops in the fields and billets
behind before they were aware that any attack had
taken place. The headquarters of divisions, and
106The Preparation for Armageddon
even in one case of a corps, were surprised, and the
tanks did invaluable service in cutting the German
telegraph and telephone communications. One of
our whippets, on the first morning, got through to a
depth of more than six miles behind the front and,
though quite alone, succeeded in causing rare havoc
to the German wires before it was surrounded and its
occupants were forced to surrender. The cavalry,
following hard after the tanks, made many captures
and completed • the demoralisation of the enemy.
Owing to the disorganisation of their means of com-
munication and the difficulty which the German
generals had in ascertaining what was happening and
in sending out their orders, control for a time broke
down, and this, in conjunction with the alarm spread
by our tanks, seriously affected the moral of the
German troops. Ludendorff says that “ August 8
was the black day in the history of the German
army,” and Colonel Bauer, the head of Ludendorff’s
artillery section at headquarters, in his account of
the negotiations between his chief and the German
Government, speaks of “ the events of the inglorious
eighth of August.” The work begun at Hamel was
completed, and the moral ascendancy established by
tanks, artillery and infantry working in combination
affected both private and general in the German
army. By August 10 the Australians and Canadians
had, with the help of the Cavalry Corps, broken
through the German lines to a depth of twelve miles.
107The Last Four Months
North of the Somme the 3rd Corps had had a
harder struggle, for the enemy there was on the
alert, the surprise was not complete and the nature
of the ground made it impossible to use tanks;
but none the less the greater part of the ridge
dividing the Ancre south of Albert from the Somme
was gained. Twenty German divisions were de-
feated by thirteen British infantry divisions, three
British cavalry divisions, and an American infantry
regiment, and nearly twenty-two thousand prisoners
and four hundred guns were captured. The immedi-
ate effect of the advance of the Australians and
Canadians south of the Somme was very similar to
that of Mangin’s blow at Soissons. The Germans
were deprived of the use of the railways passing
through Chaulnes, which had supplied their troops,
between the Somme and the Oise, and had to carry
through another withdrawal. Debeney, who was not
aided by tanks to the same extent as we were,
at first made slower progress than did the Canadians
on his left, but as the difficulties of the Germans
increased, owing to the threat of the Canadian
attack to their communications, not only was
Debeney able to press forward towards Roye,
but Humbert, on his right, joined in and drove
the enemy back from the Lassigny plateau, which
had been won by von Hutier in June, so that
by the middle of August the Germans between the
Somme and the Oise were almost everywhere back in
108The Preparation for Armageddon
the lines which they had held in the summer of 1916.
Then, in accordance with the theory of limited
punches, the attack was stayed. The Amiens salient
had disappeared, as had the Marne salient, and the
main lines of railway through Amiens, which the
enemy had dominated since the end of March and
which, were the main channels of communication
between the French and British armies, were cleared.
No sooner was Humbert established on the
Lassigny plateau, and the battle front on the Amiens
salient for the time being at a standstill, than Mangin,
on Humbert’s right, opened an attack between the
Oise and the Aisne at Soissons. Mangin began on the
18th with a local operation which sent the Germans
back into their battle positions, but did not alarm von
Boehn sufficiently to cause him to send up reserves,
of which he had none too many. Von Boehn had just
assumed command of the armies which had hitherto
constituted the German Crown Prince’s right, in
order that that young gentleman might be better able
to devote his attention to the reorganisation of his
centre after the buffeting it had received in the
second battle of the Marne. Von Boehn’s front
extended from Soissons to Albert, and he was
anxiously watching Haig. He did not, therefore,
wish to send off troops prematurely to his left, and
Mangin caught him napping. On the 19th Mangin
extended his front of attack, and by the 20th had
gained possession of the whole of the heights between
109The Last Four Months
the Oise and the Aisne, having captured 8,000
prisoners and 200 guns.
Foch’s system of manoeuvre was now in
action, and it is worth while again pausing for
a moment to compare his quick rapier thrusts
with Ludendorff’s heavier and slower sword play.
It will be remembered that Ludendorff’s attacks on.
the British front, begun on March 21, had ended on
April 29 with the repulse between Bailleul and
Ypres. Then ensued a pause of twenty-seven days,
for the third battle of the Aisne did not begin until
May 27. This ended on June 2, and was followed
after a week’s interval by von Hutier’s attempt to
reach Compiegne, which .was stopped on June 13.
It was not until July 15, thirty-two days later, that
the Crown Prince was ready to begin the second
battle of the Marne, and each of these respites which
Ludendorff had allowed the Allies made his next
task the more difficult. Now see how Foch, who
had not the superiority in numbers which Ludendorff
had had in the spring, gave his adversary no
time to recover. He makes his counter-attack
on July 18, and the second battle of the Marne
ends with the Germans behind the Aisne and the
Vesle on August 6. On August 8 Haig opens the
battle of Amiens, and on the 12th it ends with the
Germans in their lines about Chaulnes. Meanwhile,
on the 9th, Humbert has already begun the battle of
Lassigny, which comes to an end on the 16th, and
noThe Preparation for Armageddon
from the 17th to the 20th Mangin is driving the
Germans from the Aisne heights. As soon as he
stops, Byng, on August 21, begins the battle of
Bapaume; but ere that Foch’s strategy had effected
a vital change in the enemy’s plans.
Haig’s victory of Amiens gave rise to anxious
debates at German Headquarters. The blow had
been utterly unexpected, and the revelation that the
British army had so quickly recovered its fighting
power came as a great shock. Ludendorff was so
overwhelmed that he tendered his resignation, which
was refused. He has stated that Haig’s victory had
convinced him that there was no longer any hope of
German victory, and he at once advised his Govern-
ment to seek the best terms which they could obtain
from their enemies.* On August 14 a conference
was held at Great Headquarters at which both the
Chancellor and the Foreign Minister were present,
and over which the Emperor presided. Ludendorff
then expounded his views on the military situation,
and declared that, while the army could still for a time
present a strong front, the military situation could
never be better than it then was. He urged that the
best course for Germany was to propose terms while
she still occupied large stretches of the territory of her
enemies and while the process of driving the German
troops out of them was likely to prove long and costly.
Such a change of front, coming so soon after the
* Ludendorff, pp. 551 el seq.The Last Four Months
promises of victory which on Ludendorff’s authority
had been held out to Germany, filled the German
statesmen with dismay. It was held that to undeceive
the people so bluntly and brutally was politically
impossible, and the negotiations which resulted in
Prince Max of Baden becoming Chancellor were set
on foot.
While the Emperor and his advisers were thus
seeking for a way out of their difficulties Ludendorff
changed his military policy. His purpose was now
to stand on the defensive, to avoid exposing his troops
to any more such defeats as he had recently suffered,
and to present a barrier to the Allies which they
would hesitate to attack. He had had again to draw
heavily upon Rupprecht’s reserves to stop the hole
caused by the collapse of his defence in the Amiens
salient, and it had become imperative that he
should economise troops somehow. He there-
fore decided on a general shortening of his
front. He began to draw out of the salient
he had made in Flanders in April, and attempted
to follow this by a repetition of the manoeuvre which
had been so successful at the beginning of 1917.
Then he had upset General Nivelle’s plan by a with-
drawal into the Hindenburg line, and now he pro-
posed to retire slowly over the same ground to the
shelter of the same vast system of defences, in which
he hoped to stand until a peace not unfavourable to
Germany had been concluded. As in 1917, he wished
112The Preparation for Armageddon
this retirement to be deliberate and to cause us the
maximum of delay and inconvenience. It would have
suited him admirably to have completed the move-
ment about the time when the weather broke in the
late autumn. We would then have been left without
shelter in the desert of the old Somme battlefields,
while his troops were established in the elaborate
dug-outs of the Hindenburg system or billeted in
the intact towns and villages to the east of it.
Fortunately, Haig divined this scheme. At this
time the Hindenburg line ran much nearer to our
front between Albert and Arras than it did in the
Somme valley, and Haig proposed to upset Luden-
dorff’s plan of retreat, to force him out of the Somme
uplands and turn the line of the river from Peronne
southwards, by striking from the Albert-Arras front
through Bapaume towards the nearest portion of
Ludendorff’s goal.
On the eve of the battle of Bapaume, which, as
I have said, began on August 21, Haig issued an
order to his troops which, while hinting at the prob-
ability of a German withdrawal, called their attention
to the great change which had been wrought by the
victories of the Marne and of Amiens, and asked for
their greatest efforts in pressing back the enemy
wherever he gave way. The brunt of this new battle
fell upon Byng’s Third Army, which had the task
of pressing in north of the Ancre towards Bapaume,
while Rawlinson’s Fourth Army co-operated on its.
i	113The Last Four Months
right by advancing astride the Somme on Peronne.
By the evening of the 21st the success of Haig’s plan
.was practically assured by Byng, who gained the line
of the Albert—Arras railway. The consequence was
that, ,when on the 23rd a general attack on the
whole front of the Third and Fourth Armies followed,
the German defence north of the Somme gave way,
and the Thiepval Ridge, Pozieres, Courcelette, Mar-
tinpuich and Miraumont fell in rapid succession to
Byng’s men. The effect of this upon our men was
electric. In 1916 the capture of each of these places
had cost us a long, slow, bloody struggle, and the
prime manhood of our new armies lay buried thick
around them. They are names as sacred to the
National Army of Great Britain as Minden, Sala-
manca, Waterloo and the Alma are to the old
Regular Army. They had been yielded in March in
sorrow and pain after a noble defence against odds.
Now, in a few hours and at comparatively small cost,
the same regiments which had perforce retreated
from them with heavy hearts had once more thrown
the enemy back from this sacred soil. No one who
has not tasted the bitterness of retreat can appreciate
the full thrill of an advance over ground made familiar
by victory and defeat. Times had indeed changed
from the days of the first battle of the Somme.
The army was from long experience suspicious of
announcements from Headquarters which foretold
the collapse of the enemy. Too often these had comeThe Preparation for Armageddon
to men who had seen them falsified by a stubborn
and skilful foe, but now Haig was clearly right.
The day had come to strike swiftly and boldly, and
with new confidence in . themselves and in their chief
our men pressed forward across the horrid desolation
created by Hun savagery and by the still more terrible
ebb and flow of war.
The Germans strove hard to gain time to carry
through the ordered retreat which they had planned,
their machine-gunners in particular fighting with
that devotion which marked them throughout the
war; but we had now found the answer to the
German machine-gun, and one hundred tanks had
been sent by Haig into the battle to help the infantry
forward. By August 26 Byng’s progress in the north
had, as Haig had expected, begun to cause the
Germans great anxiety for the safety of their troops
between the Somme and the Oise, and these too
retreated, followed by Rawlinson’s Fourth Army and
the French armies under Debeney and Humbert.
By the night of the 29th Rawlinson’s men had
reached the left bank of the Somme opposite Peronne,
Debeney had hustled the Germans through Nesle,
and Humbert had occupied Noyon. On this same
day the Germans evacuated Bapaume, which Byng
was encircling from the north and south, and were
driven completely from the Somme plateau. The
battle was brought to a noble close by one of the
most brilliant feats of arms of the whole war.
”SThe Last Four Months
While Byng had been closing in on Bapaume
the Australian Corps had been steadily pushing the
Germans back up the Somme towards Peronne, and
in the early hours of August 31 the 5th Australian
Brigade, having crossed the river on improvised
bridges and worked their way towards Mont St.
Quentin, surprised the German defenders of that
hill, which dominates Peronne, and carried it by
assault. As the result of this achievement the
Australians were able to enter Peronne the following
day, and the German defences along the Somme
as far south as Ham were turned. In the battle
of Bapaume thirty-five German divisions had
been driven in ten days across the scene of the
struggle which in 1916 had lasted from July 1
until November 17, and they had lost 34,000
prisoners and 270 guns. Ludendorff’s retreat, far
from enabling him to economise troops, was exhaust-
ing his dwindling resources as rapidly as a battle
accepted voluntarily.
While the battle of Bapaume was in progress
Haig had been quietly transferring the Canadian
Corps from the Amiens battlefield back to Arras,
whence it had come, and on August 26 the 2nd
and 3rd Canadian Divisions, with the 51st British
Division, which had been moved north from the
Marne, attacked east of Arras and captured the
important hill of Monchy le Preux. Horne’s First
Army, to which these divisions belonged, followed up
n6The Preparation for Armageddon
this success by driving the enemy back into the
northern extension of the Hindenburg line, known
as the Drocourt-Queant switch. This Drocourt line
had been completed by the enemy after the battle
of Arras, in April, 1917, and for eighteen months
he had been hard at work improving it until it had
become almost as formidable as the main Hindenburg
line, with which it connected at Queant. It was
assaulted in the morning of September 2 by the 1st
and 4th Canadian Divisions and the 4th, 52nd, 57th
and 63rd British Divisions, assisted by some forty
tanks. These six divisions not only broke clear
through the network of German defences and gained
possession of the whole system in less than seven
hours, but in doing so they routed nine German
divisions, who had all the advantage of defensive
works which they knew thoroughly and believed to
be impregnable. This great feat had, as Haig had
hoped it would, far-reaching results. With their
right flank threatened, the Germans south of Queant
had to hurry back to the shelter of the Hindenburg
line, and by September 9 they were back in the out-
post positions in front of their main defensive system.
On September 6 the French occupied Ham, on the
Somme, and Chauny, on the Oise, and a few days
later were within sight of La Fere. Haig’s
manoeuvre had the simultaneous effect of hastening
the German withdrawal in Flanders, and by Septem-
ber 6 we had reoccupied Bailleul and Merville and
IT7The Last Four Months
were back in Neuve Chapelle, while the 27th
American Division had passed beyond Kemmel Hill.
Thus in one month all the ground .won by Luden-
dorff in his first two attacks of March and April had,
with the exception of a portion on the Ypres front,
been regained, and the British army had amply
avenged the reverses of the spring.
The two German attempts to derange the plans
of the Allies by a retreat into the Hindenburg line
had had very different results. In 1917 we did
not discover what they were at until their pre-
parations had been completed. Their retreat
then lasted almost exactly three months, and
during those three months we fought the battle
of Arras, in which the Canadians stormed the
Vimy Ridge. That was the most conspicuous success
we had gained up to that time on the Western front,
and, including our captures in that victory, we, in
those three months, secured about 21,000 prisoners
and 220 guns, an achievement of which we were at
the time rightly very proud. In 1918, when Luden-
dorff again tried to escape from his embarrassments
by a similar retreat, we drove the Germans back over
almost exactly the same distance between August 21
and September 9—that is, in twenty days—and in
that time we captured 58,000 prisoners and 470 guns.
Ludendorff could no longer retreat according to plan.
While Haig was hunting the Germans back into
the Hindenburg line Pershing was engaged in collect-
n8The Preparation for Armageddon
ing his scattered divisions, in forming them into the
First American Army, of which he assumed personal
command, and in establishing an American sector of
the front. This by the end of August extended round
the St. Mihiel salient northwards to a point opposite
Verdun. The St. Mihiel salient was a relic of the
first German offensive of 1914. In an attempt to
break through to the south of Verdun the enemy had
in September of that year gained possession of a
portion of the heights of the Meuse, including the
Fort of the Roman Camp and the little town of St.
Mihiel on the river below it. The heights of the
Meuse were part of the defensive system of the
eastern frontier of France, and along them had been
constructed a chain of forts connecting the fortresses
of Verdun and Toul, of which the Fort of the Roman
Camp was one. Though on the map the St. Mihiel
salient looked to be a narrow wedge which could be
swept by shell fire from both flanks, in reality the
wooded heights afforded the enemy splendid shelter
and gave him commanding positions of exceptional
strength which dominated all the approaches. In
1915 Joffre had tried again and again to drive the
Germans out, and both Les Eparges, on the north-
west corner of the salient, and Apremont, on its
southern face, became names of ill-omen in the
French army. Thereafter the French left the salient
alone, and it became a quiet sector of the front.
In September, 1918, the St. Mihiel salient
119The Last Four Months
was held by nine German and Austrian divisions,
of whom six were second-class troops. Ludendorff
had decided to withdraw to the base of the salient
in order to economise troops, and some of the
German heavy artillery had been removed before
the Americans attacked. Probably the enemy relied
upon the strength of his position and upon the
ease with which he could observe all preparations
for attack to enable him to make a leisurely
retirement at the proper moment. If this is so, he
was surprised by the method and swiftness of the
American advance, which began on September 12.
The main attack was made by the 1st Corps of
four divisions and the 4th Corps of three divisions
against the southern face of the salient, and was
directed northwards so as to cut in east of the
heights of the Meuse. Simultaneously the 5th
American Corps attacked with two divisions on the
north-western front of the salient and drove in east-
wards towards the southern attack. One French
division attacked on the left of the 5th Corps, and
two more connected the 5th Corps round the nose
of the salient at St. Mihiel with the main attack.
The battle opened with a four hours’ bombardment,
and then, at five in the morning, the American
infantry advanced behind their barrage. Either
because the moral of the German troops was not good
or because they knew that it had been planned to
come out of the salient, the resistance was on the
120The Preparation for Armageddon
whole feeble, and in thirty hours the two American
attacking forces had joined hands and the salient had
been wiped out with astonishingly little loss. The
whole operation was carried through according to
programme. It was not necessary to employ any of
the American reserve divisions, of which six were in
readiness, and, as will be seen, they were at once
available to begin preparations for another and more
formidable task. The battle resulted in the capture
by the First American Army of 16,000 prisoners and
443 guns.
The St. Mihiel salient had long broken up the
stretch of front between the Moselle and Verdun, so
that any considerable offensive movement by the
French into Lorraine had been impossible. The
front was equally unpromising from the German
point of view for an attack directed against Nancy.
The result of this was that this portion of the long
line had, after the failure of Joffre’s attempts in 1915
to reduce the salient, become dormant and had been
very lightly held by both sides. But now that the
salient was gone and the front had been straightened
out, the Germans found their great fortress of Metz
menaced with attack, and also the French iron fields
of Briey, to the north of Metz, which they had cap-
tured in the early days of the war, and were of
even more importance to them than the fortress.
American Headquarters allowed it to be whispered
in confidence that Pershing’s real objective was these
I 21The Last Four Months
iron fields, and doubtless some of these whispers found
their way into the German lines. In any event
Ludendorff, almost to the very end, showed his
nervousness as to an American attack on the east
bank of the Meuse, and, hard up as he was for
reserves, he kept troops to watch for an attack which
did not begin to develop until the German pleni-
potentiaries were on their way to sign the Armistice.
This victory of Pershing’s completed the series of
preliminary punches, and Foch was now ready for
the knock-out blow. His immediate object had been
to free Paris and Amiens and to clear the strategic
railways which he needed for the free movement of
his troops; his ultimate object had been to prepare
for a decisive victory by exhausting the German
reserves. We have seen how he achieved the first;
let us now see how he stood as to the second.
At the end of May, just before the Crown Prince
William’s attack on the Chemin des Dames, the
German forces in the West had reached their
greatest strength. They then had 207 divisions on
the Western front, and of these about 66 divisions
fit to take part in battle were in reserve. In the
third week of September, after Pershing’s victory at
St. Mihiel, the number of German divisions had fallen
to 185, for in order to make good his heavy losses
Ludendorff, whose income in man power from Ger-
many was quite insufficient to meet expenditure,
had been compelled to draw upon his capital, and toThe Preparation for Armageddon
break up 22 of his divisions in an endeavour to keep
the remainder up to strength. Two more divisions
.were on their way across from Russia and six others
.were placed under orders to move, but of these, three
had to be diverted to help Mackensen in the Balkans
out of difficulties in which he was placed by the
collapse of Bulgaria, and none of the remainder
reached the front in France before the great battle
was joined, and they were, moreover, of poor quality,
for all their best men had been taken from them to
meet the never-ending call for drafts for the Western
front. Even these drastic measures proved insuffi-
cient, and none of Ludendorff’s divisions had its full
establishment of men, so he had to swallow his pride
and appeal to despised Austria for aid, with the result
that six Austrian divisions arrived on the Western
front, and of these two had been defeated at St.
Mihiel. The reserve of 61 rested and fit divisions in
May had fallen to 21 in September, and there were
available to swell it only the five divisions coming from
Russia.
As I have already pointed out, this weakening of
the German armies had not been due solely to Foch’s
skill. In part it was the consequence of Ludendorff’s
mistake in his spring campaign of compromising
between the policy of a succession of attacks intended
to prepare for a great final effort and the policy of
attempting to break through in one great battle. He
failed in the first by continuing his assaults beyond
123The Last Four Months
the period when he was inflicting more loss than he
suffered, and he failed in the second because he would
not or could not continue them to the point where
decisive success was obtainable, and in acting as he
did he sapped his strength. Still more was the
exhaustion of Germany’s man power the fruit of the
Allied efforts during the previous years. It is easy
in the light of after knowledge to criticise the Allied
generals and to say that their methods were wasteful
of life. Certainly if they had known in 1915 what
they knew in 1918 their procedure would have been
different and the war would have been over sooner;
but that criticism is best answered by the fact that
the man who is to-day universally recognised as the
outstanding figure of the war was himself engaged
in doing that to which the critics object.
It is commonly asserted that the Allies should
have remained on the defensive in the West in 1915.
That argument overlooks the fact that it was always
present in Joffre’s mind that the Germans might at
any time elect to do the very thing which they came
so near achieving in March, 1918. I believe it to
have been one of the greatest of the many German
blunders that they did not attack in force in the West
in 1915, before our new armies were ready and our
munition factories had become really productive.
In 1916 Verdun was saved because we were able to
extend our front to the Somme and free a great
number of French troops; an attack made before we
124The Preparation for Armageddon
were in a position to bring such help to our Allies
tnight have had very different results. The one means
of averting that danger was to take every opportunity
of making the Western front more secure by
pushing back the German lines and of exhausting
the military power of Germany. Here lies the
root of the long barren controversy which raged
between the “ Easterners ” and “ Westerners-”
throughout the greater part of the war. It was
necessary to be safe in the East in order to be strong
in the West, but it was at no time possible before
the summer of 1918 to make the West safe by
success in the East, because the Allies had not the
force necessary to protect their vitals in the West
against possible danger and at the same time carry
through a decisive campaign in more distant fields.
Therefore the policy of seizing every favourable
opportunity of exhausting Germany’s military power
by attack in the West was the right policy if the
methods followed were not always the best. It was
that policy which emptied the depots in Germany,
and though it came near to emptying both our own
and the French depots, it had its reward in 1918, for
without it neither could Foch’s skill in two short
months have materially reduced the enemy’s strength
nor could American aid have enabled us to win when
we did win.
While the German strength had been going
steadily down, the Allied strength had been going
125The Last Four Months
steadily up. Between the middle of July and the
beginning of August nine American divisions took
part in the second battle of the Marne, and there
were then three more on the British front, which
had practically completed their training for battle.
Pershing at the battle of St. Mihiel had fourteen
divisions in action or in reserve, while at that time
there were two on the British front and nine more
almost ready—twenty-five American divisions in all—
upon which Foch could reckon at once, and more
to come, each of these divisions being about twice
the strength of a British, French or German division.
The British army, which in July could only bring
into the field fifty-three divisions, in September had,
thanks to the arrival of reinforcements from other
theatres of war, grown to fifty-nine divisions, two of
which were, however, still in process of reorganisa-
tion. Thus, while the fighting strength of the
Germans and Austrians in the West had fallen by
sixteen divisions since Foch had delivered his first
punch, that of the Allies had increased by the equival-
ent of about thirty-two, counting one American
division as equal to two German divisions.
Since July 18 the Allies had captured more than
2,000 German guns and large stocks of shell, while
the blockade, on which we had founded so many
premature hopes, was at last beginning to have
results directly bearing on the military situation, and
made it increasingly difficult for the Germans to
126The Preparation for Armageddon
replace their lost and damaged war material. For
example, the mechanism of the German guns neces-
sitated the use of brass cartridge cases, but by this
time the supply of brass and copper had run very
low, and the most elaborate and tyrannical system of
perquisition could extract no more from the occupied
territories, so that inferior substitutes had to be used.
The power and efficiency of the German artillery was
diminishing as fast as the strength of their battalions,
while the Allied guns had gone up from about 18,000
in May to 21,000 in September, and they had almost
unlimited supplies of munitions.
