(pages 598 to 602) he none the less hardly explains that final check. For instance, he tells us nothing whatever

not a single word - about the filling of the gap between the British Fifth Army and the French left, which really did the trick. He does tell us what is interesting, that even as late as March 28 he himself still counted on getting through and reëstablishing open warfare. In conclusion we have the despairing phrase: 'It was an established fact that the enemy's resistance was beyond our strength,' but that is not a military explanation. Why was the resistance of an inferior defensive beyond the strength of a superior offensive on this occasion? Was it because communications could not be kept up over the devastated land west of St. Quentin? That may well have been the main reason. Indeed, the German success in bringing up water alone was a marvel. Was it because lack of discipline was already beginning to break down in the German Army? I fancy there was something in that. In the mutual recriminations which have appeared beyond the Rhine, and especially in Ludendorff's own pages, one gets startling admissions which show the inability of the German temper to stand a strain in the fashion in which the western nations can stand it. Read the passage on page 641 about Lichnowsky's Memoirs, or 100 pages earlier, on page 541, the passage upon German morale even before the offensive of 1918. Or, again, read the description of the Divisions melting away through desertion even in the spring of 1918. Or read those remarkable words on page 683: 'The retiring troops meeting a fresh Division going bravely into action shouted out things such as "Blacklegs” and “You are prolonging the war." The officers in many instances had lost their influence and allowed themselves to be swept along with

the rest.' They are but