But it was not in numbers and material alone that
the Allies had gained. The German soldiers who
had been sent over from Russia had come into touch
with Bolshevist theory and practice. They had seen
soldiers’ committees in control, and officers degraded
and insulted, and it began to occur to them that the
iron discipline under which they had been brought
up had not behind it the power which they had
imagined was there. They infected their comrades
with a distrust and suspicion of authority which
spread rapidly as defeat followed on defeat and the
promise of a speedy and victorious peace became a
mockery. On the other side of the wire the
success of Foch’s strategy had filled France with
joyful relief and inspired the Allied troops with
confidence. The work begun at Doullens on
March 26 was completed, and for the first time
127The Last Four Months
in the war a real sense of corporate unity pervaded
the ranks. The British army, having made one of
the most marvellous recoveries in the history of war,
was sure of its superiority, individual and collective,
over the enemy. The grim, determined, stolid endur-
ance of the spring had been changed by the series of
victories which began with the battle of Amiens into
eager, irresistible enthusiasm. The second battle of
the Marne had taught the Allied leaders that the
untried American troops could fight and win with
far less training than they had calculated to be
necessary; the victory of St. Mihiel had shown that
an American army could take the field as an entity.
Every one of the data upon which Ludendorff
had based the plan for the Friedensturm had
been proved to be false. The spirit of France
was as high as ever; the British army, far
from being exhausted, had struck hard and often
and with conspicuous success; the Americans were
not only present in numbers, but had taught the
Germans to fear their dash, skill and valour.
128CHAPTER IV
ARMAGEDDON
The Hindenburg Line—The American Battle of the
Meuse-Argonne—Gouraud in Champagne — Haig
Breaks the Hindenburg Line—King Albert’s Advance
into Belgium—The Result of Armageddon.
Foch, having prepared the .way for his decisive thrust
by his series of preliminary punches, was about to
launch the Allied armies against the most formidable
of all the German defences. The name “Hinden-
burg Line ” originated with the British soldiers, who
so entitled the great system of German works which
had been discovered towards the end of 1916 behind
the Somme battlefield.
At the end of August, 1916, when Hindenburg
and Ludendorff first arrived at Great Headquarters,
the German military situation .was by no means
rosy. Russia was still formidable, the Austrian
army required a great deal of support, Roumania
was about to enter the field, the Verdun offensive
had proved to be a disastrous failure, the British
army had grown to formidable dimensions, and
the Franco-British attacks on the Somme were
pressing the Germans hard and eating up their
reserves. Ludendorff wished first to finish off Russia
J	129The Last Four Months
and Roumania, and in order to do this he had to
make the situation in the West safe and to be able
to economise troops there. The only way in which
he could do this effectively was by shortening his
front. He could not give up any ground in Belgium
without endangering his hold upon Ostend and
Zeebrugge, which were invaluable as bases from
which submarines and destroyers could attack the
British communications across the Channel, while
the country about Bruges and Ghent gave him an
excellent jumping-off place for aeroplane raids upon
London and the south-east of England. He did not
wish to abandon Lille, because great pains had been
taken to fortify the place, which had become the
northern pivot of the German defensive system,
while the great manufacturing district surrounding
the town was of the utmost value. Nor did he wish
to come away from the Vimy Ridge, for it covered
a great part of the Lens coal fields, and in the hands
of the Allies would be a strong barrier against a
German offensive when he was ready to attack in
the West. West of Laon the St. Gobain massif
formed a pivot for his centre, which it was important
to hold. Between Reims and Verdun a withdrawal
would not shorten his front, and would bring his
enemy dangerously near the railway which connected
Metz with Sedan and Mezieres, part of his main
lateral line of communications. In the east he could
not give ground without exposing Metz to bombard-
130Armageddon
ment and Alsace and Lorraine to invasion. Between
the Vimy Ridge and the St. Gobain massif, however,
his front formed a great arc, into which the French
and British had bitten deep during the battle of the
Somme. By coming out of this arc he would shorten
his front, get his troops out of an embarrassing
position, and would be yielding French territory
which was of no special value to him. Accordingly
he determined to construct a chord for the arc, and
to draw back to the chord in his own time. So
the Hindenburg line was begun.
The original section of the Hindenburg line
started just east of Arras, where it connected with
the defences of the Vimy Ridge and ran south-east-
wards to the Canal du Nord, eight miles west of
Cambrai; thence it followed an almost north and
south line past the western outskirts of St. Quentin,
through La Fere, to the St. Gobain massif. It was
this portion of the line which leaped into fame when
Ludendorff carried out his withdrawal in the early
months of 1917. He had realised that he would be
attacked again on the Western front in the spring
of that year, and that his armies between the Oise
and the Scarpe were, as the result of the battle of
the Somme, in no condition to meet attack. He
tells us that there was no alternative to withdrawal.*
Having completed his defences, he slowly brought
back the bulk of his troops and material, leaving only
* LudendOrfT, p. 322.The Last Four Months
rearguards in his front line. He then proceeded to
lay waste systematically the country he intended to
abandon. Every article of value was removed from
the French towns and villages, all the able-bodied
inhabitants were deported, and most of those who
were too young, too old or too feeble to be of service
were collected in two or three centres to be rescued
by the Allies when they advanced. The trees were
cut down, not even the orchards being spared, the
villages were set on fire, the towns were gutted,
explosives being used for the more solid buildings
which fire could not damage sufficiently, the wells
were fouled, every road and railway bridge was
destroyed, the railway embankments were blown in,
the rails were torn up, and mines were exploded
under every cross-roads, making craters which effec-
tively barred wheeled traffic. As a last refinement a
series of devilishly cunning booby traps was devised,
consisting of wires connected to German helmets,
pianos, door-handles, the steps of dug-outs or of
houses, which when touched exploded charges and
cost us the lives of many of our men. The systematic
and skilful savagery of the modern German created
a devastation which shamed the best efforts of his
untutored forbears. This was all part of Luden-
dorff’s scheme of defence. He knew that the time
and labour required to restore the communications,
to repair the bridges, and provide water and shelter
for their troops would derange the plans of the
132Armageddon
Allied generals, and as a purely military measure the
scheme was an unqualified success. Nivelle had
intended that one of his attacks should be made
against the southern part of the front from .which
the Germans had retired, and he had no time
to prepare properly for another to take its place, with
the result that his attempt on St. Quentin was
repulsed, while Ludendorff, by shortening his front,
obtained the reserves necessary to meet and check
the main French attack on the Aisne. Only the
British part of Nivelle’s campaign met with any
considerable measure of success, and in the battle of
Arras a part of the Arras arm of the Hindenburg
line was rolled up.
Before the battle of Arras started the Germans
had begun to prepare for the possibility oL the
capture of the Vimy Ridge by digging a northern
extension of the Hindenburg line, .which ran from
Queant, ten miles west of Cambrai, and then north-
wards through Drocourt and east of Lens to the
southern defences of Lille. This was the line known
to the British army as “ the Drocourt-Queant
switch,” and broken by them on September 2, 1918.
It was the beginning of a vast extension of the
Hindenburg system carried out throughout 1917,
during the whole of which year the Germans were
on the defensive. Lille and Metz became the main
pivots of this extended system. The term “line”
as applied to it is a misnomer, for nowhere did it
i33The Last Four Months
consist of a single line of trenches. It was composed
of a whole series of trench lines enclosing a heavily
fortified area many miles in depth. The Germans,
to mark their sense of its importance, named its
various sections after the heroes of German
mythology.* The Drocourt switch they called the
“ Wotan position”; the section covering Cambrai
and St. Quentin, the “Siegfried position”; that
south of St. Quentin and west of Laon, the
“ Alberich position ” ; behind the Champagne front
came the “ Brunehild position”; and the southern-
most positions, which ran east of the Argonne to the
Meuse and thence to Metz, were called the “ Kriem-
hilde and Michel positions.” Thus a great barrier
was built up from north to south covering Douai,
Cambrai and St. Quentin and protecting the rail-
way connecting Metz with Sedan and Mezieres.
Of the various sections of this barrier, the
Siegfried system in front of Cambrai and St.
Quentin, which was begun first, was the most
elaborate; the Kriemhilde section had not the same
depth, partly because the ground on the Meuse-
Argonne front was naturally very defensible, and the
approaches to the Kriemhilde fine were more difficult
than those leading to other sections, and partly
because the original German trenches between the
Meuse and the Argonne were never penetrated by
Allied troops from the first days of trench warfare
;	* These positions are shown on Map II.
134Armageddon
until they were stormed by the First American Army
on September 26, 1918.
The principles on .which these lines .were
elaborated were worked out by the Germans as the
result of a close study of their experiences in the
first battle of the Somme. If that battle cost us
dear, it and the battle of Verdun destroyed the
flower of the Germany army, and it became evident
to the German leaders that a few more such struggles
.would exhaust their military strength. By the
summer of 1916 the work of Mr. Lloyd George at
the British Ministry of Munitions and of M. Albert
Thomas at the French Ministry had begun to take
effect. For the first time in the war the Allies on
the Western front were superior to the Germans in
gun power and in the number of shells at the service
of the guns. The'bombardment preliminary to the
infantry attack by the British in the Somme battle
lasted seven days, and was heard in the suburbs of
London, 150 miles away. The Germans realised
that at this period of the war bombardment had
become the principal means of attack by the Allies,
and that their strongest trenches would crumble to
pieces if exposed to the full blast of the tornado of
shell which could be hurled against them.
Until “ sound ranging ” was highly developed,
.which did not take place till later, the accuracy
of artillery fire depended upon observation. The
guns required eyes, particularly the medium and
i35The Last Four Months
heavy guns, which fire from a long distance behind
the front lines. Even the best observation from
aeroplanes will not replace in a great artillery
attack the eyes of an observer on the ground
connected by telephone with the guns. The Ger-„
mans therefore designed the Hindenburg lines so
that observation of them from the ground should
be as difficult as possible. Whenever it could be
done, they were constructed along the back slopes
of ridges, not along the top or on the front slopes,
where they would be easily seen. In order to keep
the observers and the guns at a distance, and to
disorganise the attacking infantry, strong outpost
positions were built often as much as three or four
miles in front of the main positions. The troops in
these outpost positions .were intended to fall back
before a heavy attack, after delaying it as much as
possible by machine-gun and rifle fire, and with this
method of defence it would not be necessary to keep
large numbers of troops in the very front lines, which
would be exposed to the worst of the bombardment.
This was, in fact, an early version of the system of
defence which Gouraud applied so brilliantly when
he defeated the great German attack of July 15,
1918*
* This was the system of defence when strong lines were in existence
as battle positions. When the battle positions were pierced, it was usually
necessary to dispute every yard of ground. The outpost system was
abandoned by the Germans in the later stages of the third battle of
Ypres and in September, 1918, and by us on the front of the Fifth Army
after the German attack of March 31.
136Armageddon
In the Siegfried section the system was given
great depth, so that if the attackers succeeded in
storming the first lines it would be necessary for
them to pause until the guns had been brought for-
ward and the stocks of shell brought up for a renewed
bombardment of the rear lines. Between Cambrai
and St. Quentin the Siegfried system, from the out-
post positions near Epehy to the rearmost line near
Beaurevoir, was as much as ten miles deep. The
most elaborate wire entanglements were provided in
front of each line of trenches. They were often
arranged in geometrical patterns, so that the angles
could be swept by machine-gun fire, and there were,
in places, as many as eight or nine belts of barbed
wire in front of the trenches. Standing, after the
great battle had been won and the Siegfried system
had been pierced, on the ridges east of the St.
Quentin Canal, in the heart of the system, one looked
over miles of dense entanglements running in every
direction, and was filled with amazement that it
should have been possible for flesh and blood to storm
a way through such obstacles. Heavily concreted
shelters for the infantry and machine-gunners were
provided in the fire trenches, while farther back
great underground barracks were constructed at a
depth to make them proof against the heaviest
bombardment.
When we first broke into the Hindenburg
line with Byng’s tank attack of November, 1917,
137The Last Four Months
we found that the Germans had hollowed out
the ground under many of the villages, piling the
chalk into the buildings so that it would not attract
attention and would add to the immunity of the dug-
out from bombardment. These dug-outs were fitted
up on a lavish scale so as to provide for the
comforts of the occupants. They were often boarded
in and fitted with electric light, while water and
sleeping bunks were provided, and they were fur-
nished with numerous stairways, so that the men in
them could come out quickly when the bombardment
.was over.
Through the middle of the Siegfried system ran
two canals, the Canal du Nord and the St. Quentin
Canal, which near Cambrai becomes the navigable
Scheldt. Both of these canals, which run in places
through deep cuttings, were used by the enemy, who
dug deep into the banks to provide shelter for his men.
Between Bellicourt and Vendhuile the St. Quentin
Canal ran underground for a distance of 6,000 yards,
and this tunnel, when blocked up, provided the
Germans with a ready-made underground barrack,
which was fitted out for occupation, and connected
by numerous shafts with the trenches above. Along
the top of the canal, which constituted a very serious
natural obstacle, numbers of concreted machine-gun
emplacements were built, so that the whole length
of the canal where it ran above ground could be
swept by cross fire.
138Armageddon
Such were the defences upon which the Germans,
not without justification, pinned their faith. In
keeping with the names bestowed upon them,
legends had grown up in Germany as to their extent
and strength, and they had therefore acquired great
political as well as military importance. While they
were intact the German people felt that loss of terri-
tory or reverses in the field were not matters of great
concern, for at the worst there lay behind these
bastions rich provinces of France and the greater part
of Belgium, which could be exchanged for favourable
terms of peace. The German leaders could still tell
us to look at the map. When they were broken the
effect both upon leaders and upon people was as
overwhelming as it was unexpected.
The Allied defences have often been contrasted
unfavourably with these elaborate and intricate
German trench systems, but the conditions on the
two sides were very different. In the first place, from
the beginning of 1915 until the end of 1917 the Allies
were, with the exceptions of the German gas attack
at Ypres and the battle of Verdun, almost always
attacking, devoting all their energies to the attempt
to break through the trench barrier, and the vast
preparations required for the battles which were
fought during that period left little labour over for
the elaboration of defences. In the second place, the
Germans were much more favourably placed than the
Allies as regards labour. They had Russian prisoners
139The Last Four Months
of war in great numbers, and the fact that the Hague
Convention forbade the employment of prisoners of
war upon military work counted as nothing with
them. They were also able to employ forced labour
from the populations of Belgium and the occupied dis-
tricts of Northern France, and with these two
sources of supply they could carry out the most ex-
tensive works without calling upon the army for more
men than were necessary for planning and super-
vision. The construction of these great defensive
systems therefore did not involve the withdrawal of
any soldiers from the fighting front, and did not in-
terfere with the rest and training of the troops in
war. The Allies, on the other hand, could only
provide labour for the construction of rear lines of
defence at the expense of their armies, or of the fac-
tories in the homeland which provided for the great
and ever-growing demands of the armies and fleets,
and had to meet the urgent call for more and more
ships.
It is quite true that in the first years of the war
the German infantryman dug better and worked
harder at his trenches than did the British infantry-
man or his French comrade, but this industry would
not have sufficed for the construction of the Hinden-
burg system, and as time went on and the quality
and discipline of the German troops declined the
new German trenches, on ground won in attack,
which had necessarily to be constructed by the
140Armageddon
soldiers, grew; less and less formidable. Mangin, in
his attack of July 18 in the second battle of the
Marne, found little behind the enemy’s front line,
and Rawlinson had the same experience in the battle
of Amiens of August 8. Time and labour made the
Hindenburg systems possible.
Those systems had, as I have said, been designed
to meet a great bombardment, but by the time Foch
was ready to assault them the conditions had altered
fundamentally. Bombardment had ceased to be the
only or even the chief means at the service of the
Allies for opening the road for the infantry attack.
The perfected tank was able to break through any
belts of barbed wire, however dense, and force its
way across any trenches, given reasonably favourable
conditions of ground. I do not maintain that tanks
alone would have enabled us to break through the
Siegfried system, for the two canals formed an
obstacle which the tanks could not cross, and the gaps
in and between the canals were not sufficiently wide
to allow of a really effective breach being made
where they occurred. In the battle of Amiens the
lessons of Hamel had been applied on a great scale,
and with complete success. The triumph of the
tanks in that battle had been greatly due to the sud-
denness and to the power of the bombardment which
fell upon the German artillery. Both methods of
attack had to be combined, and .were combined with
rare skill. But it is certain that neither Foch’sThe Last Four Months
skilful preparation for the great battle, nor the
valour of the infantry, .would have brought us
victory if we had had to rely upon bombardment
alone in order to batter down the German defences.
The acres of wire entanglement which surrounded
the trenches of the Siegfried system would not have
been cut without that prolonged artillery preparation
which had failed in the past to solve the problem of
attack in trench warfare. With the warning which
this preparation would have given them the Germans
would have been able to shelter their machine-guns
and infantry in the vast dug-outs which they had pre-
pared, and have brought them out after the barrage
had gone forward. Even when we had tanks they
sometimes succeeded in doing this, as the Americans
fighting with us on September 29 found to their cost.
The tanks were needed not only to clear a way for the
infantry through the wire but to crush the enemy’s
machine-gun nests and keep his men in their under-
ground shelters. Failing this the exhaustion of the
enemy’s reserves would not have sufficed to give us
victory in the great battle, for the German troops
holding the line would have been able to break up
our attacks without support from behind. The tanks
had proved their efficacy in the preparation for
Armageddon; now they were to take their part in the
culmination towards which Foch had been working,
and few things helped us more in the decisive struggle
than the moral ascendancy which the success of the
142Armageddon
tanks in the preliminary battles had given us over the
Germans.
Captured German orders and other documents
bear testimony to the dread with which the
enemy regarded tanks at this time. Ludendorff had
completely changed his views regarding them, and in
a circular dealing with the methods of meeting tank
attack, he wrote: “ Our earlier successes against
tanks led to a certain contempt for this weapon of
warfare. We must now reckon with more dangerous
tanks.” A German army order issued after the
battle of Amiens said : “ The enemy now relies chiefly
upon tanks for the success of his attacks. This
weapon can only be overcome by the strictest atten-
tion to the prescribed counter-measures. I hold all
commanders down to company-commanders person-
ally responsible that there is no relaxation at any time
in their counter-measures. Specially selected look-
out men are to be always in position day and night to
give warning of the approach of tanks. Messages re-
garding the attack by tanks are to be given absolute
priority, and are to be sent immediately to the
artillery, which is specially detailed to fire upon
tanks. All infantry officers must know the
exact position of this artillery in their section. An
officer is to be appointed in each trench to have charge
of the light signals for giving .warning in case of tank
attack.’’ This is the type of order which is the refuge
of authority when caught napping. The German
r43The Last Four Months
leaders had delayed too long to study the possibilities
of tanks and the most effective means of meeting
them. The “ counter-measures ” presented in this
order might have availed against tanks alone; they
were useless against tanks, artillery and infantry
working in combination. They were, in fact, worse
than useless, they were harmful, for they served to
demonstrate to the German soldier, who was already
in mortal fear of tanks and prepared to make their
appearance an excuse for surrender, that his chiefs
were as frightened of them as he was, and that they
had no effective reply ready.
There are few things more depressing to the men
in the ranks, or more calculated to shake their con-
fidence in their leaders, than the knowledge that the
enemy possesses a powerful weapon with which they
are not provided. We had bitter experience of this
in the winter of 1914-1915, when we had to hold the
line without the aid of trench mortars, with a totally
inadequate supply of hand grenades, and with little
support from heavy artillery, with all of which the
Germans were .well provided. They had no more
expected or desired the deadlock of trench warfare
than we had, but they had prepared for the siege of
fortresses, and had the appliances for siege warfare
ready, and we had not. Our men then bore the
strain of meeting superior equipment with super-
human endurance, and in 1918 the German troops
failed to stand a like test. Their own tanks were few
144Armageddon
in number and of inferior design, and their know-
ledge of our superiority in th&t weapon had shaken
their confidence in the defences before they were
attacked. Sooner or later in war an antidote is
found to every device of attack or of defence, and the
combination of gun and tank proved to be the anti-
dote to the Hindenburg line, while the Germans were
not allowed the time to find an antidote to the tank.
The anti-tank gun, on which they had relied after
their first experience of the effect of artillery fire upon
tanks, had been successfully countered by our bar-
rage. They then invented an anti-tank rifle, firing
a heavy armour-piercing bullet, but it had not much
success, and towards the end they were producing an
anti-tank machine-gun, which might have been more
successful, but was in the field too late to receive a
fair trial. It would be idle to suppose that no reply
to the tank would have been forthcoming had the
war gone on longer. All that is certain is that British
ingenuity found the answer to the problem pre-
sented by German field fortifications before German
ingenuity discovered how to overcome the tank.
The general plan for the great battle which was
to decide the issue of the war was determined by
Foch in consultation .with the Allied Commanders-in-
Chief before Pershing won the victory of St. Mihiel.
That victory served to confirm the Generalissimo
in his intentions. As a result of the second
battle of the Marne, and of the retreat of the
K	*45The Last Four Months
Germans into the Hindenburg line before the
British blows, the German front ran roughly
from north to south from the North Sea coast
near Nieuport, just east of Ypres, by Armen-
tieres, west of Douai, Cambrai and St. Quentin to
the River Oise near La Fere. Starting from the Oise
it made a big bulge westwards round the St. Gobain
Forest along the Oise and the Vesle to Reims, where
it again straightened out and ran eastwards through
the Champagne heathlands across the Argonne
Forest to the Meuse, north-east of Verdun. Behind
this front at a distance of about forty-five miles from
the British lines opposite Cambrai, and of about
twenty miles from the Meuse-Argonne front, ran
the main line of railway connecting Metz, Sedan,
Mezieres, Maubeuge, Mons, and Brussels. This
railway line formed the spinal cord of the German
defensive system, was Ludendorff’s main means of
moving his reserves and military stores rapidly from
flank to flank, and twas his last good line of lateral
communication west of the Ardennes.
Foch proposed to strike at this spinal cord from
either side of the great bulge in the enemy’s line.*
The First American Army was to advance between the
Meuse and the Argonne upon Sedan, while Gouraud
drove in between the Argonne and Reims towards
Mezieres. This constituted the right wing of the
Allied battle front. The intention was that
* The direction of these various attacks is shown on Map I.
146Armageddon
Gouraud and the Americans should pinch out the
Argonne Forest by advancing on either side of it,
for the French had learned by bitter experience .what
a terrible obstacle the forest presented when de-
fended by the skilled and determined German
machine-gunners, who in a country where it was
almost impossible to get at them with tanks or with
artillery, were in their element. Actually this inten-
tion was not realised, and the prolonged stubborn
fighting of the American troops through the forest
has concentrated attention in the United States upon
the struggle in the forest, to such an extent that the
battle has come to be popularly known as the battle
of the Argonne, but the main American forces were
always to the east of the Argonne, and the axis of
Pershing’s attack ran through Montfaucon to Sedan.
The attack to the north of the bulge was to be
made by the First French Army and the First,
Third and Fourth British Armies between the
Scarpe and the Oise, and was to be directed through
St. Quentin and Cambrai towards Maubeuge. It
was known that Ludendorff, in his anxiety to pro-
tect Cambrai and to secure his precious Hindenburg
line, had been weakening his forces in Flanders,
and Foch proposed to take advantage of this by
making a third attack into Belgium with the Belgian
army, reinforced by a portion of Degoutte’s army,
which had been sent northwards from the Aisne, and
the Second British Army. This attack, if successful,
147The Last Four Months
would clear the Belgian coast and threaten the
enemy’s communication with Germany north of the
Ardennes. Foch believed that the two main attacks
on either side of the bulge would force the Germans
to withdraw from it, and the French armies around
the bulge were, while the three attacks were in pro-
gress, to keep the enemy in the bulge occupied, and
prevent them from retiring at their leisure. The
Fifth British Army, which had been reconstituted
under the command of General Bird wood, was to
carry out a similar role on the Lille front between
the main British attack on Cambrai and the Flanders
attack.
Such was the plan, vast, simple and bold. Now
that all is over, and the plan has been brilliantly
and completely successful, the courage and deter-
mination of the men who formed it and carried it
through is apt to be overlooked, more especially as
the continuous and rapid succession of victories,
which began with the famous counter stroke of
July 18, produced in the public mind an exaggerated
impression of weakness and even of collapse in the
enemy. It seemed as if Foch had brought back the
trumpets of Joshua, and that German defences fell
before him wherever and whenever he chose to
advance. Yet in the third week of September the
German resistance was far from broken. If the
enemy’s infantry had lost much of the dash and
initiative which distinguished it in 1916, and the sub-
148Armageddon
ordinate leaders had not the skill of their predecessors
who had fallen in battle, his artillery, though weaken-
ing, was still powerful and well directed, and his
machine-guns were manned by picked men of high
courage, and had, from long experience, become
more formidable than ever. The strongest of the
German trench lines still lay in front of the Allies,
lines which the enemy believed to be impregnable.
Many of the American divisions which were to
take part in the battle had had little or no war
experience, and the last stages of their training
had been hurried through. The American com-
manders and staffs had had no opportunity of
handling such masses of troops as were to be em-
ployed, and though St. Mihiel had proved to be a
very complete success, it had disclosed defects in the
American organisation and staff. It was thought,
particularly in the British War Cabinet, that it
would be wiser to defer forcing a decision until the
American troops had learned more and the American
army had increased in size, that the attempt to
break through should be postponed until the spring
of 1919.
Those who held this view were not .without hope
that the anticipations which they had long cherished
would be realised, and that Germany would collapse
when her props were knocked away. One of these
props, Bulgaria, was on the point of surrender, and
the news both from Austria and from Turkey was
r49The Last Four Months
encouraging. It might never be necessary to assault
the impenetrable barrier in the West.
Though Foch was in supreme control, his special
function was to co-ordinate the strategy of the Allied
armies, and the Commanders-in-Chief of those armies
remained responsible to their Governments for the
lives and wellbeing of their men. It was a question
of fighting a battle on a scale which had never yet
been attempted, a battle in which millions of soldiers
would take part, and hundreds of thousands of lives
were at stake. Had Haig and Pershing hesitated,
and the arguments in favour of hesitation were many,
the great plan could not have been consummated.
Haig was, however, confident in himself and in his
men. Believing absolutely in their superiority over
the Germans, and that no defences could hold them
back, he was ready to take on his shoulders the heavy
responsibility of deciding to push on at once.
The British Government, while unwilling to veto
the plan, felt so doubtful of its success that they were
not prepared to support it. Mr. Lloyd George, in
daily contact with our difficulties in raising men for
the prosecution of the war in all its varied aspects,
dreaded the casualty lists of another Somme or
Passchendaele, and his sympathies with the theory
of victory by the ,way round were this time more
powerful than his courage and his readiness to take
risks. Even Foch felt that he could not take the
responsibility of ordering the army of anotherArmageddon
nation to advance against the serried lines of the
Siegfried system. So Haig was left to bear the
burden alone. He tells us in his dispatch of January
7, 1919, how he took it up. After describing the
broad lines of Foch’s plans and of the attacks to be
carried out by the Allied armies, he goes on : “ The
results to be obtained from these different attacks de-
pended in a peculiarly large degree upon the British
attack in the centre. It was here that the enemy’s
defences were most highly organised. If these were
broken, the threat directed at his vital systems of
lateral communication would of necessity react upon
his defence elsewhere.
“ On the other hand, the long period of sustained
offensive action through which the British armies had
already passed had made large demands both upon
the troops themselves and upon my available reserves.
Throughout our attacks from August 8 onwards, our
losses in proportion to the results achieved and the
numbers of prisoners taken had been consistently and
remarkably small. In the aggregate, however, they
were considerable, and in the face of them an attack
upon so formidably organised a position as that which
now confronted us could not be lightly undertaken.
Moreover, the political effects of an unsuccessful
attack upon a position so well known as the Hinden-
burg line would be large, and would go far to revive
the declining moral not only of the German army but
of the German people.The Last Four Months
“ These different conditions were present to my
mind. The probable results of a costly failure, or,
indeed, of anything short of a decided success, in any
attempt upon the main defences of the Hindenburg
line were obvious; but I was convinced that the
British attack was the essential part of the general
scheme, and that the moment was favourable.
“ Accordingly I decided to proceed with the
attack, and all preparatory measures, including the
preliminary operations already recounted, were
carried out as rapidly and as thoroughly as possible.”*
In making this decision Haig staked his future;
not that such a consideration weighed with him for
a moment; but he must have known that failure,
with a doubting Government behind him, could have
for him but one result. At the time the fact that
the War Cabinet sent no congratulations to the army
on the victories of Bapaume, of the second battle of
the Scarpe, of Epehy, or of Cambrai, victories which
gave us nearly 100,000 prisoners, caused much com-
ment. The reason of this neglect was that the War
Cabinet to the last doubted of victory and did not
wish to appear to exult until all danger of a setback
was over. So not until Foch assured Mr. Lloyd
George on October 7 that Haig’s hammer blows had
done their work was any message sent.
Pershing was equally sure that the proved valour,
the vigour and enterprise of the American soldier
* Supplement to the London Gazette, 7 January, 1919, para. 32, p. 14.
*5*Armageddon
would more than compensate for any lack of experi-
ence and training. These were fateful decisions, for
if we had not attacked the war could not have been
ended before the spring of 1919. The firmness and
courage of these two men gave us victory in 1918.
The victory of Bapaume, and the piercing of
the Drocourt line in the battle of the Scarpe, had
forced the enemy on the front covering Cambrai to
take refuge behind the Canal du Nord, but south-
west of Cambrai, and west of St. Quentin as far as
the Oise, he still held strong advanced positions some
three miles in front of the main Hindenburg system.
These positions included the outpost defences of
that system and some of the British works which had
been prepared to meet the March attack. It was
necessary, therefore, before the Hindenburg line
could be attacked, to clear the Germans out of these
works, and this Haig did between September 12 and
18, while Pershing was busy at St. Mihiel. During
this period fifteen divisions of the British Third and
Fourth Armies fought the battle of Epehy, and drove
twenty German divisions back into the main Hinden-
burg line, capturing 11,750 prisoners and 100 guns.
Simultaneously Debeney’s First French Army per-
formed the same function between St. Quentin and
La Fere.
While these events were taking place on the
Cambrai—St. Quentin front Pershing was quietly
transferring troops from the St. Mihiel salient to
i53The Last Four Months
Verdun. This movement had begun as soon as it
was seen that the American divisions in the front line
would succeed in the task of obliterating the salient,
and that the reserve divisions would not be needed.
It was carried through with the utmost secrecy, the
American troops on the new front created by
the battle of St. Mihiel doing everything that was
possible to produce the impression that the advance
would be continued towards Metz and Briey. Be-
tween the Meuse and the western edge of the
Argonne, which had been inactive for more than a
year, French troops continued to hold the trenches
while the First American Army assembled behind
them, and they were not relieved until the night of
September 25-26. There is little doubt that the
Germans were surprised when the great battle opened
with an American attack between the Meuse and the
Argonne, for they had not reinforced their front,
which was held by four divisions, who were
overwhelmed by the nine American divisions which
advanced against them. By the evening of the 27th
the Americans had taken the first line defences on
the whole front of their attack, and in the centre had
pressed forward to a depth of some seven miles, to
the southern slopes of Montfaucon. This hill domin-
ates the surrounding country, and for that reason the
Crown Prince William had had built for himself on
it a palatial dug-out from which he directed the opera-
tions in his unsuccessful attempt to capture Verdun.
154Armageddon
A gallant attempt to storm the hill and the village
on its summit made with the aid of tanks in the
evening failed, but both were carried in a second
attack the next day. By the evening of September 29
the Americans were in possession of the first and
second German systems of defence between the
Meuse and the Argonne, and had in places penetrated
the third system. Ten thousand prisoners fell to
Pershing in this first advance.
Ludendorff now became suddenly aware that he
was menaced by a deadly blow at his lateral communi-
cations. He could write off St. Mihiel as a regrettable
incident; he was, in fact, preparing to come out of
the salient when he was attacked. The majority of
the troops defending it had been of inferior quality,
and the Germans could always throw the blame for
their failure upon the Austrians who fought with
them. But the capture of Montfaucon was quite a
different matter. The Americans were on territory
which had not been trodden by Allied troops since
the early days of 1914, having broken through de-
fences which had been prepared and held by the Ger-
mans since the first days of trench warfare, trenches
established on ground as difficult to attack as that on
any part of the whole long front. There was no ques-
tion of yielding voluntarily a foot of that ground,
which was especially precious to the Germans as their
lines through it ran nearer than elsewhere to the Metz-
Maubeuge railway. The American advance, there-
i55The Last Four Months
fore, confronted Ludendorff with a crisis which had
to be dealt with at any cost.
While the battle had opened thus auspiciously on
the Verdun front, Gouraud had attacked simultane-
ously in Champagne on a front of eighteen miles from
the west of the Argonne towards Reims. The Cham-
pagne hills had been the scene of Joffre’s first efforts
to wear down the enemy by the “ nibbling ” process,
and of his attempt to force a \yay through the trench
barrier in one great rush in September, 1915. The
left of Gouraud’s battle front included part of the
ground on which he had defeated the German attack
of July 15, when bombardment and counter-bom-
bardment had torn the surface of the heathlands and
left an area of desolation and destruction, which, if
less deep than that of the Somme battlefields, could
only be compared in its intensity with that on the
Ypres front.
Forward movement across country so pitted
with mine craters and shell holes was very laborious,
and the Germans held all the heights command-
ing the lines of the French advance. Gouraud’s
progress on the first day was therefore slower than
Pershing’s, and by the-evening of the 27th his in-
fantry had only got forward some three miles. It
took him three days of hard fighting, to force his way
clear"of the old battlefields, but by September 30
he had won through, and thenceforward his diffi-
culties diminished just when those of Pershing began
156Armageddon
to increase. On October 1 he was on the outskirts
of Challerange, some nine miles from his starting
point, having captured 13,000 prisoners and more
than 300 guns, and having made Ludendorff realise
that he constituted a danger not less imminent than
that of the American advance. There for the
present I must leave the right wing of Foch’s battle
to turn to the British front.
The British attacks were timed to begin in the
early morning of September 27, and on the evening
before a great bombardment opened on a thirty-mile
front, from a point about two miles north-west of St.
Quentin, as far as the Sensee River north-west of
Cambrai. Then in the grey light of early dawn the
4th, 6th, 17th and Canadian Corps, thirteen divisions
in all, of Byng’s Third Army and Horne’s First
Army advanced on the Cambrai front, stormed the
immensely strong Canal du Nord, swept beyond
Bourlon Wood and Fontaine-Notre Dame, the ex-
treme limits of our advance in the first battle of Cam-
brai of November, 1917, and captured Sailly, more
than six miles from their starting point, taking over
10,000 prisoners and 200 guns. By this blow Cambrai
,was threatened from the north, whereas in the pre-
vious battle we had attempted to approach the town
from the south-east, where the St. Quentin Canal was
a formidable obstacle to our troops, and we had in one
bound got sufficiently near to the railway lines, which
converged on Cambrai and made it one of the most
i57The Last Four Months
important junctions in the hands of the Germans, to
be able to deny their use to the enemy.
I have already mentioned that Ludendorff had,
in his anxiety to protect Cambrai, been withdrawing
troops from Flanders. Doubtless he remembered our
experiences in the third battle of Ypres, and recalled
the fact that the Flanders mud had there done
more to check our progress than had the German
troops. The season was already far advanced and
there had been a good deal of rain. The state of his
reserves was such that in order to meet the American
advance west of the Meuse, and the British advance
on Cambrai, both of them blows aimed at his vitals,
he had to take chances somewhere, and he decided
to take them on the Flanders front. He left less
than five divisions to hold the seventeen miles of front,
from near Vormezeele, four and a half miles south of
Ypres, to Dixmude, and on September 28 this thin
line was attacked and overwhelmed by the Belgian
army, supported by some French divisions, and by
six divisions of Plumer’s Second Army, the whole
under the command of King Albert. The success
won by the gallant Belgian king, who had seen his
army cooped in for four years behind the floods of the
Yser, and had only left it at rare intervals, living with
his Queen in a little villa within range of the German
guns and in a district incessantly attacked by the
enemy’s bombing aeroplanes, was startlingly com-
plete and exceeded the wildest expectations. The
158Armageddon
i
Flanders ridges, up which we had hewn our way at
heavy cost in three and a half months of fighting in
the autumn of 1917, were won in less than forty-eight
hours. The French and Belgians, following up this
success vigorously on the left of the battle, swept for-
ward beyond Passchendaele, and by the evening of
October 1 had penetrated almost to the outskirts of
Roulers, while Plumer, throwing in three more divi-
sions, drove across the Messines Ridge, cleared the
Lys valley from Armentieres to Comines, and ad-
vanced to within two miles of Menin. Thus Lille,
like Cambrai, was menaced from the north.
While King Albert was putting the finishing
touches-to his victory the crisis of the great battle had
been reached and passed. The bombardment which
had begun on the evening of September 26 on the
front of the British Fourth, Third and First Armies,
had been continued on the front of the Fourth Army
throughout the 27th and 28th, while the other two
armies were fighting their way towards Cambrai.
During the final stage of that bombardment nearly
1,000,000 shells, weighing some 25,000 tons, were
poured into the German lines. This wholesale ex-
penditure of ammunition took place during about
one-tenth of the period of the whole battle, and on
considerably less than one-tenth of the fronts
attacked.
During the war of 1870-71 the total number of
rounds fired by the German artillery in the field
i59The Last Four Months
amounted to 360,000, as compared with 4,862,500
tons of shell fired by the British artillery alone on
the Western front, and yet, so tremendous had the
effect of the German guns appeared to be in those
days, that Napoleon III. told his enemies after his
surrender at Sedan that he felt himself beaten by their
artillery. Science and industry have in less than fifty
years developed man’s power of destruction to an
extent which makes comparison with the past futile.
With this artillery attack we reverted to former
methods, and the reason for doing so was, that imme-
diately behind that part of the German front to be
attacked by the Fourth Army, ran the St. Quentin
Canal, which merges near Cambrai in the navigable
Scheldt, is capable of taking the largest barges and
is unfordable. With such an obstacle in their path
tanks could not be used to prepare the way for
the infantry, except against such portions of the
German line as lay west of the canal, and against the
two stretches where the canal ran under ground, one
of about four and a half miles between Bellicourt and
Vendhuile, the other of about 1,000 yards long just
north of St. Quentin known as the Le Tronquoy
Tunnel. Further, there was no longer any question
of obtaining surprise, the Germans were well aware
that we intended to attack, and therefore one of the
great objections to a prolonged bombardment disap-
peared. So the guns again came into their own. It
was long since the Germans had been subjected to
160Armageddon
such a dose of shelling, and many of their troops hav-
ing come from the Eastern front, or being fresh drafts
from Germany, had never experienced a really in-
tense and prolonged bombardment. The moral effect
of this cannonade was therefore very great. It drove
the enemy into his deep dug-outs and tunnels, and
prevented his carrying parties from bringing up food
and ammunition.
At 5.30 a.m. on September 29 Rawlinson’s
Fourth Army attacked the heart of the Hindenburg
line, on a front of twelve miles, with the 9th
British Corps and the 2nd American Corps with the
Australian Corps in support behind it. Debeney’s
First French Army extended the battle front to the
south, while two corps of the Third British Army
prolonged it to the north as far as the loop in, the
St. Quentin Canal at Marcoing. This was the
decisive day of the great battle and .was marked by
many glorious feats of arms. The 9th Corps attacked
the St. Quentin Canal at and north of Bellenglise,
the 46th Division, North Midland Territorials,
leading, the men advancing equipped with life-
belts, requisitioned from the Channel steamboats,
and carrying mats and rafts. Here and there they
managed to cross by foot bridges, which ,the enemy
had been unable to destroy, but the majority dropped
down the sheer sides of the canal, swam across, clam-
bered out and stormed the German trenches on the
top of the eastern bank. Then swinging southward
L	161The Last Four Months
they surprised the enemy before he had realised the
new direction of the attack, and on this one day
the division captured over 4,000 prisoners and 70
guns.
The 2nd American Corps attacked the Bellicourt
Tunnel front, which the Germans, knowing that it
was exposed to tank attack, had fortified with especial
care. The 30th American Division stormed through
the intricate web of barbed wire and the network of
trenches which surrounded Bellicourt, and breaking
clean through this section of the main Hindenburg
line, carried the village, only to be attacked in the
rear by the German machine-gunners who had come
out of their subterranean shelters in the tunnel _ The
Australians coming up in support had to tackle these
pests without the aid of artillery or tanks, for both
the barrage and the tanks had gone forward with the
Americans, but they overcame them, and another
breach in the Hindenburg line was effected.
The 27th American Division attacking on the left
of the 30th, had an especially difficult task, for the
westerly bend in the canal at Vendhuile made it im-
possible for the British troops farther north to keep
pace with the advance of the 27th, and its left flank
was exposed to cross fire of artillery and machine-guns
from the ridge north-east of Vendhuile on the
eastern bank of the canal. Two regiments of the
division, the 106th and 107th, had therefore to fight
desperately hard to safeguard the left of the division,Armageddon
while the right and centre pushed on to the village
of Bony. Later the British 12th and 18th Divisions
forced their way across the canal to the north of the
tunnel, and relieved the pressure on the left flank of
the 27th American Division which had beaten off
repeated and fierce German counter-attacks.
On September 30 and on the following days the
yielding enemy was driven back on the whole front
of the Fourth, Third and First Armies. On the right
of the Fourth Army the 1st British Division had,
by the 30th, gained possession of the Le Tronquoy
Tunnel, and crossed the canal to the north of St.
Quentin, a feat as splendid as that of the 46th Divi-
sion on the previous day. Its immediate conse-
quence was that the Germans retired from St.
Quentin, which fell into the hands of the French
on October 1. The Australians, passing through
the Americans, sent the right centre of our battle
front forward to within touch of the last line of the
Hindenburg system which ran through Beaurevoir.
The New Zealanders and the 3rd British Divisions
crossed the canal to the south of Cambrai, while the
Canadians all but encircled the town to the north.
By October 3 the Fourth Army had broken through
the Beaurevoir line, and by the 5th the whole line of
the canal, and the Hindenburg defences along it, were
in our hands.
The victory was complete and decisive, and in
winning it the three British armies had captured
163The Last Four Months
36,500 prisoners and 380 guns. Thirty British and
two American divisions with a British cavalry division
had defeated thirty-nine German divisions, holding
the strongest defences ever devised by the wit of man.
At last after four years of dogged effort the great
trench barriers had been pierced, for between the
British army and its objective^ Maubeuge, there lay
but one German line, which the enemy, believing the
Hindenburg system to be proof against all assaults,
had not troubled to complete. This line lay some
fourteen miles back, and its artificial defences con-
sisted of nothing more formidable than a thin fence
of barbed wire, with the sites of the trenches to be
dug behind it marked out upon the ground. The
victors of Cambrai looked out over rolling, wooded,
and well-watered country with something of the joy
and wonder which filled the soldiers of ^enophon
when at the end of their great march they first saw
the sea. The leafy trees, the harvested fields, the
green meadow lands and the valleys were to an army
which had lived and fought for four years surrounded
by hideous devastation, with the stink of the blood-
soaked, battle-torn ground ever in their nostrils, more
convincing evidence of achievement than tens of thou-
sands of prisoners and hundreds of guns.
The effect of the three great blows on the Meuse-
Champagne front, on the St. Quentin-Cambrai front,
and in Flanders waS', as Foch had hoped it would be,
to cause the Germans to yield in the intervals between
164Armageddon
those attacks. By the end of September the enemy
had begun to withdraw between Lens and Armen-
tieres before the left of our First Army and our Fifth
Army, and there were signs of retirement from the
St. Gobain bulge. He was at once pressed by the
French and British forces on those fronts, and the
battle thereupon enveloped the whole 250 miles from
Dixmude to the Meuse. Foch’s great conception had
been realised; he had delivered his big kick and the
whole German front was crumbling under it. For a
time, on the British front at least, the German moral
broke down, prisoners were taken from the German
infantry in great numbers and without much resist-
ance, and there were signs of confusion and disorder
in the enemy ranks, though the German artillery re-
tained much of its efficiency and the machine-gunners
continued to fight with their old devotion and skill.
More important still the resolution of the German
High Command was badly shaken. There were no
men in Germany to replace the tremendous losses in
the field, and many of Ludendorff’s divisions were
reduced to mere skeletons. He had piled up behind
his front, for his great offensive, enormous stocks of
shell, and of military stores, and had had neither the
time nor the transport to remove them. The Allies
had captured thousands of guns. The output of the
German munitions factories was quite incapable of
making good these losses, and he had ample evidence
that the Allied factories had not yet reached the
r65The Last Four Months
zenith of their production. In September Haig had
more guns, more machine-guns, more ammunition
and more aeroplanes than he had ever possessed,
.while the growth of the American army was daily
bringing more and more guns into line.
With dwindling resources, Ludendorff saw him-
self faced by three great dangers; in the east the
Americans, more numerous and efficient than he had
believed they could possibly be, were threatening his
communications between Metz and Mezieres; in the
centre the British army had beaten the best of his
troops in their strongest defences, and he had no
more Hindenburg lines to stay its progress; in
Flanders the Belgians, whom he had classed as
capable only of defence, had won their way into the
open and were fighting with unexpected dash.
Lastly, Bulgaria had collapsed, Mackensen was in
dire straits and was clamouring for reinforcements
to enable him to escape from the Balkans. Under the
pressure of these calamities Ludendorff threw up the
sponge on the evening of September 28. The next
day he and Hindenburg met the Kaiser and the
Foreign Secretary, who had come to headquarters,
and insisted on an immediate request for an armistice.
In the afternoon the Kaiser, without consulting his
military advisers and much to Ludendorff’s disgust,
issued his pronouncement on the introduction of
Parliamentary Government and von Hertling ceased
to be Chancellor. Ludendorff then sent one of his
166Armageddon
staff, Major Freiherr von der Bussche, to Berlin to
explain to the Vice-Chancellor von Payer, who was
in charge of the Administration while Prince Max
of Baden was endeavouring to form a Government,
that an immediate offer of peace must be made.*
Von Payer pressed for delay, pointing out that there
was no Government in power to negotiate, but
Hindenburg, who had accompanied the Kaiser to
Berlin, immediately replied:
Main Headquarters, Oct. 1, 1918. 1.30 p.m.
To Major Frhr. von der Bussche,
for Vice-Chancellor von Payer.
Provided that a guarantee can be given between 7 and
8 o’clock this evening that Prince Max of Baden is forming
the Government, then I agree to postponement until
to-morrow morning.
Should there, however, be any doubt about the forma-
tion of the Government, then I must insist that the
declaration be made known to the foreign Powers to-night.
(Signed) von Hindenburg.
Made known to His Excellency von Payer on October 1,
2 p.m.	(Signed) Frhr. von der Bussche.
This note was naturally assumed in Berlin to
be a cry of despair, and when we consider the events
.which led up to it this seems to be the only possible
interpretation. It is now maintained in defence
of Hindenburg and Ludendorff that the object of
* Ludendorfl’s account of these proceedings is contained in pp. 583 et
seq, of his Reminiscences. He suppresses many of the documents I have
quoted.
167The Last Four Months
this startling message, to which Ludendorff makes no
reference in his Reminiscences, was to hasten the for-
mation of the new Government, but the formation of
a Government could not by any stretch of imagination
be supposed to influence the military situation on the
front, and there was no reason, if that situation had
not been held at German Army Headquarters to be
desperate, why Prince Max should not have been
given as much time as he needed to form his Adminis-
tration. Ever since Haig’s victory of August 8
Ludendorff had been pressing his Government to
open negotiations, because he was then convinced
that Germany’s military position must go from bad
to worse. It seems more than*probable that, when
the Hindenburg line was broken, he wanted an
immediate armistice, because he feared that a general
collapse was imminent and that he might, if he
could not obtain a cessation of hostilities, be forced
before long to accept an unconditional surrender.
It is absurd to suppose that he, with his great
military experience, could have imagined that the
Allied and Associated Powers would agree to any
terms of armistice, after they had just won the
greatest victory in the whole course of the war,
unless those terms made it impossible for Germany
to resume the struggle in any form. An offer to
conclude peace made immediately after the strongest
German defences had been pierced is obviously
very different from such an offer put forward whenArmageddon
the Hindenburg line was still intact, and could in
the circumstances be nothing less than an open
acknowledgment of defeat. It is, therefore, only
reasonable to suppose that Hindenburg and Luden-
dorff believed that their armies had been decisively
beaten and that there was no better alternative to
such an acknowledgment. The defence that they
were influenced by the political rather than by
the military situation has been put forward in
Germany in support of the fiction that the German
army was unbeaten, and that it was the politicians
and the German public who lost their heads and sur-
rendered when it was still possible for the German
army to wring favourable terms from us.
This defence is shown to be untenable by a state-
ment, made on October 2, on the military situation to
the party leaders of the Reichstag by Major Freiherr
von der Bussche, who, as Ludendorff admits, had
been carefully coached by him and presented his
views correctly. The statement ran :
In a few days the situation has fundamentally changed.
The collapse of the Bulgarian front has entirely upset our
disposition of troops. Our communications with Constanti-
nople were threatened, as well as the shipping route
indispensable for the transport of our supplies on the
Danube. We were compelled, if we were not to leave
the Entente a free hand in the Balkans, to send German
and Austro-Hungarian divisions ear-marked for the
Western front to those regions, abandoning the Black Sea
169The Last Four Months
and Roumania. We were obliged to make an immediate
decision. The entrainment of our troops had already
begun. We have every justification for hoping that the
situation in the Balkans may be re-established, at all
events sufficiently to guard our own interests. Unfortu-
nately, as I shall explain, this cannot be done without great
detriment to the situation as a whole. Almost simulta-
neously with the offensive in Macedonia, violent enemy
attacks have been made in the West. They have not found
us unprepared. All possible measures have been taken
to hold them up. Divisions from the East were on the
way to relieve the sorely tried divisions in the West.
Unfortunately a portion of these troops had to be diverted
to the Balkans. The last men capable of bearing arms
had been withdrawn from the East. We calmly awaited
the decisive battle. The Entente knew how to conceal
from us where the attacks would take place. From the sea
to Switzerland preparations for the attack were in progress.
The most extensive was against Lorraine and the Sundgau,
and we were forced to distribute our reserves and to keep
the whole front in a state of readiness for the attack. Con-
siderable forces had to be stationed, especially in Lorraine
and in the Sundgau, for the defence of German territory.
After carrying out the necessary movements, we were
absolutely convinced that we should emerge victorious
from the coming battles, and that we should be able to
break the opposition of our enemies by the enormous
losses which we anticipated they would suffer. Conse-
quently, by putting in reserves at the right time, we
have been able to hold up the enemy at all those places
where, by means of tanks, by surprise attacks or superiority
in numbers, he has penetrated our fines. The fighting of
the last six days may be termed successful for us, in spite
of the loss of prisoners and material.
170Armageddon
In comparison with our successes in the spring offensive
the enemy has made little progress. In the majority of
cases his continuous onslaughts have been countered with
unusual obstinacy on the part of our troops. According
to our own reports the enemy has suffered the heaviest
losses.
The majority of our troops have fought splendidly
and made superhuman efforts. Their old brave spirit
has not died out. The numerical superiority of the enemy
has not been able to terrorise our men. Officers and men
vie with each other in deeds of valour.
In spite of these facts, the High Command has been
compelled to come to the enormously difficult decision that
in all human probability there is no longer any prospect
of forcing the enemy to sue for peace. Two factors have
had a decisive influence on our decision, namely, tanks and
our reserves. The enemy has made use of tanks in unex-
pectedly large numbers. In cases where they have sud-
denly emerged in huge masses from smoke clouds, our
men were completely unnerved. Tanks broke through
our foremost lines, making a way for their infantry,
reaching our rear, and causing local panics, which entirely
upset our battle control. When we were able to locate
them our anti-tank guns and our artillery speedily put an
end to them. But the mischief had already been done,
and solely owing to the success of the tanks we have suffered
enormous losses in prisoners, and this has unexpectedly
reduced our strength and caused a more speedy wastage
of our reserves than we had anticipated. We were not in a
position to make use of similar masses of German tanks.
Our manufacturers, under the existing pressure, were
absolutely" unable to supply them in large numbers,
without causing other more important things to be
neglected. The question of reserves has, however, been
171The Last Four Months
the decisive factor. The army entered the fray with
depleted numbers.
In spite of using every possible device, the strength
of our battalions sank from about 800 in April, to 540 by
the end of September. And these numbers were only
secured by the disbanding of 22 infantry divisions (66
infantry regiments). The Bulgarian defeat has eaten up
7 more divisions. There is no prospect whatever of raising
the strength. The current reserves, consisting of men
who are convalescent, combed out men, etc,, will not even
cover the losses of a quiet winter campaign. The inclusion
of the 1900 class will only increase the strength of the
battalions by 100, and that is the last of our reserves.
The losses of the battle which is now in progress are, as I
have stated, unexpectedly large, especially as regards
officers. That is a decisive factor. If the troops are to
stem the onslaught or to attack they require more than
ever the example of their officers. The latter must, and
have, sacrificed themselves unreservedly. The regimental
commanders and leaders fought in the front lines together
with their men. I will give one example only. In two
days of fighting one division lost all its officers, dead or
wounded, and three regimental commanders were killed.
The small number of reserve officers has sunk to nothing.
The same applies to the N.C.O.’s. The enemy, owing to
the help he has received from America, is in a position to
make good his losses. The American troops, as such, are
not of special value, or in any way superior to our men.
In those cases in which, owing to numbers alone, they
gained an initial success, they were finally held at bay
by our troops. They were, however, able to take over large
portions of the front, thereby permitting the English and
French to liberate some of their experienced divisions and in
this way form an almost inexhaustible supply of reserves.
172Armageddon
Up till now our reserves have been adequate to fill the
gaps and drafts have duly arrived. The hardest attacks
were repulsed. The fighting was described to be of
unparalleled severity. Then our reserves began to fail.
If the enemy continues the attack, the situation may de-
mand a withdrawal from extensive sectors of the front.
We can continue this kind of warfare for a measurable
space of time, we can cause the enemy heavy losses,
devastating the country in our retreat, but we cannot
win the war.
This decision and these events caused the idea to ripen
in the minds of the Field-Marshal and Ludendorff to
propose to the Kaiser the breaking-off of hostilities, so
as to spare the German people and their Allies further
sacrifice. Just as our great offensive of July 15 was
abandoned, when the sacrifice entailed no longer warranted
its continuation, so the decision now had to be taken that
it was hopeless to proceed with the war. There is still
time. The German army is still strong enough to hold
the enemy for months, to achieve local successes and to
expose the enemy to fresh sacrifices. But every day
brings the enemy nearer his goal, and will make him less
inclined to conclude a peace with us which will be satis-
factory on our side.
/ Therefore no time must be lost. Every day the situation
/may become worse, and give the enemy the opportunity
of recognising our momentary weakness, which might have
the most evil consequences for peace prospects as well as
for the military situation. Neither the army nor the Home-
land should do anything which would make our weakness
apparent; on the other hand, the Army and the Homeland
must stand together more closely than before. Simul-
taneously with the peace offer a united front must be
shown at home, so that the enemy recognise our unbending
i73The Last Four Months
will to continue the war, if the enemy will not make peace
with us, or only a humiliating one. If this should be,
then the endurance of the army will depend on a firm
attitude at home, and on the power of the Homeland to
inspire the Army.
This is a very human statement. It contains the
excuses and explanations of men who find themselves
beaten and are endeavouring to shuffle out of their
responsibility. Much is laid to the account of Bul-
garia, who by collapsing unwarrantably has upset the
best laid plans of the German Great Headquarters.
Ludendorff’s advocate says truly that the last man
capable of bearing arms had been withdrawn from
the East. For some time before the end of
September the German divisions on the Russian front
had been combed out and the fittest men had been
sent westwards to help make good the losses in
France. It is obvious that the German battalions in
the Western front would not have been permitted to
fall almost to half their proper strength, and that
twenty-two divisions would not have been disbanded
had there been men in the East available for service
in the West.
The situation on the Bulgarian front began to be
critical on September 19, and by no possibility could
troops starting westwards after that date have been in
time to save the Hindenburg line. Therefore the
statement that “the collapse of the Bulgarian front
has entirely upset our disposition of troops ” is a gross
174Armageddon
exaggeration intended to throw dust in the eyes of
the Reichstag leaders and save the face of the General
Staff. The defeat of Bulgaria was certain to bring
down Austria sooner or later and made the position
of Germany hopeless, but the General Staff knew
quite well that it would be many months before the
Allies would be able to attack the southern frontiers
of Germany, and that, vast as was the political effect
of these events, they had no immediate influence upon
the military situation in France. Bulgaria had asked
for an armistice on September 25, for she was very
anxious to get it concluded before Mackensen, who
was hurrying troops towards Sofia, could intervene.
The armistice was signed on September 29, and the
fact that Bulgaria had asked for terms and had sent
plenipotentiaries to meet Franchet d’Esperey was
notified to the world in our Wireless Press Summary
of September 28. These facts must therefore have
been known to German Great Headquarters on
October 2, but not a word is said of them to the
Reichstag leaders, who are led to believe that “ the
situation in the Balkans may be re-established.”
After this exordium on Bulgaria’s delinquencies
comes the true reason for the demand for the imme-
diate opening of peace negotiations. The German
armies in the West are in imminent peril, and if
hostilities are not stopped promptly they may be
unable to escape an overwhelming disaster. That is
in plain English what the statement means ^ The
i7SThe Last Four Months
German troops have been fighting splendidly, and
the General Staff had made every possible preparation
to meet the expected attack, but our superiority in
tanks and the exhaustion of the German reserves
have made the position hopeless.
I had written all that I have said in the earlier
part of this chapter on the effect of our tanks before
this document came into my hands, and it is interest-
ing to see how completely it confirms all the informa-
tion on this point which we had obtained before the
armistice. Not less interesting is the tribute paid to
Foch’s strategy. Great Headquarters were in fear of
attack along the whole front from the sea to Switzer-
land, and the remarkable statement is made that the
most extensive preparations for attack were against
Lorraine and the Sundgau, that is the frontier district
of Alsace, east of Belfort. This is evidence of the
effect of Pershing’s victory of St. Mihiel and of the
activities of the Second Army in simulating an offen-
sive towards Briey and Metz. It is difficult to make
this anxiety square with the disparaging remarks
about the American troops, for the German General
Staff must have known that the majority of the troops
on the Lorraine front were American. This is prob-
ably another attempt to save the face of the General
Staff, who had declared roundly that the Americans
would not be able to train troops to fight in any
numbers during 1918. As we know, preparations for
an offensive into Lorraine were not completed until
176
NORTH SEA
GERMAN DEFENSIVE
SEPTEMBER 1918
/ro/?£ Line July 15tl.P 1918	_________
..„......September 25th 1918 __________
Completed GERMAN SYSTEMS
Incomplete.
METZ-MEZIERES-BRUSSELS RAILWAY.
CALAIS
A - B AMERICAN FRONT September2S$
B -C
C -D
D-E
BRITISH
BELGIAN
				
				
				
THE MAPPA CO 1 TP LONDONArmageddon
some time later, and at this time there were no pre-
parations at all for an invasion of Alsace. Therefore
this statement is an admission that Foch had very
completely hoodwinked Ludendorff. Most interest-
ing of all is the evidence of the efficacy of Foch’s
method of exhausting the German reserves before
fighting his great battle. The picture drawn of the
state of the German army is impressive, and tallies
exactly with information received from other sources.
Truly the question of reserves was the “ decisive
factor.” The German reserves were exhausted and
therefore there was nothing to be done but to make
peace as quickly as possible. As the staff officer
naively remarks, the decision had to be taken that it
was hopeless to proceed with the war for the same
reasons as led to the abandonment of the great offen-
sive of July 15. The offensive of July 15 was aban-
doned because the Germans were soundly beaten in
the second battle of the Marne. On October 2 the
Great Headquarters were compelled to advise that
the struggle should be abandoned because the Ger-
man armies had been beaten.
Hindenburg, on the morning of October 3,
confirmed the statement made the previous day by
his representative in the following memorandum:
To the Imperial Chancellor.	Berlin, Oct. 8.
The High Command insists on the immediate issue of
a peace offer to our enemies in accordance with the decision
of Monday, September 29, 1918. In consequence of the
m	x 77The Last Four Months
collapse of the Macedonian front, and the inevitable
resultant weakening of our reserves in the West, and also
the impossibility of making good the heavy losses which
have occurred during the battles of the last few days, there
is no prospect, humanly speaking, of forcing our enemies
to sue for peace. The enemy, on the other hand, is continu-
ing to throw fresh reserves into the battle.
The German army still stands firm and is defending
itself against all attacks. The situation, however, is
growing more critical daily, and may force the
High Command to momentous decisions. In these
circumstances it is imperative to stop the fighting in
order to spare the German people and their allies unneces-
sary sacrifices. Every day of delay costs thousands of
brave soldiers their lives.—(Signed) von Hindenbubg.
The appeal to the Homeland to stand firm, with
which the gloomy review of the situation made to the
leaders of political parties ends, is curious as coming
from men who were pressing with all their energy
for an immediate opening of negotiations to men
who were anxious to delay so fatal a step until they
were better assured that it was unavoidable. Yon
Payer in particular seems to have taken a much
calmer view: of the situation than did the soldiers, and
before acceding to counsels of despair he wanted to
know more. On October 8 he therefore sent Hinden-
burg the following memorandum :
Beblin, Octobee 3, 1918.
Before coming to any decision as to a peace move, I would
request your Excellency to answer the following questions:—
178Armageddon
(1)	How long can the army hold the enemy the other
side of the German frontier ?
(2)	Must the Chief Army Command expect a collapse,
and if so, when ?
(3)	Is the military situation so critical that action
should immediately be taken to bring about an armistice ?
(4)	In the event of your reply to question 3 being in
the affirmative, is the Chief Army Command aware that
a peace move, under pressure of the critical military
situation, may lead to the loss of German territory, namely,
Alsace-Lorraine and the purely Polish districts of the
Eastern provinces ?
(5)	Does the Chief Army Command agree to the
dispatch of the enclosed draft note ?
I should be grateful to your Excellency for an immediate
answer.—(Signed) Payee, Representative Imperial
Chancellor.
The draft note referred to is presumably the first
request for an armistice sent to President Wilson.
Prince Max had arrived in Berlin, and he was no
more eager than his Vice-Chancellor to hoist the flag
of surrender, but the soldiers were insistent. The
same day (October 3) Hindenburg gave the following
answer to von Payer’s questions :	_
October 3.
(1) The question cannot be answered in exactly the
form in which it is put. The holding of the front depends
on many factors, amongst others on the resources and
ability of the enemy to continue his attacks, and on the
duration of our power of resistance.
At present the German army is standing firm. It will
withdraw from sectors if forced, clinging toughly to enemy
179The Last Four Months
soil. The duration of such withdrawals cannot be deter-
mined beforehand. But it is to be hoped that they may
protect German soil until next spring.
(2)	Answer to question 1 applies to this question. I do not
believe that there will be any general collapse. As long as
valuable reserves are at hand the yielding of the front conse-
quent on enemy break-throughs need not have such a result.
(3)	This question is answered by my communication
of October 3 to the Imperial Chancellor.
(4)	Unless things should change, the Chief Army Com-
mand will take into consideration the surrender of small
French-speaking portions of Alsace-Lorraine. For it there
is no question of the cession of German territory in the East.
(5)	Draft note was advised, but not enclosed.
These answers and the memorandum to which
they refer are very cautious, but leave no room for
doubt as to the opinion at Headquarters. The hold-
ing of the front is possible; the army may be able to
resist until the spring; the wholesale surrender of
Alsace-Lorraine need not be considered unless things
change, but it is impossible to guarantee any of these
things. The situation is highly critical and at any
moment it may be necessary to take momentous
decisions, that is to say, disaster may overtake the
German armies. Therefore it is imperative that
negotiations should be opened at once.
On October 4 Prince Max of Baden became Im-
perial Chancellor, and the next day the first request
for an armistice was dispatched to President Wilson.
The greatest battle in the world’s history had been
180Armageddon
fought and won. There was to be bitter fighting
before the end came, for Ludendorff made an attempt
to rally which met with some measure of success, and
the discipline of the German armies, which in the
first days of October appeared to be cracking, again
for a time asserted its influence. None the less, it was
the great battle begun on September 26 which
decided the issue of the war. This battle was so vast
that no single name has ever been suggested for it.*
During its course we British fought the second battle
of Cambrai, the battle of St. Quentin, and took
a part in the battle of Flanders, the Americans fought
the battle of the Meuse-Argonne, the French the
battle of Champagne, while the Belgians with French
help fought the battle of Flanders. These great
struggles, however, made up a whole, conceived and
directed by one man. Foch’s long-thought-out plans
and careful preparations had their reward. He was
ably supported by Haig, Pershing, Petain and King
Albert, and each of the Allied armies on the Western
front had played its glorious part in Armageddon.
Foch had worked patiently and skilfully up to a great
climax, and when the climax was reached the whole
of the huge machinery under his control had been
set in motion and every one of its parts had answered
to his controlling hand.
* While this book was in the Press M. Louis Madelin, in the August
number of the “ Rfvue de Deux Mondes,” has called the great struggle
“the battle of France.” This name just fails to be apposite, for an
important part of the battle was fought in Belgium.
181CHAPTER V
LUDENDORFF TRIES TO RALLY
The Delays to the Allied Advance—The Difficulties
of the Americans—Ludendorff s Plan of Retreat—
How it was Defeated
On none of the three fronts of attack which made up
Foch’s great battle was it easy to gather the fruits
of victory. In Flanders King Albert and Plumer,
having crossed the ridges, had behind them ground
over which the tide of war had ebbed and flowed for
more than four years, and now that it had been
finally turned back it had left a morass of stinking
mud which had obliterated every road and track.
Behind the main British battle lay the deepest zone
of devastation on the whole long front. From Vimy
Ridge to the eastern outskirts of Amiens, and thence
through St. Quentin northwards by Cambrai to
Douai, in an area of over one thousand square miles,
there was hardly a house to be found intact, no village
which had not been gutted; the surface of the ground
was torn and blasted by shell fire, the vegetation
withered by poison gas, the roads had been destroyed,
the railways torn up, and all the bridges over the
many rivers and canals blown down. Behind Gouraud
in Champagne lay a somewhat narrower but equallyLudendorff Tries to Rally
horrible belt of desolation. In rear of the Americans
were the battlefields of Verdun.
Therefore, on all the fronts the repair of the
communications behind the armies was a stupendous
undertaking, which not all the skill and tireless
energy of the engineers and working parties could
complete quickly. Without food, ammunition and
military stores the victorious troops could not get
forward, even against a badly shaken enemy, and
these could not be brought up to them until the roads
and railways had been to some extent restored. So
everywhere progress was for a time slow. The
Belgians were within two miles of Roulers by
October 1, but it was not until October 14 that King
Albert, having bridged the muddy gulf behind him,
was able to advance and enter the town. Cambrai
had been enveloped north and south by British
troops on September 30, but the Germans were not
completely cleared out of the town until October 9.
Debeney, with the First French Army, had
entered St. Quentin on October 1, but by the
10th he was only eight miles east of the place.
Only on the front between Cambrai and St. Quentin
was any rapid progress made. Gouraud had by
September 29 advanced about six miles through the
German lines, but by October 9 his men were only
one and a half miles farther forward.
Neither Gouraud’s advance to the west of the
forest nor that of the Americans to the east of it hadThe Last Four Months
been sufficiently deep to force the Germans out of
the Argonne. Now that forest runs roughly from
north-east to south-west along a series of rough
ridges which separate the valleys of the upper Aisne
and of the Aire. These forest-clad ridges gave the
Germans splendid vantage ground from which to
harass with artillery and machine-gun fire the Allied
troops on either side of the Argonne, and if these
troops were to get on there was nothing for it but
to clear the forest. By September 28 the American
left had penetrated some three miles into the
Argonne, but on that date the centre was nearly
five miles ahead on the outskirts of Exermont, and
was being worried by the German guns firing from
the Argonne heights into their flanks and rear. To
clear these heights and enable the centre to advance,
the American left had to force its way forward
through nine miles of the most difficult country on
the whole Western front. Under modern shell-fire
woods become an almost impenetrable tangle of
fallen timber, which affords ideal nests for the
enemy’s machine-guns. This tangle was made still
more difficult by cunningly-placed wire entangle-
ments and stretches of rabbit netting. The forest is
cut up by deep ravines with almost precipitous sides,
which made it very hard for the infantry to keep
touch, while tanks could be of no help to them, and
even the most experienced artillery would have been
put to it to give them support. It was a question
184Ludendorff Tries to Rally
of hard slogging infantry fighting, and the American
infantryman did slog hard, and after eleven days of
continuous, grim, dogged effort, by October 10 he
had won his way through.
Simultaneously with the advance in the Argonne,
which fell to the left of the 1st American Corps, the
right of that corps and the 5th and 3rd Corps worked
their way forward to the latitude of the northern
edge of the forest, while east of the Meuse sufficient
progress was made, in conjunction with French
troops, to safeguard the flank of the troops west of
the river. In all this fighting the casualties of the
American First Army were very heavy and the hard-
ships imposed on the troops severe. It is difficult
to see how this could have been avoided in the
circumstances in which the battle was fought. There
was undoubtedly lack of co-operation between the
infantry and the artillery and between the aircraft
and both. It is equally true that the eagerness of the
American infantry to get forward landed them in
awkward salients, in which they suffered very
severely, and that attempts to rush machine-gun nests
by direct attack had to be paid for at a heavy price.
In fact, the experiences of the American army in
this their first great continuous offensive battle were
in some respects similar to our own experiences in the
first battle of the Somme. No one will maintain that
the quality of the infantry of the British army, which
in the summer of 1918 drove the Germans across the
185The Last Four Months
Somme battlefields into and through the Hindenburg
line, can be compared with the quality of the infantry
,who, two years before, won their way up the Somme
heights. Then the pick of the manhood of the British
Empire fought and fell, while in 1918 the ranks con-
tained a high proportion of middle-aged men and
boys. Yet in 1916 we gained comparatively little at a
great price, and in 1918 we won much with far less
sacrifice of life. The deterioration in the quality of the
German troops in those two years does not wholly
account for the change. The essential difference in
the two battles is that the first was won by sheer
inexperienced valour, the second by valour combined
with skill. We have learned in this war that it is
possible to train the individual soldier and get him to
meet the terrible conditions of the modern battlefield
in far less time than had been supposed to be
necessary. The clerk from the counting-house, the
ploughman from the fields, and the hand from the
factory have all shown that with a few months’
instruction they can acquit themselves, under con-
ditions such as man has never been called upon
before to face, better than the best of the soldiers
of old, provided they are sent to take their
places in an organisation which has been perfected
and of which all the parts are working smoothly
together.
Contrary to general expectation, the great war
has shown that civilisation and education by develop-Ludendorff Tries to Rally
ing intelligence have improved the fighting powers
of the race, that the trained will can triumph over
the weaknesses of the flesh. But the war has also
shown conclusively that the experience of the past
still holds good in that the training of the individual
is a very small step toward the making of an army.
It is even a shorter step to-day than it was in the
past, for the organisation of the modern army is
infinitely more complex than was that of the armies
of old.
In 1918 all the parts of the British army had
learned, both by long and bitter experience and
as the result of Sir Douglas Haig’s careful and
systematic teaching, to work together for a common
end. Commanders of all grades had learned their
jobs, the staffs knew their business, infantry,
cavalry, artillery, engineers, trench mortars, machine
gunners, tanks and aircraft knew each what the
other could do and what the other needed. Sir
Douglas Haig had, from the time when he assumed
command of our armies in France, established a
system of instruction which was continually
developed and improved until in 1918 it was the
most complete organisation of its kind which has
ever assisted an army in the field. Unfortunately,
from the middle of 1916—when the first battle of
the Somme began—until the German attack in
Flanders ended on April 29, 1918, the army had not
the opportunity to make full use of the means of
187The Last Four Months
training at its disposal. The first battle of the
Somme merged in the battle of the Ancre, which
ended in the German retreat to the Hindenburg line.
Then came in succession the battle of Arras, the
battle of Messines Ridge, and the third battle of
Ypres, while the winter of 1917-18 had to be devoted
to preparation, with depleted ranks, for the expected
German offensive. The respite which the Germans
allowed us between the end of April and the begin-
ning of August, 1918, afforded us the longest period
of good weather for training and instruction .which
we had enjoyed since the battle of the Somme, and
it proved invaluable. The result of that period of
reconstruction, when the full benefits of Haig’s in-
structional arrangements were felt, showed them-
selves in the battle of Amiens and in the victories
which followed it.
Sir Douglas Haig has often been accused of
having maintained an extravagant organisation
behind his front at the cost of the fighting ranks.
He was looking forward confidently to the day when
he would get his enemy on the move, and when that
day came he was ready. It was the perfection of
the organisation of the services behind the British
lines, a perfection which was the outcome of long
experience, and the scale on which these services were
equipped, as much as the increased skill of the fight-
ing ranks, which enabled the British army to fight
continuously and victoriously for three months and
188Ludendorff Tries to Rally
keep up that succession of hammer blows to which
Foch has paid a generous tribute.
The American army had had little of the war
training which had taught the British army its lesson.
Many of the divisions which fought in the Meuse-
Argonne battle went into action then for the first
time. That being so, it was inevitable that there
should be defects in co-operation and that a high
price should be paid for victory. I have already
described the difficulties of the ground over which
the American troops fought. The difficulties which
confronted the services of supply were not less for-
midable. On the stretch of eighteen miles between
the Meuse and western edge of the Argonne—a front
of battle occupied by nine American divisions in the
first line, equivalent to eighteen British or French
divisions—there were only two main roads running
in the direction of the advance, one of them on the
extreme right flank, along the valley of the Meuse,
exposed to artillery fire from the heights in the hands
of the Germans on the east bank of the river, the
other on the left flank along the eastern edge of the
Argonne, exposed to artillery fire from the forest.
There was one more road, which ran through Mont-
faucon, parallel to the American line of advance, but
it was a very poor one, and the bottom soon fell out
of it under the combination of wet weather and a
never ending stream of traffic. Between these on
the front of the main American advance there were
189The Last Four Months
only narrow cross-roads connecting the villages, and
these roads had been shelled to pieces. The hilly and
wooded nature of the country made the task of con-
structing new roads, of repairing the existing ones,
and of laying railways very laborious, and conse-
quently in the early stages of the battle the transport
had to be crowded on to the very .few roads which
were fit for traffic.
On September 28 the main American advance
east of the Argonne had penetrated through the
German lines to a depth of seven miles. Eleven days
later it was barely two miles farther forward. This
slow progress was by no means only, due to the
necessity of clearing the Argonne, for the centre and
right of the First American Army was not troubled
by flanking fire from the forest. The difficulties of
getting forward food and ammunition and of sending
up timely reinforcements and of relieving tired troops
caused even more delay. Just as happened in our
early battles, so in this, the first great American
effort in the war, some divisions had to give ground
because they could not be supported in time. The
roads behind the army, too few and too poor to take
the immense amount of transport which was seeking
to find its way forward, became hopelessly congested,
and in some cases masses of vehicles were so jammed
that they could not be moved either forward or back-
ward for long periods. The consequence of this was
that it was not possible to get a regular supply of
„ igOLudendorff Tries to Rally
food up to the troops in front, and cases occurred in
which the men did not receive their usual rations for
four days.
There has been a great deal of talk of the break-
down of the American administrative services, and
unquestionably things did go wrong; but the critics
,who lay stress on the defects of organisation which
showed themselves are apt to overlook the conditions
under which battle was joined. It was a question
of attempting to force a decision by a great combined
attack on the main German defensive positions at
the end of September or of deferring a decisive attack
until the following spring. It is probably true that
no French or British staff would, after long experi-
ence of previous failure, have advised an attack on
the Meuse-Argonne front until elaborate improve-
ments and extensions of the roads and railways
behind the front of attack had been carried out, and
until equally elaborate preparations for prolonging
those roads and railways into the territory captured
from the Germans had been completed. It is prob-
ably equally true that French and British soldiers,
after the bitter lessons of the past, would not have
attacked with any confidence unless they had ocular
evidence that everything had been done beforehand
to help them forward. There are times and occasions
in war when the valour of ignorance has its advan-
tages. With greater experience the American in-
fantry would have learned to overcome the German
191The Last Four Months
machine-guns with less loss of life, and the services
of supply would have worked more smoothly. Had
the American army waited to gain that experience,
the war would certainly have been prolonged by at
least six months, and the cost in life would certainly
have been far greater than it was.
Pershing must have taken all these factors into
consideration when he threw in his vote for fighting
the great battle which began on September 26. He
decided that the vigour and valour of his troops would
more than counter-balance their lack of battle experi-
ence, and he was justified in the result. From
September 26 until the Kriemhilde system was
finally broken, by making the fullest use of his man
power, for 630,000 American troops were engaged
in this battle, he continuously menaced the Metz-
Mezieres railway, and forced Ludendorff to employ
more than forty divisions in an ineffectual effort to
stem his advance. The American attack, therefore,
formed an essential part of Foch’s plan, and had it
not been successful it is almost certain that the
Germans would have been able to withdraw in fairly
good order to the Meuse, and that we should not
have forced them to sign an armistice on Novem-
ber 11; but before it was successful there were many
delays. The first rush forward of September 26
changed to slow progress and a long struggle as much
against the difficulties of Nature as against the
resistance of the enemy.
192Ludendorff Tries to Rally
During the first week in October, then, the Allies
were, for the reason which I have explained, delayed
on all the main fronts of attack to a greater or less
degree. This gave the Germans time to pull them-
selves together to some extent, and Ludendorff
began to see a possibility of re-forming his armies
on a new line. There was a good deal of exaggera-
tion at various periods of the war on our side as to
the prowess of the Germans as diggers, and they
were reported to have defensive lines constructed
right back to the Rhine. These existed only in the
excited imaginations of those who at one time were
disposed to believe that in matters military the
Germans were demigods, but it was true that when
the Siegfried position was broken through Luden-
dorff still had defences to which to withdraw. His
military policy at this time is indicated in Hinden-
burg’s note of October 3 to the Vice-Chancellor.
The army was to fall back as deliberately as possible,
when retreat was necessary, to successive positions,
and he hoped to be able to keep the Allied armies
out of Germany at least until the spring. This
programme entailed a slow retirement to the Meuse,
and a prolonged stand on that river when it was
reached. His left flank, opposite the Americans,
was the nearest part of his lines to the Meuse, and
his right, in Belgium, farthest from that river.
Therefore, the two first steps necessary for a re-
adjustment of his front were to delay the Americans
N	193The Last Four Months
and to begin withdrawing his right from Flanders.
It was equally important that the British advance
through Cambrai towards Maubeuge should be
checked, for the British were considerably nearer to
the Meuse at Namur than were the German troops
about Ostend and Roulers. Lastly, it was neces-
sary to withdraw from the bulge in the German
line west of Laon, for the position there became
daily more precarious once the Siegfried line was
broken.
In looking over his map* Ludendorff saw that by
beginning to retire at once in Flanders he might hope
to establish his troops behind the Ghent Canal
and the River Scheldt as far south as Valenciennes.
With his northern flank on the Dutch frontier east
of Zeebrugge, and a formidable water obstacle in
front of his positions to protect them against the
dreaded tank, there was a chance of gaining the time
necessary to organise an orderly and gradual with-
drawal from Belgium, provided Haig and Debeney
could be checked sufficiently long between Valen-
ciennes and the Oise. This was the weakest link
in his new chain. The beginnings of a defensive
position had been prepared connecting the Scheldt
south of Valenciennes with the Oise west of Guise.
This line, to which the Germans had given the name
of the Hermann position, was very far from com-
plete, - because it had always been supposed that it
* The positions described in the following pages are shown on Map II.
194Ludendorff Tries to Rally
would take us so long to work our way through the
Siegfried system, if-we ever seemed likely to penetrate
it, that there would be plenty of time to complete
the Hermann position. However, the greater part
of the Hermann position followed the course of the
River Selle, and had great natural strength, which it
.was hoped would compensate for the lack of artificial
protection.
South of the Oise Ludendorff was better prepared
to meet and stay the progress of his enemies. East
of the St. Gobain massif and of Laon he had the
Hundung position, which extended as far south as
the Aisne and connected with the Brunhilde position.
Both these positions were well fortified, particularly
the latter, which stood in the way of Gouraud’s
advance. The German trenches ran along the north
bank of the Aisne, through Rethel, towards the
Argonne, and the river lay immediately in front of
them, while the north bank here dominates the south
bank. It was, therefore, a very formidable obstacle
to attack directly, and might be counted upon to
delay Gouraud for a considerable time. East of the
Argonne as far as the Meuse ran the Kriemhilde
position, which had a depth of some two miles, and
had not yet been reached by the Americans. East
of the Meuse and across the base of the St. Mihiel
salient there was the Michel position, which was well
entrenched. Behind the Brunhilde and the Kriem-
hilde positions there were the Hagen and Freya
195The Last Four Months
positions, which, like the Hermann position, had only
been sketched out.
On the existence of these various defensive lines,
natural or artificial, Ludendorff’s plans for rallying
his forces and keeping the Allies out of Germany
until the spring of 1919 were based. He proposed
to carry through an immediate and extensive retreat
in Belgium, French Flanders and Artois, to abandon
the Belgian coast, Bruges, Courtrai, Lille and Douai,
and to establish his front behind the Scheldt through
Ghent and Valenciennes. On the front of Haig’s
main attack he set about retiring to the Hermann
position along the Selle, and hoped to compensate
for its weakness by massing along it the troops he
had economised by shortening his front in the north.
He began a withdrawal of his centre from the St.
Gobain massif and from Laon into the Hundung
line, and prepared for a similar withdrawal in front
of Gouraud into the Brunhilde fines. East of the
Argonne his programme was to make the most of
the natural difficulties of the country to delay the
progress of the Americans towards the Kriemhilde
position as long as possible.
If the last phases of the war in the West are to
be followed, it is important to understand this scheme
of Ludendorff’s and to appreciate both where and
when he meant to stand and fight and where and
when he meant to retreat. After the Hindenburg
line was broken the front was in a continual state
rg'6Ludendorff Tries to Rally
of flux; news arrived almost daily of fresh progress
by the Allied forces, and it was difficult to discrimin-
ate between victories won by hard fighting and the
consequences of those victories.
There was hard fighting before the enemy was
completely smashed * for Ludendorff’s plan was
attended with a certain measure of success. By
October 14, when King Albert was ready to attack
again in Flanders, the arrangements for the German
retreat were well advanced, and it was on the whole
well conducted, though the enemy’s rearguards had
to struggle to gain time, and in spite of their resist-
ance he had to abandon numbers of guns and great
quantities of stores of all kinds. Roulers fell to
French troops on the 15th, Thourout was occupied
by the Belgians on the 16th, and the next day they
entered Ostend. Plumer, meanwhile, had entered
Menin and Courtrai and crossed the Lys. On
October 18 the Fifth British Army, farther south,
had found Lille evacuated by the enemy, and four
days later the whole of the Belgian coast was in our
hands, and the Germans had reached the line of the
Scheldt from Valenciennes to Ghent. There have
been many curious examples during the war of the
difference between the mentality of the Germans
and of other European peoples, but I doubt if there
has been anything stranger than their conduct during
their retreat through Flanders and Belgium. At the
last moment before they retired they brought into
197The Last Four Months
many of the principal towns wagon-loads of the flags
of the Allies, which included one peculiarly German
invention—a composite banner made up of the
colours of their chief enemies, and hawked these
round for sale to the inhabitants in order that they
might decorate their houses fitly for the welcome to
the incoming troops. It is out of the question that
this traffic in their shame can have taken place with-
out the assistance of the German authorities, who
were not too proud to allow money to be made out
of their defeat, but pretended shortly afterwards that
they were too proud to acknowledge themselves
beaten.
The retreat of the German centre from the
St. Gobain massif, Laon, the Chemin des Dames
and the neighbourhood of Reims was carried
through in fairly good order, though about Reims
it was hastened by the transfer to that neighbour-
hood of the 2nd and 3rd American Divisions in
succession. On October 13 the French entered
Laon, and two days later found themselves con-
fronted by the enemy in his new positions. Opposite
Gouraud the Germans .withdrew, when on October 8
the French attacked in force, into their Brunhilde
position along the Aisne, from the west of Rethel,
through Attigny, to Vouziers, just west of the
northern edge of the Argonne.
The German retreat from the main British front
between Cambrai and St. Quentin was, however,
198Ludendorff Tries to Rally
not carried through according to Ludendorff’s plan.
By incessant and skilful work on the part of the
engineers, bridges were thrown across the Canal du
Nord and the St. Quentin Canal, and the roads were
made possible for traffic, while farther back the rail-
ways, both narrow and broad gauge, were repaired
or relaid, so that as early as October 6, before the
German rearguards had been organised, the Fourth
and Third Armies were able to begin the second
battle of Le Cateau. This battle culminated in a
fine attack made on a front of seventeen miles
by those armies at dawn on October 8. It was
a bold measure to attempt to assemble in darkness,
on ground torn up by shell-fire and seamed with
trenches and with the wreckage of wire entangle-
ments, such a mass of troops on so wide a front,
but the time had come to be bold. The immediate
results of this attack were that the 9th Corps,
2nd American Corps and 13 th Corps of the
Fourth Army, all greatly assisted by tanks, made
very important progress in the direction of Le
Cateau, while the Third Army was able to com-
plete the encirclement of Cambrai on the south.
Debeney, continuing his role of extending the
battle front of the Fourth Army southwards, simul-
taneously drove the Germans back east of St.
Quentin.
The ultimate results were of much greater import-
ance in their effect upon Ludendorff’s plan. The
rggThe Last Four Months
enemy’s intended orderly retreat became a rout, and
the roads behind his front converging on the bridges
over the River Selle were blocked with troops and
transport, so that the time which was to have been
employed in the systematic occupation of the Her-
mann position had to be devoted to restoring order
amongst weary and dispirited troops and clearing
away such of the impedimenta as could be saved
from capture. On October 9 the Canadians entered
Cambrai from the north and the 57th Division from
the south, and drove the last Germans out of the <
town, while the Fourth and Third Armies, led by
cavalry patrols, took up the pursuit of the enemy
retiring towards the Selle, and drove him across the
field of the first battle of Le Cateau, where Smith-
Dorrien had fought von Kluck during the retreat
from Mons. By October 12 the enemy was found
to be established in the Hermann position, but his
retreat to it had cost him 12,000 prisoners and 250
guns.
On the American front there was no question of
a German retreat, and except in the northern part
of the Argonne Forest the Americans had to fight
hard for every yard of ground they gained. The
slow struggle through the southern end of the forest
had brought the Americans on October 1 to approxi-
mately its centre, and for a week little or no progress
was made. Then, fortunately, it became possible to
apply the plan, which had been originally attempted
800Ludendorff Tries to Rally
and had failed, of forcing the Germans to evacuate
the forest by advancing on both sides of it. On
October 6 and 7 troops of the American 28th and
82nd Divisions, after a desperately hard struggle,
took the village and chateau of Chatel and the
hills around it which dominate the eastern edge
of the Argonne. On October 8—that is, the same
day on which the Third and Fourth British Armies
made their dawn attack in the second battle of Le
Cateau—Gouraud had, it will be remembered, begun
his advance to the Aisne, and by the 9th his troops
were in position along the greater part of the western
edge of the forest. Fearful of being cut off, the
Germans thereupon evaeuated the Argonne, and on
October 10 the 77th American Division was clear of
the forest and in touch with the Germans on the
outskirts of Grandpre. East of the Argonne there
was no such rapid progress, and the Americans
fought their way slowly on to the forward positions
of the Kriemhilde system, with which they were
everywhere in touch by October 14. Five days
before this Pershing had handed over command of
the First American Army to General Liggett, for
the continued arrival of American troops had made
it necessary to form a Second American Army of
the troops occupying the Woeuvre front, east of the
St. Mihiel salient and opposite Metz.
Ludendorff appears to have been fairly well
Satisfied with the progress of his retreat by October
201The Last Four Months
16. His left and centre were by then back in their
new positions, which were strong, and his losses
during the retreat, if heavy, had not been over-
whelming. His right had not yet completed the
retreat from Flanders behind the Scheldt, but he had
good reason to believe that it would be able to do
so. Accordingly on October 17 he spoke much more
boldly to the German cabinet than he had done on
October 1. Prince Max of Baden was proposing to
pave the way for peace negotiations by offering to
abandon unrestricted U-boat warfare and to guaran-
tee that the German troops would not destroy
French and Belgian towns during their retreat. The -
rumblings of revolution were growing louder, and it
.was vitally necessary to make concessions to the
popular party, .which had lost all confidence in the
Great General Staff, and were becoming more and
more determined to enforce peace.
It had become abundantly evident that the
German people had only been induced to endure the
rigours of the blockade and to hold on by the lavish
promises of victory which had been given to them.
It was therefore impossible, while the military
situation on all fronts was going rapidly from bad to
worse and decisions had to be taken quickly, to
educate them to an attitude of endurance with the
object of minimising the effects of defeat. The
pretence that Germany had been fighting a defensive
war, which had periodically been put forward by the
202Ludendorff Tries to Rally
Kaiser and his advisers whenever their campaign of
conquest was checked, could not deceive anyone, and
least of all the German people. The popular senti-
ment in regard to war was summed up in the phrase,
“ World power or downfall,” the assumption being,
that there was no doubt as to which of these alter-
natives would be Germany’s fate. With rare skill
the German Government and its military advisers
had hitherto managed to obliterate the effect of their
failure to obtain their chief aims by dazzling victories
in secondary theatres of war. They had not
succeeded in conquering France in 1914 according
to plan, but this had been forgotten in the joy of
gazing at the brilliant prospect opened up by the
accession of Bulgaria, the overrunning of Serbia, and
the opening of the road to the East. The conquest
of Roumania had obliterated the memories of Ver-
dun; the collapse of Russia and the victory of
Caporetto had been ample compensation for the long,
costly and unfruitful struggle on the Western front
during 1917. Now, however, there was no carrot to
dangle in front of the donkey’s nose. Even in
an autocratic country it is not possible to deceive
all the people all the time, and the German
people knew in October, 1918, that the victory
which had been promised to them could never be
obtained.
The revulsion of feeling and the collapse of con-
fidence were such that no enthusiasm could be
203The Last Four Months
aroused for a war of endurance in defence of the
Fatherland. Yet this was what Ludendorff pro-
posed. He wished the negotiations to be continued
with President Wilson, but refused to agree to the
acceptance of any terms which would make Germany
militarily defenceless. He protested energetically
against the renunciation of the U-boat campaign, and
claimed that the German army should be allowed to
take any and every measure which would delay the
enemies’ advance. But while he was actually press-
ing his views upon the German cabinet another blow
had fallen upon him, and his new front had been
broken.
The enemy’s position along the River Selle, which
was the connecting link between the Scheldt and his
lines south of the Oise, was, as I have said, naturally
formidable. His left flank opposite Debeney’s army
rested on a series of very defensible wooded heights
which divided the valleys of the Selle and the Oise.
On the front of the Fourth British Army the Ger-
mans held the eastern bank of the Selle, and had occu-
pied the line of the railway which connects Le Cateau
and Solesmes. This railway line runs through a series
of embankments and cuttings, which provided the
German infantry with excellent cover and their
machine gunners with positions from which they
could sweep the valley, while the rolling heights be-
hind gave their artillery splendid opportunities for
dominating the approaches to the river. In front of
204Ludendorff Tries to Rally
the railway line a single, and as compared with the en-
tanglements of the Hindenburg line not very formid-
able, belt of barbed wire had been erected, but the
Selle, ordinarily an insignificant stream, had been
dammed by the enemy and was in flood, and in
itself constituted a serious obstacle to infantry,
which would have to force its way across in face of
machine-gun fire. The sites for a strong trench sys-
tem had been marked out by digging down to a depth
of about one foot, but the German infantry and en-
gineers, weary and dispirited by their defeats, had
not the energy to complete these trenches in the time
at their disposal. None the less, the attack on such
a position was a serious undertaking, particularly as
the enemy, knowing that it covered the direct road
to Maubeuge, had occupied it in great strength
and had numerous machine-guns and a powerful
artillery.
The battle of the Selle began in the early hours
of October 17 with an attack by Debeney’s First
French Army and the 9th, 2nd American and 13th
Corps of the Fourth British Army against the Ger-
man left, from Le Cateau southwards. The enemy
fought well, the 27th and 30th American Divisions
having a particularly hard task in their attack upon
the railway line south of Le Cateau, where it ran
along a commanding hill. It was only after two
days of strenuous effort that the Germans south of
Le Cateau Were forced back behind the S&mbre and
205The Last Four Months
Oise Canal. It was quite evident from this fighting
that the enemy was making a desperate effort to hold
up our advance. Appeals were issued to the German
troops to remember the devastation, which they had
seen in Belgium and northern France, and to save
their country from a like fate. But, though they
fought valiantly, they had lost confidence both in
themselves and in their leaders, and they had none
of the grit and staying power which distinguished
the British soldier when he was in like straits.
However, it still remained to tackle the German
main position along the Selle west of Le Cateau,
and this was done in a night attack by seven divi-
sions of the Third Army and one of the First
Army. A mist in the valley increased the cover
afforded by night, and enabled the infantry and
engineers to lay foot bridges across the Selle under
the very noses of the enemy’s machine gunners, and
tanks to be brought down unseen into the valley. At
2 a.m. on October 20 the British infantry advanced
to the assault, and helped by the ubiquitous tanks,
which succeeded somehow in getting across the
river, they stormed the heights on the east bank
after fierce fighting, for the Germans again fought
hard.
The weather had broken, the ground was satur-
ated, there was little shelter for the troops, the roads
churned up by shell-fire and by the stream of traffic
became rivers of mud, and both roads and railways
206Ludendorff Tries to Rally
were constantly being cut by mines, which the enemy
had buried beneath them and fitted with delay action
fuses, so that they would explode at irregular intervals
after our troops had passed beyond, but the enthu-
siasm of the British troops was not to be denied. On
October 23 the Fourth, Third and First Armies made
a general advance on a front of fifteen miles between
the Sambre and Oise Canal and the Scheldt. On the
right the Germans were driven back into the Mormal
Forest, in the centre our troops got within a mile of
Le Quesnoy, and on the left approached Valenci-
ennes. Thus, in the battle of the Selle, British,
French and American troops had made a breach,
about thirty-five miles wide and nearly six miles deep,
in Ludendorff’s rallying line. The twenty-four
British and two American divisions engaged had de-
feated thirty-one German divisions and had captured
20,000 prisoners and 475 guns.
I have mentioned that on October 14 the Ameri-
cans were in touch with the forward positions of the
Kriemhilde system. On that day there began an
eight-day battle on the front from the Meuse to
Grandpre, in which by incessant hard fighting the
Americans broke into the formidable German de-
fences at a number of points. On October 16 Grand-
pre was taken, while Gouraud on the American left
stormed the heights about Vouziers and crossed the
Aisne. On the 16th, 17th and 18th a succession of
fierce attacks,. in which four divisions took part,
207The Last Four Months
enabled the Americans to pierce the Kriemhilde line
near its centre. The Germans fought desperately to
hold the line and employed some of their best troops,
including the 3rd Guard Division, the infantry of
which was almost annihilated. The most important
result of this battle was to exhaust the German
defensive power on the Meuse front just as Haig’s
attacks had exhausted it on the Cambrai-St. Quentin
front, a secondary result being to straighten out
the American line, so that by the end of the
month it was well placed for another general
forward movement.
I have already explained that Ludendorff’s plan
of deliberate withdrawal to the Meuse depended on
holding off the British on the Selle and the Americans
on the Kriemhilde line. He was endeavouring to
assure his Government that there was no cause
for despair when the news of the Selle battle
and of the American attacks on the Kriemhilde
line reached them. It convinced them that there
was no line upon which the German army could
be relied upon to stand, and it shattered what
little faith they had left in their military adviser.
On October 26 Ludendorff tendered his resignation,
which was accepted, and the next day he left Great
Headquarters. The capitulation of Turkey, follow-
ing upon that of Bulgaria, and the decisive defeat of
the Austrians on the Piave coupled with the never-
ending tale of disaster on the Western front, andLudendorff Tries to Rally
the growing unrest in Germany left no glimmer of
hope in the minds of the Kaiser and his ministers.
While they were preparing to send in plenipoten-
tiaries to Foch, he, in order to make assurance doubly
sure, was setting the stage for the final advance.
o
209CHAPTER VI
THE LAST PUSH
The American Advance to Sedan — Gouraud Reaches
M6zi6res—The British enter Maubeuge and Mons—
The Condition of the German Army — Was the
Armistice Premature?
At the end of October Germany’s armies on the
Western front had suffered a series of crushing
defeats, her navy was seething with mutiny, her
working class population were on the verge of
starvation, the German people ;were at last aware of
the extent to which they had been deceived by
their rulers, and all of her allies had collapsed.
The military power of the United States was but
half developed, the output of the Allied munition
factories had not reached its zenith. After a long and
bitter struggle we had won a definite superiority in
the air, we had aeroplanes ready of a type capable
of bombing every town in Germany, and the U-boat
menace had been scotched, if not definitely mastered.
There could be only one end to the war; the question
was when that end would come.
The situation of France in 1870 after the battle of
Sedan had been, except as regards food stocks and the
determination of the people to resist, more hopeless
210The Last Push
than was that of Germany on October 30, 1918.
Almost the entire French army as it had existed at
the outbreak of the war had disappeared, and France,
too, had realised that she had been deceived by those
she had placed in authority over her. She overthrew
the Government; under the inspiration of Gambetta’s
leadership she created new armies and went on fight-
ing for six months, during which she caused her
apparently irresistible foe many moments of anxiety.
Germany had no need to create new armies. Those
she had in the field were still capable of prolonged
resistance provided they were inspired with patriotic
devotion, and determined not to yield until the last
extremity. Her enemies were still far from her
frontiers, there were many strong natural barriers
between the Allied armies and the interior of Ger-
many, and the German armies, if permitted to fall
back to these, would obtain a shorter and stronger
battle front on which they might hold out throughout
the winter. There was no precedent for a great and
powerful nation, which was fighting for its existence,
surrendering while it still had the means to resist.
Therefore, it was necessary to continue to press the
enemy until his means of resistance were destroyed
or until his will to fight was finally broken. Foch
therefore planned another great combined drive
against him.
When Germany in 1914 first invaded Belgium
and France by far the greater number of the German
211The Last Four Months
troops deployed on the Western front had crossed the
line extending from the Dutch frontier north of
Liege to Metz, a distance of 115 miles. As the war
.went on and Germany developed her man power, her
forces on the Western front had been strengthened,
and in the early months of 1918 they received a very
great reinforcement consequent on the collapse of
Russia. In August, 1914, some fifty-four German
infantry divisions had passed between the Dutch
frontier and Metz, and by the middle of 1918 the
front of deployment of 115 miles had developed into
a battle front extending from the North Sea near
Nieuport to Pont-a-Mousson on the Moselle. south
of Metz, a great arc with a circumference of about
350 miles. The maximum strength of the German
armies on and behind the circumference of this arc
amounted in May, 1918, to about 190 divisions.
These divisions were smaller than those of August,
1914, but their appurtenances, guns, mortars,
machine-guns, aeroplanes and war material of all
kinds had in the four years multiplied exceedingly.
Even when Ludendorff had completed his retreat
after the great battle of September 26—October 3,
his front from the Dutch frontier to the neighbour-
hood of Metz was not less than 250 miles in length,
and the number of divisions which he had on that
front and in reserve was not fewer than 160.
Therefore, in order to make good their retreat
the Germans had to get back across the 115 miles
212The Last Push
about three times as many men and many times as
much material as Moltke had sent westwards across
that line in August, 1914. In fact, they had to get
their armies through the neck of a bottle. It was
like trying to force an oak plant, which has grown in
four years from an acorn in a bottle of water, back
into the bottle without destroying the plant; a diffi-
cult problem if the neck of the bottle were clear, but
it was not. Behind the German centre lay the forests
and mountains of the Belgian and Luxembourg
Ardennes, a region traversed by few roads and fewer
railways, and washed by the Meuse, which had a
limited number of bridges. The main exits lay north
and south of the Ardennes, in the north from
Liege to Namur, in the south from Mezieres to
Longuyon.
The course of the Meuse from Mezieres to Namur
runs generally northwards, but at Namur, where the
Sambre joins it, it makes a sharp bend eastwards.
The consequence of this was that the German troops
on the Scheldt on either side of Ghent would, when in
their retreat they reached the longitude of Namur,
still have fifty miles to march to the river,
and would only find east of Namur four points of
passage. If the British succeeded in crossing the
Meuse between Namur and Dinant before the Ger-
man forces in Belgium had got over the river, there
was a probability that they would be driven against
the Dutch frontier and forced to surrender; if the
213The Last Four Months
German centre had not made good its retreat before
Gouraud and the Americans captured Mezieres and
Sedan it was in danger of being cut off. There was,
therefore, no longer any question of the leisurely re-
treat to the Meuse which Ludendorff had planned.
It was essential to withdraw to the river as quickly
as possible, but to do this without incurring irremedi-
able disaster it was still as necessary as it had been
since the end of September to delay to the utmost the
British advance on Namur and the American progress
towards Sedan.
This was the position of which Foch proposed to
take advantage by continuing the general plan of his
great battle. Gouraud and the Americans were to
strike for Mezieres and Sedan and block the southern
exits, while the British armies made for Maubeuge
and Mons and threatened Namur before the Germans
in western Belgium could get away. The advance on
Namur .would force the Germans to come out of the
greater part of Belgium in a hurry or be cut off, and
would save that sorely tried land from the destruction
.which was inevitable if it became the scene of pitched
battles, while the advance on Mezieres and Sedan
would have the same effect on the German centre.
The French armies in the centre were, therefore, to
continue their role of harassing and delaying the Ger-
man retreat, and the Belgian armies were to keep the
Germans busy on the Scheldt. The French troops
on King Albert’s right, however, with the help of two
214The Last Push
American divisions sent up to reinforce them, were
to assist the British advance by forcing the line of the
Scheldt about Audenarde.
On November 1 the last drive began, as had
Armageddon, with a Franco-American attack, and
again there lay in front of the American left a stretch
of mountain forest, the Forest of Bourgogne, a
northern extension of the Argonne. Again the in-
tention was to force the Germans out of the forest
, by a combined advance of the Americans to the east
of it, and of Gouraud’s army to the west. This time
the plan was completely successful. On the right of
the American battle front the 3rd American Corps
attacked in the Meuse valley, while the 5th American
Corps broke clean through such parts of the Kriem-
hilde line as it had not previously captured, and
made an advance of about five miles in the
one day. Simultaneously Gouraud extended his
hold on the heights on the eastern bank of the Aisne
opposite Vouziers. The Germans were in no mind
for a repetition of the Argonne struggle. Before the
battle started their moral had begun to give way
under the steady pressure of the American advance,
and now it gave way altogether, while the American
divisions which had done most of the hard fighting
in October had either been rested and their ranks re-
filled, or had been relieved by fresh divisions, with the
result that the First American Army was as full of
vigour and energy as it had been on September 26,
215The Last Four Months
despite the continuously wet and cold weather on the
bleak hills of the Meuse.
On November 2 the 1st American Corps on the
left of the First Army drove forward six miles, cap-
tured Buzancy, and lined the eastern edge of the
Bourgogne Forest, Gouraud at the same time reach-
ing its western edge throughout its length. The Ger-
mans immediately evacuated the forest and began a
general retreat before the First American Army and
Gouraud’s right. During the night of Novem-
ber 3 the infantry of the 2nd American Division,
giving the weary Germans no time to reorganise
a defence, made a remarkable pursuit and ad-
vanced in the darkness straight through the German
lines for a distance of five miles. This great
progress enabled the Americans to bring forward
long-range guns and to shell the railway stations of
Longuyon and Montmedy, through which the
Crown Prince was trying to get away as much as
possible of his war material.
The clearing of the Bourgogne Forest had enabled
Gouraud to join hands with the Americans on
November 3 to the north of the forest, and he thus
obtained a straight front of some nine miles beyond
the Aisne east of Attigny. He was now able to
threaten the retreat of the German troops holding
the formidable Brunhilde line farther west between
Attigny and Bethel, by pushing forward his right
wing in conduction with the American advance. On
si6The Last Push
November 4 he drove the enemy back from the
southern portion of the canal which connects the
Aisne near Attigny with the Meuse near Sedan.
This manoeuvre compelled the Germans to fall back
from the Brunhilde line in order to avoid being cut
off from Mezieres, and the French entered Rethel
on November 6.
Meanwhile, by November 5 the American front
had sprung forward another six miles, and on the
evening of the 6th, despite the endeavours of the Ger-
man machine-gunners to delay the pursuit, a division
of the 1st American Corps reached the Meuse oppo-
site the southern outskirts of Sedan, twenty-one miles
from its starting point of November 1. Gouraud,
with a longer distance to go and with the resistance
of the German troops, who had fallen back from the
Brunhilde line, to overcome, did not reach his ob-
jective, Mezieres, until the evening of the 10th. While
the 1st and 5th American Corps were advancing
northwards towards Sedan the right of the 3rd Corps
began to strike out eastwards, and it crossed the
Meuse and occupied Dun on November 4. Thence
on the following days, the 3rd, 2nd Colonial and 17th
French Corps on the right of the First American
Army gradually wore down the resistance of the Ger-
mans in the wooded Meuse hills, and on the morning
of November 11, when the Armistice came into effect,
the Franco-American front was within six miles of
Montmedy, where the German Crown Prince had
217The Last Four Months
lived during the battle of Verdun, when he was not
in his dug-out on the Montfaucon Hill. Though
Montmedy was not entered by the Allies until the
Germans had withdrawn in accordance with the
Armistice terms, they found on arrival that defeat
had not changed the German nature, for the little
town was pillaged by the enemy’s troops before they
left. These operations on the east bank of the Meuse
towards Montmedy were extended southwards by
the Second American Army, which began the long
threatened movement toward the Briey iron fields.
The reasons for this development I must leave for the
present to follow events farther north.
While the French and Americans on the southern
battle front were completing the task set them by
Foch, the British armies were again in motion. The
Germans at the end of October, after their defeat on
the Selle, occupied the line of the Scheldt from
Ghent to a point about two miles south of Valenci-
ennes, whence their front ran southwards to the River
Sambre, which it reached a little above Landrecies.
The distance between the Scheldt and the Sambre
on this line was not more than eighteen miles,
and the southern five of these eighteen miles were
taken up by the Mormal Forest. Sir Douglas Haig’s
first care was, therefore, to get more room for his
advance between the Sambre and the Scheldt, and
particularly to force the enemy to fall back from the
tangle of reclaimed land, cut up by innumerable
218The Last Push
dykes, which stretches north of Valenciennes as far
as the Conde Canal. Accordingly, on November 1,
while the Americans and French were attacking on
the Meuse-Argonne front, the 17th Corps of the
Third British Army, and 22nd and Canadian Corps of
the First Army, attacked south of Valenciennes, and
after two days’ heavy fighting had by the evening of
November 2 turned the line of the Scheldt from the
south, and the Canadian corps had entered Valenci-
ennes. This at once gave Haig the elbow room he
required, and as there was no time to spare, if the
enemy was to be prevented from making good his
retreat to the Meuse, the Fourth, Third and First
Armies attacked on November 4 on a thirty-mile
front, from the Sambre Canal eight miles south
of the Mormal Forest to the north of Valenci-
ennes. The British right had the difficult tasks of
crossing the Sambre Canal, which is as wide as the
Scheldt Canal stormed on September 29, and con-
tains more water, and of forcing a way through the
Mormal Forest. This forest was not so serious an
obstacle as it had been in August, 1914, when after
the battle of Mons it caused the separation of the
British army into two parts, one retreating on each
side of it, for the Germans had obtained a great quan-
tity of timber from it for their trenches, huts and
dug-outs, and they had also improved the roads
through it. Nevertheless, it afforded a resolute
enemy splendid opportunities for defence, and bothThe Last Four Months
it and the canal prevented the Fourth Army from
making free use of its tanks.
The British army was now fighting on the very
ground on which it had first assembled in France,
before it advanced to Mons, and was about to take
complete revenge for its early misfortunes. A dense
artillery barrage rolled forward, and behind it, with
the help of tanks wherever they could be used, the
infantry on the whole thirty miles broke into the
German positions. On the right the 1st and 32nd
Divisions of the 9th Corps fought their way across
the canal near Catillon, and by nightfall were more
than three miles to the east of it. Farther north
the Germans were driven far back into the Mormal
Forest, and troops of the 25th Division of the
13th Corps, crossing the Sambre on rafts, captured
Landrecies at the south-east corner of the forest.
Landrecies was defended by a battalion of the
German 1st Guard Reserve Division; it was in
Landrecies that British Guards first met the Ger-
mans, when, on August 25, 1914, they repulsed a
night attack in the streets of the town. North of the
Mormal Fofest the 37th Division and the New
Zealanders, after repulsing a heavy German counter-
attack, drove the enemy back beyond the Valenci-
ennes—Avesnes railway, which runs through the
centre of the forest from west to east, and the New
Zealanders, surrounding the old fortified town of
Le Quesnoy, compelled its garrison to surrender. By
220The Last Push
the evening the left of the Third Army, and the right
of the First Army, were on a front five miles beyond
Valenciennes. On the British right Debeney’s First
French Army had also forced a crossing over the
Sambre Canal to the north of Guise and kept pace
with the advance of our Fourth Army. In this battle
the resistance of the enemy was definitely broken and
he never rallied again. The three British armies
captured 19,000 prisoners and 450 guns, and
Debeney gathered in 5,000 more prisoners. South of
Ghent the two French corps on King Albert’s right,
which each now had an American division with them,
drove back the Germans along the Scheldt, and the
91st American Division captured Audenarde.
From this time until the end the pursuit was
delayed mainly by the very complete destruction of
the roads and railways by the Germans as they fell
back, and by the consequent difficulty of getting up
supplies to the troops. The enemy’s difficulties in
retreat were, however, much greater. Far into Bel-
gium the roads were blocked with masses of transport
and the railways with thousands of trucks, for the
removal of which the Germans had not sufficient
engines. Our aeroplanes swooping down from the
sky attacked the German convoys and railway lines
with machine-gun fire and with bombs, causing great
destruction and frequent panics. A single battalion
of the 25th Division on November 5 took possession
of thirty guns, which the German artillerymen had
221The Last Four Months
abandoned when attacked from the air. By
November 5 our troops were well beyond the Mormal
Forest. On the 7th the Guards entered Bavai, on
the 8th the Fourth Army occupied Avesnes. On
the 9th the Guards and 62nd Division occupied the
fortress of Maubeuge, the French taking Hirson on
the same day. On the 8th the Germans began to
fly from the Scheldt, and the British Fifth and
Second Armies, Lwith the French and Americans on
their left, who had been preparing to deliver a great
attack on the river line on November 11, finding that
the enemy were slipping away, followed hard after
him and made rapid progress. Peruwelz, Tournai
and Renaix were occupied in succession, while by a
last dramatic stroke of fortune the 3rd Canadian
Division entered Mons a few hours before the
Armistice was signed. There were many curious
coincidences between our first and last contact with
the Germans in arms. Officers of our cavalry who
had fought at Mons in August, 1914, found them-
selves on November 11', 1918, on the scene of their
original encounter with the German troopers; .while
most curious of all the 2nd Battalion of the Royal
Irish Regiment, which had fought in the 3rd
Division in the loop of the canal north-east of Mons
on August 23, 1914, was with the 63rd Division
entering that loop when hostilities ceased.
The opinion is widely held that the Armistice of
November 11 was premature* It is argued that we
222The Last Push
had the German armies at our mercy, and that
the foundations of peace would have been more
sure if we had ended the war by forcing the surrender
in the field of a great part of those armies, or, failing
that, had driven our beaten enemy back across the
Rhine and followed him into the heart of Germany.
The reception of the German troops by the German
people, their march into the German towns through
triumphal arches and beflagged streets with their
helmets crowned with laurels, and the insistent state-
ments in Germany that the German armies had not
been defeated, that the Armistice had been accepted
to save bloodshed, and to put an end to the sufferings
of the .women and children aroused amazement and
disgust in the victors. There was very real anxiety
lest after all we had failed to convince Germany that
war did not pay; it was felt that .we ought to have
brought the realisation of Lwhat war means home to
the German people in their own country, and that,
had we done so, the long-drawn-out negotiations in
Paris would have been concluded more speedily and
more satisfactorily. It is worth while, therefore,
examining the situation as it was at the time of the
Armistice, and considering the case as it presented
itself to the men who had to decide whether hostilities
should cease or not.
There is no question but that the German armies
were completely and decisively beaten in the field.
The German plenipotentiaries admitted it when they
223The Last Four Months
met Marshal Foch, and von Brockdorff-Rantzau ad-
mitted it at Versailles, when he said after the Allied
peace terms had been presented to him : “We are
under no illusions as to the extent of our defeat and
the degree of our want of power. ... We know that
the power of the German Army is broken.”
Even if these admissions had not been made, the
condition of the German lines of retreat to the Rhine
is conclusive evidence of the condition of their armies.
Every road was littered with broken-down motor
trucks, guns, machine-guns and trench mortars.
Great stacks of supplies and of military stores
of all kinds were abandoned. Every railway
line was blocked with loaded trucks which the
Germans had been unable to remove. The sixty
miles of railway in the valley of the Meuse between
Dinant and Mezieres was filled from end to end with
a continuous line of German freight trains carrying
guns, ammunition, engineering equipment, and other
paraphernalia. On the Belgian canals alone over
eight hundred fully charged military barges were
found. It is beyond dispute that on November 11
the lines of communication immediately behind the
German armies had been thrown into complete dis-
order by the streams of traffic which were converging
on the Meuse bridges, disorder greatly intensified by
the attacks of the Allied airmen. The German
armies, unable to resist on the fighting front, could
no longer retreat in good order, partly because of
224The Last Push
the congestion on the roads and railways behind them,
which not only hampered the movements of the
troops, but prevented the systematic supply to them
of food and ammunition, partly owing to the fact
that there were not horses left to draw the transport
of the fighting troops. The following description of
the condition of the German Army at the time when
it began its march back to the Rhine in accordance
with the terms of the Armistice has been recently
published in Berlin.
Many of the units of the army were unable to move for
lack of transport horses. Even those which were able
to march had but little of their former mobility because
the loss of horses had been so great. The majority of the
troops were unaccustomed to long marches, the horses were
in very poor condition, and the daily losses even during
the retreat to the Antwerp-Meuse position had been very
great. There was a deficiency of boots, winter clothing,
hoof-pads, and frost nails, and winter weather might
set in at any time. Almost all the casualty clearing stations,
the ambulances and the hospitals were overcrowded owing
to the continuous stream of wounded and sick, which
poured in in consequence of the fighting which continued
right up to the Armistice.*
Not less remarkable is a report from the head-
quarters of one of the divisions of the 17th German
Army of the Crown Prince Rupprecht’s group. The
number of the division is obliterated on the report,
which is dated November 8, 1918, and was found in
* Die Racfifuhrung des Westheeres, Berlin, 1919.
P	225The Last Four Months
a Belgian farmhouse. I have therefore been unable
to identify the division, but it appears to have been
one of those which was opposed to our First Army.
The report runs : “ The division can only be con-
sidered as unfit for battle. Owing to the extremely
heavy casualties, to sickness and to numerous deser-
tions, the average strength of regiments* is under
600. Still more important as regards efficiency in
battle is the shortage of officers, of which no regiment
of the division has more than twelve, and one
regiment has only nine. Almost all the machine-
guns in the division have been lost or are out of
repair, and half the guns of the artillery are deficient.
Owing to lack of horses, less than half the transport
of the division can be moved, and if the retreat con-
tinues many guns and vehicles will have to be
abandoned. Owing to lack of petrol, much of the
motor transport of the division cannot be moved.
The division has not received rations for two days,
and the condition of the horses .which remain is
becoming very bad, because owing to constant move-
ment there is no time to collect supplies from the
country, and forage for them is not arriving.”
If ever armies were in a state of hopeless rout,
the German armies were in the second week of
November, 1918. The moral of the troops was gone,
the organisation of the services on which they
* A German regiment consisted of three battalions, and its full
strength was about 3,000 men and 64 officers.
226The Last Push
depended for their needs had collapsed. This being
so, why did we allow the German armies to escape
from a hopeless position? Why did ,we not at once
follow up the military advantage which we had
gained at such cost?
In order to get an answer to these questions I
visited the fronts of the Allied armies shortly after
the conclusion of the Armistice. I there found, after
travelling down the line from north to south, that
amongst the fighting troops of the Belgian, British,
French and American armies the opinion ,was
unanimous that they had got the Germans on the
run and could have kept them on the run indefinitely,
or until they laid down their arms. On the American
front in particular, where there were large numbers
of troops ready and eager to go forward who had not
yet taken part in a great battle, there was a very
strong feeling that they had been robbed of the fruits
of victory. When, however, I inquired the opinion
of those behind the fighting fronts who were respon-
sible for feeding the troops and keeping them supplied
.with all that was necessary to enable them to march
forward, I heard a different story. Everywhere I
was told that the Allied armies, which .were on or
were marching towards the Meuse, had on Novem-
ber 11 reached, or very nearly reached, the farthest
limit at which for the time being they could be kept
regularly supplied. The reasons for this were two-
fold. In the first place the Allied lines of communi-
227The Last Four Months
cation grew steadily longer as the Germans were
driven back, and even before our victorious advance
began the state of the railways and the amount of
rolling stock in France had caused anxiety. For four
and a half years the railway systems of north-eastern
France had been strained to the limit of their
capacity, and the effects of that strain were beginning
to be serious in 1918. Both we and the Americans
had made great efforts to improve and extend the
railway systems in our respective zones. During
1918 the British military railway administration in
France built or reconstructed 2,340 miles of broad
gauge and 1,348 miles of narrow gauge railways,
while to supplement the French rolling stock we sent
to France 1,200 locomotives and 52,600 cars. The
shipment across the Channel of such cumbrous and
heavy objects as locomotives and trucks was a slow
and difficult business, and the needs of the armies
were always growing faster than were the resources
of the railways. During the last four months of the
war the weekly average load carried by the British
military railways in France amounted to over half a
million tons.
If these were our difficulties, those of the
American army were greater, owing to the rapid
growth of the army during the latter half of the
year 1918, the shortage of shipping capable of cross-
ing the Atlantic, and the necessity of giving first
place to the transportation of troops and of war
228The Last Push
material. Up to the end the railways under
American control in France suffered from a
deficiency in rolling stock, and had great difficulty
in meeting the demands of the large forces engaged
in the Meuse-Argonne battle at the end of an ever-
lengthening line of communications. The French
armies, which in the middle of September had been
extended along the outside of the great bow made
by the German lines between St. Quentin and Ver-
dun, had the longest distances to advance in following
up the German retreat, and before the advance
began the French Government had cut down the
railway transportation in the interior of the country
to the bare minimum necessary for the preservation
of the industrial and social life of France, and even
then was unable to meet the full demands of the
French armies and to supplement the railway
material which Great Britain and America had been
able to produce. The Belgian armies had hardly any
resources of their own and no means whatever of
developing their means of transportation. The result
of all this was that the mere lengthening of the Allied
lines of communications by the German retreat, apart
altogether from any other action by the enemy, threw
a very great strain upon the Allied railway adminis-
trations.
The Germans were, however, very active and
skilful in damaging the roads and railways before
they retreated, and this damage was extended by
229The Last Four Months
the destructive power of the artillery of both sides.
Every railway bridge, large or small, was blown up,
the railway embankments were cut, long stretches
of track were destroyed, the stations were burned
down, and the telegraph lines were almost obliterated
and the instruments removed. The Germans had
left behind them inines buried under the railway
lines, and these exploded often after the first damage
had been repaired and the trains were running, with
the result that there was constant interruption to
the traffic. One of our Army Commanders told me
that, owing to the constant explosion of mines behind
his front, during the last stages of the advance of his
army his railhead was retreating faster than his troops
were advancing. The consequence of this was that on
November 11, despite the most strenuous and devoted
work by all concerned in the repair and«working of
the railways, the farthest points at which supplies
could be delivered by rail were from thirty-five to
fifty miles in a direct line behind the front, and
often double this distance by road. This gap had
to be bridged by the motor transport, which, of
course, had to use the roads. But the destruction
of the roads by the Germans was as thorough as their
destruction of the railways. Not only .were the
bridges destroyed, but mines were sprung at every
cross-road. I remember counting eleven mine craters
on three miles of the main road between Le Quesnoy
and Mons. This damage could only be very roughly
230The Last Push
repaired, while the wet weather and the heavy traffic
of the German retreat and of our advance increased
the work of destruction. The heavy motor lorries,
loaded with supplies and ammunition, had to plough
their way slowly through these broken roads from
the railheads to the troops, and return to the rail-
heads to fill up. At the time of the Armistice the
motor lorries were working in double and treble
shifts, and the strain upon them caused by the bad
roads and the incessant work was such that in the
Fourth Army on November 11 more than half of
the lorries at the service of the army had broken
down. The troops .were receiving no more than bare
necessities, and at one time had with them nothing
more than the day’s food carried by the men.
The advance of the British army towards
Germany did not begin until November 17, six days
after all fighting had ceased, and actually only six-
teen of- the fifty-nine British infantry divisions in
France and Belgium at the time of the Armistice—
that is, less than one-third of our whole army—moved
forward. Though there was no interference by the
enemy, and the advance was made by slow stages, it
proved impossible to keep even this comparatively
small part of our army supplied with their full
rations, and at the beginning of December it was
necessary to call a halt because the supply trains were
running more than forty-eight hours behind scheduled
time. A very similar story could be told of the
231The Last Four Months
situation on the Belgian, French, and American
fronts.
Nor was the feeding of the fighting troops by any
means the only problem of supply which the Allied
armies had to solve. The Germans in their retreat
had left behind them in the liberated provinces of
France and Belgium a large civilian population on
the verge of starvation. In the-French provinces on
the British front alone there were nearly 800,000
persons to be fed, and during a period of six weeks,
until the French Government could undertake the
distribution of supplies, we distributed more than
5,000,000 rations amongst the civilian population, a
task which threw an immense additional burden upon
the transportation services. The French armies on
their own front had very much larger numbers to
deal with, and, as it taxed all their resources to repair
the main roads and railways so that the troops on
the front might be fed, many French villages and
small towns off the main lines of communication
remained isolated for long periods, and were only
kept from starvation by having food brought to them
by aeroplanes. Added to all this, the Germans as
they retreated released large numbers of prisoners
of war without making any provision for their feed-
ing. The people of Belgium of their necessities
made great sacrifices in order to do what was possible
for these unfortunate men, whose sufferings were
often intense, but their means were not equal to their
232The Last Push
generosity, and yet another burden was added to the
work of supply.
This being the situation on the front at the time
when the Armistice was signed and during the days
which followed its signature, it is obvious that a great
and rapid advance to and across the Meuse by the
Belgian, British, French and American armies, such
as might have brought about the complete destruc-
tion of the German armies and ended the war with
a colossal Sedan, was out of the question. It is true
that on November 11 two British cavalry divisions
had passed through the front and were ready to
pursue the enemy. Sir Douglas Haig has expressed
the opinion that this cavalry would have been able
to turn the retreat of the Germans on the British
front into a complete rout, but it is very improbable
that any action by such a comparatively small force
of mounted troops would have been able to affect
seriously the situation on the whole long front, and
their influence, though it would certainly have been
considerable, must necessarily have been local. The
plain fact is that on, or very soon after, November 11
it would, had hostilities been continued, have been
necessary to call a halt of the Allied armies between
the Dutch frontier and the Meuse until the roads and
railways behind them had been repaired and the
services of supply were again able to work normally.
That is to say, it would have been necessary to give
the enemy a breathing space, which would have
233The Last Four Months
allowed him to restore some sort of order in his ranks
and make good his retreat to the Meuse, where he
would have been able to establish himself on a very
much shorter front and in very strong positions.
This would have entailed fighting at least one more
great battle and have cost us very many lives.
There was, however, a part of the front on which
the Allied armies had made little progress and behind
which their communications were in good order; that
was the front between the Meuse, north-east of Ver-
dun, and the Swiss frontier. As I have explained,
Pershing’s victory of the St. Mihiel salient had given
Foch an opportunity for invading Lorraine, and the
French Marshal had all his plans ready for the exten-
sion of his long line of battle by an advance into
Lorraine when hostilities ceased. In fact, the
manoeuvres preliminary to this advance had begun
on November 7, when the three French corps imme-
diately east of the Meuse attacked in the direction
of Montmedy, a movement followed by the advance
of the second American Army through the Woeuvre,
as the country east of the St. Mihiel salient is called,
towards the famous ironfields of Briey. The left of
the Second American Army had driven the Germans
back some three miles in the Woeuvre by the morn-
ing of November 11. The general plan for this new
attack was that the left of the Second American
Army should be protected by the advance of the
right of the First American Army and of the three
234The Last Push
French corps on Longwy—the French fort on the
Luxembourg frontier, about fifteen miles north of
Briey, which had been captured in 1914 by the
German Crown Prince in the first invasion of France
—the Second American Army was to attack towards
and across the Briey ironfields, which lie north of
Metz, while another Franco-American attack was
to be made east of the Moselle and to the south of
Metz. These two attacks, which were to have been
in full swing by November 14, were intended to
isolate the great German fortress. Now there is very
little doubt but that this battle on the Lorraine front
would have ended in another great Allied victory,
for the Germans would have been greatly out-
numbered and their troops on this part of the line
were not of the best quality; but it is equally certain
that it would have exposed a great part of Lorraine
to the ravages of war, and very probably also to the
same widespread destruction which the Germans had
carried out during their retreat farther north.
The general situation at the time of the Armistice,
then, was that the Allied armies between the Dutch
frontier and the Meuse were for the time being
incapable of carrying on a sustained advance, though
two British cavalry divisions were ready to begin a
local pursuit on a portion of the British front. The
Germans in front of them had been utterly defeated
and were almost helpless, but we were not, and could
not for some little time, be in a position to complete
235The Last Four Months
their destruction as a military force. It was, there-
fore, reasonably certain that if the Armistice had
been refused the Allied armies would have had to
fight hard and would have suffered serious losses,
while there was the risk of exposing the greater part
of Belgium, including the cities of Brussels and
Antwerp, and the great Charleroi industrial district
—which were still in the hands of the Germans—to
destruction. Everything was ready for another battle
on the Lorraine front, but this, too, would certainly
have cost us many lives and have caused much damage
to valuable property, which is to-day intact and in
the hands of the French. The problem which the
Allied and Associated Governments and generals had
to decide was whether they would continue to fight
on these terms or would impose such conditions of
armistice upon the enemy as would render him
militarily impotent. They decided on the latter
course, and I think there are very few who would
have taken upon themselves the responsibility of
deciding otherwise.
The criticism of the decision to stop fighting
on November 11 has been due to the feeling
that the German people do not recognise that
their armies were beaten in the field, and the fear
that this state of mind may sooner or later cause them
to fight again. My own conviction is that the recep-
tion of the German troops in Germany and the state-
ments made in the German press and by the German
236The Last Push
people that the Armistice was not the consequence
of defeat were not unnatural, and can be explained.
In November, 1918, the German people could
only get news of what was happening on the front
through the newspapers, and the newspapers got
their information through the military Press Bureau.
The officials of that bureau, either because they were
so inured to lying that they could not tell the truth,
or in the hope of staving off revolution by continuing
to deceive the people, announced, from the first days
when things began to go wrong for them right up to
the end, that the German armies were fighting
splendidly, that the front was everywhere intact, and
that the troops were falling back, slowly and steadily,
according to plan to better and stronger positions.
No inkling was given of the true state of affairs on
the front, and the German people ascribed the surren-
der either to the revolution, if they were not in favour
of it, or more generally to the desire of the new
Government to get the blockade raised as quickly
as possible. When the German troops came back
to their homes and began to talk, the truth gradually
became known, and the German people were able to
see for themselves the state of the army which had
once been their god. I do not think that there is
to-day any intelligent German who does not know
that the German armies were utterly beaten, though
there may be many who would not admit as much
to a foreigner.
237The Last Four Months
It has begun to dawn upon most Germans that
it is more disgraceful to admit that they accepted
defeat, ignominiously surrendered their navy, gave
up the greater part of their artillery and aeroplanes,
handed over large quantities of rolling stock and
military stores, and permitted the armies of their
enemies to occupy the Rhine unopposed, that they
did all this when they still had the power to fight on,
than to acknowledge that their armies were defeated
in the field. I do not believe that we shall in the
future hear much more of the unbeaten German
armies, except perhaps from a few extremists like
Bernhardi, nor do I believe that if we had not stopped
fighting on November 11 it would have been possible
to make Germany any less capable of resistance than
she is to-day.
I set out in this book to describe the general
course of the last great campaign on the Western
front. I am not, therefore, concerned with the story
of the downfall of Bulgaria, Austria and Turkey,
except in so far as these have contributed to the
defeat of our chief enemy. The trials of the spring
of 1918 had taught us that common sense which is
the essence of strategy; we had learned that the
Western front was for us the vital front, and we had
concentrated there every man who could be spared
from other theatres of war; but Sir Charles Monro’s
expansion of the Indian army had enabled us to
replace the British troops withdrawn from Palestine
238The Last Push
.with Indian troops who could not be employed in
France. Thus Allenby was still powerful, while any
weakening of the British and French forces in Mace-
donia had been compensated by the addition of a
Jugo-Slav division to the Serbian army and the
growth of the Greek forces. The Germans had with-
drawn all their troops in Italy to France, so that the
Italians were not only able to dispense with part of
the assistance which we and the French had given
them after Caporetto, but were able to send a contin-
gent to France, and even so were superior to the
Austrian armies on their front. Therefore, common
sense indicated that as soon as Foch’s policy of ex-
hausting the German reserves in the West had taken
effect, and Germany was no longer in a position to
help her friends, every possible effort should be made
on every front. By that time it had become clear
that the direct road to Germany was the shortest
road, that the barrier in the West was penetrable,
and therefore, while the attack upon our enemies
upon all fronts became general, there was no
doubt as to where the main attack was to be made
or any attempt to seek the defeat of Germany by
taking the way round. Had there been no good
reason to expect that the Allied armies in France
would be able to pierce the Hindenburg line, then,
when the arrival of American troops had placed the
safety of the Western front beyond question, it
might have been right to seek victory by the way
239The Last Four Months
round. Fortunately, this was not necessary, for it
would have greatly prolonged the war.
So it happened that, while Foch was complet-
ing his preparations for Armageddon, Franchet
d’Esperey was driving back the Bulgars, Allenby
,was overwhelming the Turks, and about a month
later, on October 24, the Italians began the third
battle of the Piave. By the time that Austria
collapsed Ludendorff’s attempt to rally had been
defeated, and the fate of the German armies in the
West was sealed. The Italian victory, therefore,
came too late to affect the main issue, nor did
Allenby’s campaign, though of vital importance in
its influence on the future of the East, hasten by
an hour the defeat of Germany. The defeat of
Bulgaria, on the other hand, did, as I have shown
from the statements made by Hindenburg and his
advisers at the time, unquestionably weigh with the
political and military leaders of Germany and helped
to convince them of the hopelessness of their position.
The controversy between the advocates of an East-
ern and of a Western policy, which so long agitated
us, is a symptom of defective organisation. Conflict
between the political demands for dispersal of force
and the military demands for concentration are
nothing new in war. It has always been a very
difficult problem to adjust them, and in the case of
a scattered Empire such as ours the problem is
peculiarly complex. War, as the Germans were
240The Last Push
never tired of telling us, is an act of policy, and it
is the business of the statesman to define policy in
war as in peace. The soldier is as much his servant
as the civilian administrator in Whitehall. It'is the
statesman’s duty to determine the objects of the war,
to say what interests are vital to the security of the
nation and what may be neglected with impunity,
to increase our power by bringing in allies to our
side, and to diminish that of the enemy by detaching
from him potential or actual adherents to his cause.
War, however, is not an abstract problem. It is a
struggle against an opponent whose intentions -and
resources can only be surmised from incomplete
evidence. Miscalculations and mistakes entail loss
of life and, maybe, disaster. Therefore, before the
statesman decides on his policy it must be translated
for him by experts into a definite plan which shows
him what his policy entails in men and in time, and
gives him the best possible estimate of how the enemy
will endeavour to counter the plan. It is very easy
to take a map and place one million men in the
Balkans, or a quarter of a million in the Gallipoli
Peninsula, and picture the results of their action
when they have arrived. It is quite another matter
to calculate accurately how long it will take to get
the men to those places, to estimate what will'be
needed to maintain them when they are there, and
to forecast what the enemy may do while they are
moving to their positions.
q	241The Last Four Months
Mr. Lloyd George’s proposal, made early in 1915,
to transfer the British army to the Balkans would
have been admirable had it been practicable. He
maintained, with good reason, that such a manoeuvre
Lwould assure the safety of Serbia, bring in Italy,
Greece, Bulgaria and Roumania on our side, enable
us to complete the encirclement of the Central
Powers, cut them off from Turkey and the East,
would open up communication with Russia, and
allow us to attack Austria in overwhelming force.
It opened up a dazzling prospect when compared with
Kitchener’s prophecy of a war lasting three years
and with the slow and costly process of wearing down
the Germans in the West. The fallacy in the plan
was that we had not the military power ready to
provide for security in the West and in the East
while it was in preparation. It would have taken
us many months to move an army to the Balkans
and to equip it. While it was on the move it would
have been incapable of action, and in the interval
both the Western front and Egypt would have been
exposed to attack. Even if Germany was unable to
get the Turks to organise an effective attack upon
Egypt and did not again mass troops against France,
there was no guarantee that she would not anticipate
us in the Balkans, as from her central position she
might readily do, and with the help of Austria,
Bulgaria and Turkey destroy our expedition while it
was concentrating. The translation of Mr. Lloyd
242The Last Push
George’s plan into practical proposals involved a
careful survey of ways and means and elaborate
calculation of time and space. These were the
business of the soldier. But we had made the grave
mistake of taking too narrow a view of our commit-
ments when we first entered into the war. No one
save Kitchener, who was only brought into the War
Office after war had been declared, had foreseen that
we would be engaged in a world war and a long war,
and it took even Kitchener time to grasp that our
part in such a war could only be directed from a great
general headquarters in London. We allowed the
General Staff at the War Office to be broken up, and
it was long before it was built up again. The result
of this was that the Government was deprived of
expert assistance at the time when it was most
needed, and individual Ministers devoted their
energies, abilities and influence to advocating particu-
lar plans of campaign which appealed to them, in
place of supporting one carefully thought out and
agreed policy.
The Dardanelles Commission has made public
the melancholy story of the inception of that
enterprise. As a plan of campaign it promised,
if successful, results as brilliant as Mr. Lloyd
George’s Balkan enterprise, while it had the
advantage over its rival that it enabled us to make
use of our sea power for offence and that it did pro-
vide from the outset a definite measure of protection
243The Last Four Months
for Egypt, for it was clear that the Turks would not
venture to attack the Suez Canal while Constantinople
was menaced. The plan was faulty because Mr.
Churchill had formed an exaggerated estimate of the
power of naval guns against land defences, because the
machinery for getting the expert naval opinion before
the Government on this question was defective, and
because we were drawn into a military enterprise for
which we had not the means ready, when it was found
that the Navy had been given an impossible
task. Owing to this same absence of organised
expert advice, the Mesopotamian expedition was
allowed to drift gradually into commitments which
were beyond its powers. So our energies were
exhausted in controversies which need not have arisen
if the roles and responsibilities of the statesman, the
soldier and the sailor had been clearly defined, and
if the Government had been equipped with the means
of surveying the whole ground from the outset, and
of learning what various alternative policies entailed
in men, guns, ships, material and time. In our
special circumstances “ side-shows ” were inevitable.
We had to protect India, and keep the Suez Canal
open; we could not allow the Germans a free hand
in Africa to organise native forces at their leisure.
We could not therefore concentrate all our forces in
the Western theatre and leave the outlying parts of
the Empire to look after themselves. The fact was,
however, that so large a part of our total power was
244The Last Push
required in order to make the Western front safe
that we were never able, until our enemies were on
the verge of exhaustion, to conduct offensive cam-
paigns elsewhere to a decisive issue. Because that
truth was not realised in time, we frittered away our
resources and prolonged the war. In the end circum-
stances compelled us to renounce our Strategical
heresies, and victory followed.
Not only was the defeat of the German armies
due to Foch’s campaign in the West, but that
campaign made victory possible in all theatres of war
by discouraging Germany’s allies, who, like the
German people, had been kept in the war by
promises of victory, and by depriving them of her
aid at the moment when they were most in need of
it. The sudden change of the tide of fortune from
the ebb to the full flood of victory, the vast extent
of the operations, and the swift succession of blows
struck made this campaign a stupendous climax to
a stupendous war. In 118 days the great German
army which set out confidently to capture Paris on
July 15, 1918, had been utterly and completely
broken. It had been driven back to the French
frontier, and made incapable of further resistance.
During the period of rather less than four months
which had elapsed since the beginning of the second
battle of the Marne the British army had captured
188,700 prisoners and 2,840 guns; the French army,
139,000 prisoners and 1,880 guns; the American
245The Last Four Months
army, 44,000 prisoners and 1,421 guns; the Belgian
army, 14,500 prisoners and 474 guns—a total of
385,500 prisoners and 6,615 guns. Many thousands
of machine-guns and trench mortars and thousands
of tons of war material of all kinds must be added
to this tale of booty, while the enemy’s losses in
killed and wounded are estimated to have amounted
to 1,500,000.
This wonderful result, which even as late as the
end of September no one would have ventured to
foretell, was due to many causes, of which, in the
military sphere, three are predominant: the genius
of Foch, the unexpectedly rapid development of
America’s fighting power, and the marvellous re-
covery of the British army from its reverses of the
spring. To Foeh’s genius I have already paid my
tribute. In his “ Principles of War,” which em-
bodies his teaching at the French War College before
the war, he says : “ Great results in war are due to
the commander. History is therefore right in making
generals responsible for victories, in which case they
are glorified, and for defeats, in which case they are
disgraced. Without a commander no battle, no
victory is possible. . . . The will to conquer, such
is victory’s first condition, and therefore every
soldier’s first duty, but it also amounts to a supreme
resolve, which the commander must, if need be,
impart to the soldier’s soul.” Foch’s will to conquer
jyavered neither in the dark days of 1914 nor through-
246The Last Push
out the long period of trench warfare, ,when many
in high places were talking of a deadlock and plan-
ning for a patched-up peace, nor in those still more
critical days of March, 1918, when he was first called
to the helm to steer the ship from the rocks, and the
storm of the German offensive was at its height, nor
when the Germans surprised him in May and a second
time menaced the capital of France. But the stoutest
will in the world can at best refuse to admit defeat;
it cannot compel victory unless it is accompanied by
knowledge and skill. Foch had the knowledge and
skill which come of long study and careful thought,
and these he added to his iron will. Great results
in war are due to the commander, and, therefore, our
first tribute must be paid to Marshal Foch.
Even Foch could not have foreseen how nobly his
will to conquer and his genius in planning would be
supported. Early in April there had been one
American division fit to take its place in the line;
by November 11 twenty-four American divisions had
fought in battle and had won, and there were many
more ready to fight. I doubt if, even after the second
battle of the Marne, there was a single Allied general
who believed that it would be possible for a great
American army to force its way triumphantly through
the German lines. Many of the American divisions
who fought in those last battles which brought us
victory went into action with little or no experience
of trenches, and with hone at all of the hell on earth
_	247The Last Four Months
which constitutes a modern battle. The multiplicity
of weapons and the complications of tactics which
four years of war had produced, and the fact that an
entirely new element had entered into war with
the development of aircraft, all made the effective
handling of troops in battle a far more difficult
problem than it had ever been. Neither the
American generals nor the American staffs had had
experience in fitting together the numerous parts of
the military machine or in handling large bodies of
troops. For all these reasons a great attack by
American troops against intact German defences on
the most difficult part of the front was a bold experi-
ment. It was one thing to obliterate the St. Mihiel
salient in thirty hours, to stop the German rush at
the Marne, or even to drive the Germans from the
Marne to the Vesle in co-operation with Allied
troops. It was quite another matter to fight con-
tinuously on a front of some twenty miles for close
on fifty days, through line after line of German
trenches, in a battle which entailed the employment
of nearly three-quarters of a million American troops.
It was done because America placed the pick of her
splendid manhood in the field, and that manhood
went ahead at the job in front of it without counting
the cost. By doing its job it gave us victory in
1918.
Of the achievements of the British army in this
last campaign, under its great leader whose calm
248The Last Push
judgment, coolness in adversity, unselfish patience,
when unsupported at home, and bold decisions, when
the time came to be bold, were vital factors in our
triumph, a Briton can hardly write temperately.
The “ Old Contemptibles ” of 1914 have become
almost heroes of legend, and their wonderful recovery
from the retreat from Mons, their advance to the
Marne and the Aisne are rightly reckoned as amongst
the proudest records of the British army. I took
part in the retreat from Mons and in the subsequent
advance of our little army, and I saw both what our
army had to endure in the spring of 1918 and what
it accomplished in the last months of the war, and
I am convinced that the achievement of the National
Army of Great Britain transcends even that of her
old Regular Army. That National Army for six
weeks, from March 21 until the end of April, with-
stood the full brunt of the greatest military effort of
which Germany was capable. It was driven back
at one point to a depth of forty miles, it lost 70,000
prisoners and 1,000 guns and suffered 300,000 casual-
ties ; 55 of its divisions were attacked by 102 German
divisions, and still presented to the enemy a front
he could not break. Then, starting on August 8, it
fought uninterruptedly and victoriously for three
months, driving the enemy back 120 miles, taking
more than twice as many prisoners and more than
three times as many guns as it had lost, and com-
pletely routing the German armies by which it was
Q*	249The Last Four Months
opposed. This is a record with which any army
coming fresh into the field might be content. That
it was accomplished after four and a half years of
bitter struggle is an achievement to which no words
can do justice.
The soldiers of France were not less splendid.
They had to endure first while Great Britain was
making of herself a great military power, and then,
when Great Britain’s efforts were insufficient to turn
the balance, while America was placing her armies
in the field. The Germans had again and again
boasted that France was bled white, that she was
weary of the war and would not fight. From 1916
onwards the next winter was to see the collapse of
France. From every trial, with her country ravaged,
and many of her richest provinces in the hands of
the most brutal tyrant of whom history tells, she rose
again to a new effort, until at last she drove her
oppressor back to her frontiers and her poilus marched
triumphantly through Alsace-Lorraine to the Rhine.
The soldiers of little Belgium, who for more than
four years had protected the last little strip of their
country west of the Yser after the German tide of
invasion had been stemmed on that river, had, under
the leadership of King Albert, whose spirit was as
indomitable as that of Foch, issued from behind their
water-lines, had fought with a fire and dash wholly
wonderful in an army which had long been con-
demned to inaction and had none of the means of
250The Last Push
replenishing its ranks at the disposal of the other
Allies, and had conquered. It is idle to argue as
to who won the war. Germany could not have been
beaten in the field, as she was beaten, without the
intimate co-operation of all the Allied armies on the
Western front directed by a great leader, nor with-
out the co-ordination for a common purpose of all
the resources of the Allies, naval, military, industrial
and economic. If victory is to be attributed to any
one cause, then that cause is not to be found in the
wisdom of any one statesman, the valour of any one
army, the prowess of any one navy, or in the skill of \
any one general. Our triumph was due to the justice
of our cause and to the faith to which, even in the
darkest days, the free peoples of the world held firmly
—the faith that right is might.
251INDEX
Aeroplanes as food carriers, 232
Air raids on Paris, 62
Aisne, the, third battle of, 110
Albert, King of the Belgians, 106,
158, 181
enters Roulers, 183
indomitable spirit of, 250
Allenby captures Jerusalem, 2, 18
overwhelms the Turks, 240
reinforcements for, 18, 19, 26
victory at Gaza, 2, 18
Allied advance, the, delays to, 182
Allied peace terms presented to
German plenipotentiaries, 224
Allies, the, a year of disappointment
for, 1
critical days for, 11
defences of, contrasted with those
of enemy, 139
question of unity of command, 3
America (see United States)
American advance, the, difficulties
of, 184
advance to Sedan, 217
army and the railway difficulty
in France, 228 (see also First
American Army, Second Ameri-
can Army)
American Corps (1st), 120, 185, 216,
217; (2nd), 161, 162, 199, 205;
(3rd), 185, 215, 217; (4th), 120;
(5th), 120, 185, 215, 217
American Divisions, loyal support of
Foch’s plans, 247
American Divisions, operations of
(1st), 98; (2nd), 98, 198, 216;
(3rd), 96, 100, 198; (4th), 100;
(26th), 98, 99, 100; (27th), 118,
162, 163, 205; (28th), 96, 100, 201;
(30th), 162, 205; (32nd), 100, 101;
(33rd), 91, 103; (42nd), 95, 101;
(77th), 102, 201; (82nd), 201;
(91st), 221
American troops, a remarkable Ger-
man statement concerning, 66
American troops in the West (1918),
126
Americans arrive at Ohateau-
Thierry, 62, 82
attack St. Mihiel salient, 120
Amiens, battle of, 103, 110, 141
defeat of Germans at, 107
preparations for, 105
critical days in 1918, 11
German attempts for, 47, 51
threatened by enemy, 42
Ammunition, wholesale expenditure
of, 159
Ancre, the, first battle of, 20, 188
Anti-tank guns, 145
Apremont, 119
Argonne Forest, 147, 184
Armageddon, 129 et seq.
the preparation for, 93 et seq.
Armentiferes abandoned, 49
Armistice, the, condition of German
army at time of, 225
general situation at, 235
in operation, 217
was it premature? 222
Arras, a German effort for, 45
battle of, 1, 73, 118, 188
Artillery fire, “ sound ranging " and,
135
Audenarde, capture of, 221
Aulic Council, the, 9
Australian Brigade (5th) captures
Mont St. Quentin, 116
Australian Corps, the, operations of,
90, 103, 161
Australian Division (1st), detrains at
Hazebrouck, 49
Australian Divisions, operations of
(4th), 51; (5th), 51
Australians at Bullecourt, 90
Austrian defeat on the Piave, 208Index
Austrian Divisions arrive on Western
front, 123
Avesnes, occupation of, 222
Baghhad, enemy planB for recapture
of, 18
Bailleul captured by enemy, 50
reoccupation of, 117
Balkan enterprise, Lloyd George’s,
241
Bapaume, battle of, 113, 115
enemy evacuation of, 115
German losses in, 116
Bauer, Colonel, 107
Bavai entered by the Guards, 222
Bavarian Crown Prince (see Bup-
precht)
Beaurevoir line broken, 163
Beauvais, an interview with Foch
at, 58
Beersheba, Allenby’s victory at, 2, 18
Belgian Army, the, operations of,
147, 158
Belgian coast in Allied hands, 197
Belgians enter Ostend, 197
Belgium, a tribute to her King and
army, 250
Bellenglise, St. Quentin Canal at-
tacked at, 161
Belleu Wood, bitter struggle in, 98
Bellicourt Tunnel front, attack on,
160
Berthelot’s Army, 96
BOthune, gallant defence of, 48
Birdwood, General, succeeds Gough
in command of Fifth Army, 148
Bliioher, a story of, 16
Boehn, von, and his command, 109
Bolshevism in German Army, 127
Bombardment, a prolonged, 157
Bony, village of, 163
Bourgogne, forest of, 215
Bourlon Wood, 157
Briey, ironfields of, 121, 218, 234
British Army, the, a tribute to the
" Old Contemptible*,” 249
age limit raised, 26
brilliant battle tactics of, 50
British casualties in Flanders, 53
British Corps, operations of (3rd),
103; (4th), 157; (6th), 157; (9th),
161; (17th), 157
British cross Sambre Canal, 219
British Divisions, operations of (4th),
117; (15th), 101; (34th), 101;
(51st), 101, 116;	(52nd), 117;
(57th), 117; (62nd), 101; (63rd),
117
British Government urge expeditious
dispatch of American troops to
France, 63
British reverses in the spring of
1918, 37 et seq.
Brockdorfi-Rantzau, von, admits
German defeat, 224
Bulgaria asks for armistice, 175
capitulation of, 208
collapse of, 123, 166
impending surrender of, 149
Bullecourt, tank warfare at, 90
Bussche, Major Freiherr von der, 167
Buzancy, capture of, 101, 216
Byng begins battle of Bapaume, 111,
113
Byng’s Third Army, operations of,
31, 34, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 47,
113, 115, 147, 153, 157, 159, 199,
200, 201, 206, 207, 219, 221
Calais, a conference between French
and British Governments at, 4
enemy rush for, 49
preparations for flooding ap-
proaches to, 49
Cambrai front, the, British advance
on, 157
Cambrai, German counter-attack at,
19, 44, 48
Germans driven from, 183, 200
second battle of, 181
tank attacks at, 17, 89, 90
Canadian Corps, operations of the,
103, 157, 219
Canadian Divisions, operations of
(1st), 117; (2nd), 116; (3rd), 116,
220; (4th), 117
Canadians enter Cambrai, 200
Canal du Nord, storming of the, 157
Oaporetto, disaster to Italian Army
at, 2, 4, 78, 88
Carey, General, commands an im-
provised force, 44
Cavalry Corps, the, 107
Champagne, battle of, 181
Channel Ports, the, a German drive
for. 34, 48, 49, 62
importance of, to Great Britain
and France, 29
Ohateau-Thierry, arrival of Ameri-
can troops at, 62, 82Index
Chat el, capture of, 201
Ohauny occupied by the French, 117
Ohemin des Dames, Crown Prince’s
attack on, 122
German success at, 62
Churchill, Mr., and the Dardanelles
expedition, 243-4
Olemenceau, M., and Foch’s appoint-
ment. 12, 13, 63, 87
at Doullens conference, 11
his faith in Foch, 63, 87
recalls Foch, 87
Colonial Corps (2nd), 217
Compifegne, von Hutier’s attempt
for, foiled, 65
Courcelette, fall of, 114
Courtrai entered by Plumer, 197
Dardanelles Expedition, the, 243
Debeney, General, 102, 108, 115
Deheney’s First French Army, opera-
tions of, 102, 147, 153, 159, 161,
183, 198, 204, 205, 214, 221
Degoutte, General, 96
attacks the enemy, 100
enters Fbre-en-Tardenois, 101
Degoutte’s Army, 147
reinforced by 42nd American
Division, 101
D’Esperey, Franchet, Bulgarian
plenipotentiaries’ meeting with,
175
drives back the Bulgars, 240
Divisions, Army (1st), operations of,
163, 220; (3rd), 163; (4th), 117;
(8th), 51; (9th), 38, 49; (12th),
163; (15th), 101; (18th), 51, 163;
(21st), 52; (25th), 52, 200, 220,
221; (29th), 49; (31st), 49; (32nd),
220; (34th), 101; (37th), 220;
(46th), 161, 163; (49th), 52; (51st),
100, 101, 116; (52nd), 117; (55th),
48; (57th), 117, 200; (58th), 51;
(62nd),	100, 222;	(63rd), 117,
222
(See also American Division, Aus-
tralian Division, etc.)
Doullens, a momentous conference
at, 11
Drocourt-Qudant switch of Hinden-
burg line, 117, 133
Dun, occupation of, 217
Dunkerque, precautionary protective
measures for safety of, 49
East Prussia, Russian invasion of. 15
England, extension of Military Ser-
vice Acts in, 29
Epehy, battle of, 153
Espionage system, the German, 67
Executive Military Council, the,
establishment of, and its
failure, 8 et sea-
Falkenhayn, supersession of, 14
Fere-en-Tardcnois entered by De-
goutte, 101
Festubert, the 55th West Lancashire
Division at, 48
Fifth British Army, a new front for,
24
a portion placed under Byng, 42
causes which led to defeat of, 37
operations of, 10, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37,
38, 40, 41, 45, 165, 197, 222
reconstituted, 148
retirement of, 46
(See also Gough and Birdwood)
First American Army, operations of,
119, 134, 146, 147, 154, 185, 189,
201, 207, 215 et sea.. 228, 234
(See also Pershing)
First British Army, operations of,
45, 116 et sea., 147, 157, 159, 163,
165, 206, 207, 219, 221
(See also Horne’s First Army)
First French Army, operations of,
102, 147, 153, 159, 161, 183, 198,
204, 205, 214, 221
(See also Debeney)
Flanders, battle of, 181
British casualties in, 53
Ludendorfi’s defeats in, 82
Portuguese attacked and over-
whelmed in, 47, 54
ridges lost to enemy, 159
the mud of, 76, 158
Foch, a favourite axiom of, 85
a German tribute to his strategy,
170, 176-7
a Marshal’s baton for, 11
a trying position for, 62
appointed Oommander-in-Ohief, 12
attack on Vimy Ridge, 73
fierce energy of, 57
genius of, 244
in a motor accident, 86
Lord Roberts’ prediction con-
cerning, 55
255Index
Foch, Marshal (continued)
plans for a counter-offensive, 70
preparations for final advance,
214
under a cloud, 4, 86
Fontaine-Notre Dame, 157
Fort of the Roman Camp, the, 119
Fourth British Army, operations of,
91, 103 et seq., 113 et seq., 141,
147, 153, 159, 161, 163, 199, 200,
201, 204, 205, 207, 219, 221
(See also Rawlinson)
France, a tribute to her army, 2£C
after the battle of Sedan, 210
arrival of first American Divisions
in, 17
defensive system of eastern
frontier of, 119
diminishing man-power of, 17
importance of Channel ports to,
29
the battle of, 181 (note)
Gaza, Allenby's victory at, 2, 18
George, Lloyd, a famous speech of, 6
and the Western front in the
spring of 1918, 25
becomes Minister of Munitions,
135
characteristics of, 71
his action on Allied organisation,
4, 12
his faith in Foch, 63
proposal to transfer British Army
to Balkans, 242
German arrangements for advance
on Paris, 93
attack on Third and Fifth Armies,
34
campaign in the West, defeat of,
53
Crown Prince, the, 61, 62, 69, 110
begins second battle of the
Marne, 110
unsuccessful attempt to cap-
ture Verdun, 154
defensive system: the spinal cord
of, 146
dread of tanks, 143
reception of their defeated troops,
223
regiments: strength of, 226 (note)
underground barracks, a, 138
war strength in 1918, 27
Germans, a cardinal blunder of, 2
a determined push by, 29
abandon outpost system of de-
fence, 136 (note)
admit defeat, 223
an example of mentality of, 197
Bolshevist tendencies in soldiers
returned from Russia, 127
bombard Paris, 62
capture the line of the Somme, 41
diminishing artillery- and man-
power of, 122, 123, 125
drive back the British Fifth Army,
10
evacuate forest of Bourgogne, 216
fighting strength of, 84
“ kultur ” of, 132, 218
move troops from Russian front,
7, 17, 174
reinforcements from the Eastern
front, 17
retire behind Hindenburg line, 1,
186
their scientific plans in warfare,
85-6
their second defeat at the Marne,
102
Germany, Ludendorfl’s frank advice
to. 111
misunderstands psychology of
Americans, 68
the Kaiser's pronouncement on
parliamentary government, 166
Givenchy, the 55th West Lancashire
Division at, 48
Gneisenau and Bliicher, 16
Gough, a baseless charge against, 39
a combination of untoward
events concerning, 34 et seq.
falls back to the Somme, 39
forms a reinforcing force, 44
his rear lines of defence, 39
Gough’s Fifth Army, operations of,
10, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41,
45, 165, 197, 222
(Cf. Fifth British Army)
Gouraud, General, 146-7, 214
attacks in the Champagne, 156
brilliant defence of, 95
crosses the Aisne, 207
reaches M6zieres, 217
Grandpr6, fall of, 207
Grant, General, forms a reinforcing
force, 44
Great Britain, the importance of the
Channel ports to, 29
256Index
Great War, the, controversy between
“ Easterners ” and “ Western-
ers,” 125, 240
last push of, 210 et sea.
Guards Divisions, operations of, 207,
220, 222
Haig, Sir Douglas, a surprise attack
on the Hindenburg line, 78
a wise decision of, 42, 46
and Marshal Foeh, 13, 14, 181
and the first battle of the Somme,
73
and the German attack on Fifth
Army, 10
attacks enemy on Amiens front,
103
attends conference at Doullens, 11
extends his front, 23
his fighting strength in March,
1918, 21
orders withdrawal from Flanders
ridges, 49
preparations for smashing Hin-
denburg line, 151
system of army training, 187
tribute to 55th West Lancashire
Division, 48
unwavering courage of, 60
Ham, Germans cross the river at, 40
occupied by the French, 117
Hamel, battle of, 90, 91, 103
Hazebrouck, perilous position of, 49
Hertling, von, supersession of, 166
Hindenburg, first coup on Western
front, 1
his victory at Tannenburg, 15
insists on a peace oiler to Allies,
and von Payer’s reply, 177, 178
personality of, 15
replies to von Payer, 179
succeeds Falkenhayn, 15
telegram to von Payer, 167
tenders his resignation, 111
" Hindenburg line," the, 1, 112, 113,
117
attacked and broken, 133, 148, 161
et sea.
battle for: the decisive day, 161
Haig’s surprise attack on, 78
origin of name, 129
original section of, 131
strength of defences of, 164
Hintze, von, 66
Hirson taken by the French, 222
Horne’s First Army, operations of,
45, 116 et sea-, 197, 157, 163, 165,
206, 207, 219, 221
(Cf. First British Army)
Humbert drives enemy from Las-
signy plateau, 108
occupies Noyon, 115
Hutier, General von, attempts to
reach Compiegne, 65, 110
Indian troops for Palestine, 18, 19, 26
Italian collapse on the Isonzo, 2
disaster at Oaporetto, 2, 4, 78, 88
Italy, British reinforcements for, 2,
21, 78
Jerusalem, capture of, 2, 18
Jeudwine, Sir H., commander of 55th
West Lancashire Division, 48
Joffre, General, and question of
unity of command, 4
attacks St. Mihiel salient, 119, 121
failure of his first oflensive, 56
unsuccessful assault in Cham-
pagne, 73
Kemmel, enemy attacks repulsed at.
60
Kemmel Hill gained by Germans, 51,
59
Kitchener, Lord, foresight of, 242,
243
Kluck, von, and first battle of Le
Oateau, 200
" Kultur," German, instances of, 132,
218
Kut, Turkish defeat at, 2
Landrbcibs, capture of, 220
Laon entered by the French, 198
Lassigny, battle of, 110
Le Oateau, first battle of, 200; second
battle of, 201
Le Quesnoy surrenders to New
Zealanders, 220
Le Tronquoy Tunnel, 160
in British hands, 163
Lens coalfields, 130
Les Eparges, 119Index
Liggett, General, takes command of
First American Army, 201
Lille evacuated by enemy, 197
menaced by the Allies, 159
Locre recaptured by the French, 52
Longuyon railway station shelled,
216
Lorraine, withdrawal of French
Army from, 56
Loucheur, M., at Doullens confer-
ence, 11
Ludendorfl advises immediate oiler
of peace, 111, 166
and his “ storm troops," 33
anxiety concerning Cambrai, 158
appeals to Austria for aid on
Western front, 123
as controlling mind at German
Headquarters, 14, 16
changes his military policy, 111,
112
drive on the Somme, 14
elaborate scheme of defence, 131
first coup on Western front, 1
fourth offensive of, 65
his confidence of victory, 66
his plan of retreat, and how it
was defeated, 193 et sea.
plans for the Friedensturm, 93
reserves in March, 1918, 28
result of a costly repulse, 45
retreat of, and its cost, 102, 116,
118
strategy of, 27, 29, 31
tenders his resignation, 208
tries to rally, 192 et seg.
Lys, the, crossed by Plumer, 197
Mackensen hurries troops towards
Sofia, 175
in difficulties in the Balkans, 123,
166, 175
Madelin, M. Louis, 181 (note)
Mangin, General, attacks the enemy,
97
drives Germans from Aisne
heights, 109
opens attack at Soissons. 109
Marne, the, first battle of, Foch’s
achievements at, 56
Marne, the, second battle of, 87, 92,
97, 110, 177
Americans in, 126
Martinpuich, fall of, 114
Maubeuge, occupation of, 222
Maude, his victory at Kut, 2
routs the Turks, 88
Max of Baden, Prince, and Hinden-
burg’s suggested peace offer,
179
endeavours to form a Govern-
ment, 167
becomes Chancellor, 112, 179, 180
paves the way for peace negotia-
tions, 202
Menin entered by Plumer, 197
Merville, fall of, 49
retaken by Allies, 117
Mesopotamia Expedition, faulty
plans of, 244
Mesopotamia, operations in, 2
rout of the Turks in, 88
Messines, battle of, 77, 188
Messines Kidge cleared by Plumer, 2
splendid work of 9th Division on,
49
Meuse-Argonne, battle of, 181
difficulties of American Army in,
189
Meuse-Ohampagne front, effect of
attack on, 164
Meuse heights, defence of, 119
Mfiziferes reached by Gouraud, 217
Military Service Acts, extension of,
219
Milner, Lord, and Foch’s appoint-
ment, 13
in conference at Doullens, 11
Minaumont, fall of, 114
Monchy le Prenx oaptnred, 116
Monro, Sir Charles, 19, 238
Mons entered by Canadians, 222
Mont St. Quentin carried by assault,
114
Montfaucon, capture of, 155
Montmedy entered by the Allies, 218
residence of German Crown
Prince, 215
the railway station shelled, 216
Mormal Forest, 218, 219, 220
Nesle, Debeney at, 115
Neuve Ohapelle, British reoocupation
of, 118
New Zealanders, 163, 220
Nivelle, General, his campaign and
its failure, 1, 4, 73
succeeds Joffre, 73
North Midland Territorials, 161
Noyon occupied by Humbert, 115Index
"Old Oontemptiblbs,” the, 249
Ostend entered by Belgians, 197
Oui'cq valley won by Degoutte, 101
Outpost system of defence, 95, 136
Palestine, reinforcements for, 83, 236
Paris, a memorable conference at, 3
bombardment of, 62
the protection of, 28
Passchendaele, battles of (see Flan-
ders, Tpres)
Payer, Vice-Ohancellor von, an em-
bassy to, 167
memorandum to Hindenburg on
suggested peace ofler, 178
P6ronne entered by Australians, 116
heights of, seized by enemy, 41
Pershing, General, hands over com-
mand of First American Army,
201
his hearty support of Foch, 181
his offer to Foch, 13, 83
transfers troops to Verdun, 153
urges a counter-attack, 98
victory at St. Mihiel, 121
Peruwelz, occupation of, 222
Petain, and declining strength of
French Army, 22, 23
attends Doullens conference, 11
hearty support of Foch, 181
Piave, the third battle of, 240
Plumer clears Messines Eidge, 2
clears the Lys valley, 159
crosses the Lys, 197
Plumer’s Second Army, operations
of, 147, 158, 222
PoincarS, It., attends conference at
Doullens, 11
Portuguese attacked and over-
whelmed, 47, 54
Poziercs, fall of, 114
Qdeant, the Hindenburg line connec-
tion at, 115, 131
Eailways in France, serious strain
on, 228
Eapallo, the Versailles Council estab-
lished at, 5, 6
Rawlinson, General, attacks heart of
Hindenburg line, 161
in command of Amiens front, 5
surprises the enemy, 106
Eawlinson’s Fourth Army, opera-
tions of, 90, 103 et seq., 113 et
seq., 141, 147, 153, 159, 161, 163.
199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 207, 219,
221
Eeims, gallantry of British at, 62
German plans for capture of, 93
Germans' shattered at, 95
Eenaix, occupation of, 222
Eethel entered by the French, 217
Roberts, Lord, a fulfilled prediction
of, 55
Robertson, Sir William, resignation
of, 8, 9
Roulers entered by King Albert, 183
falls to the French, 197
Rupprecht, Crown Prince, 61, 69, 94
Russia, collapse of, 17, 66 (note)
German troops sent to Western
front from, 7, 174
Russian invasion of Fast Prussia, 15
Russian Revolution, the, 3
Sailly captured by British, 157
St. Gond, marshes of, 56
St. Mihiel battle, American reserves
at, 126
Pershing’s victory at, 88
St. Mihiel salient, the, Pershing and,
119
St. Quentin, battle of, 181
Canal, 138, 157, 160
attack on, 161
St. Quentin, enemy repulses Nivelle
at, 133
fall of, 163, 183
St. Quentin-Oambrai front, effect of
Foch’s blow on, 164
Salonika, reinforcements for Allenby
from, 18
Sambre Canal crossed by British, 219
Scarpe, battle of the, 152, 153
Scheldt, the, German flight from, 222
Scottish Division (15th), capture of
Buzancy by, 101
Second American Army, formation
of. 201
operations of, 218, 234
Second British Army, operations of,
147, 158, 222
(Cf. Plumer)
Sedan, American advance to, 217
Selle, the, battle of, 205
Smith-Dorrien and first battle of Le
Cateau, 200
259Index
Soissons, Mangin attacks enemy at,
108, 109
Somme, the, first battle of, 1, 34, 187
tanks in, 76
“Sound ranging" and the accuracy
of artillery fire, 135
Spanish Succession, War of the, 9
Spy system in Germany, 67
Supreme War Council (see Versailles
Council)
Tanks, a frank German confession
regarding, 171
deserters' disclosures of impend-
ing attack by, 99 (note)
German, 51, 144
improvement in British, 105
in warfare, 76, 89, 91, 99, 105, 106,
142
Ludendorff’s changed view of, 143
Ludendorfl’s criticisms of first
British, 80
the German dread of, 143
Tannenburg, German victory at, 15
Thi6pval Ridge, fall of, 114
Third British Army, its critical
situation, 41
its glorious defence, 37
operations of, 31, 34, 38, 45, 47, 113,
115, 147, 153, 157, 159, 199, 200,
201, 206, 207, 219, 221
receives a portion of Fifth Army,
42
Thomas, M. Albert, 135
Thourout occupied by Belgians, 197
Tournai, occupation of, 222
Transportation, difficulties'of, 228 et
seq.
Trench systems, German, 138, 139
Trench warfare, conditions of, 71
Foch and, 89
Turkey, capitulation of, 208
Turkish Army, the, disorganisation
of, 18
Turks defeated at Kut, 2
U-boat campaign, the, 2, 66
Ludendorfl’s opinion on, 68 (note)
United States of America, a feat of
transportation by, 63, 84
and “unity of command," 7, 8, 13
enters the war, 2
United States of America, first divi-
sions arrive in France, 17 (see
also American)
“Unity of command," question dis-
cussed, 3 et seq.
Valenciennes entered by Canadians,
219
Verdun, Falkenhayn’s failure at, and
his supersession, 14
German defeat at, 73
Versailles, an Executive Military
Council formed at, 8
meeting of Supreme War Council
at, 82
Versailles Council, the, establishment
of, 5
Villers-Brettonneux, German occupa-
tion of, 51
recaptured by British, 51
Vimy Ridge captured by Haig, 73
enemy preparations against cap-
, ture of, 133
Foch's failure at, 4, 73, 86
its defensive value, 45
War, complex problems of, 240
the devastation of, 182
West Lancashire Division (55th), gal-
lant deeds of, 48
William II., Emperor, arranges de-
tails of his entry into Paris, 68
at Great Headquarters confer-
ence, 111
issues pronouncement on the in-
troduction of parliamentary
government, 166
witnesses second battle of the
Marne,. 69
Wilson, General Sir Henry, attends
Doullens conference, 11
Wilson, President, German request
for armistice dispatched to,
180
Wire entanglements, elaborate, 137
Ypres, first battle of, Foch and, 59;
third battle of, 53, 75, 77, 158,
188
use of tanks in, 77
Ypres salient, the, 2
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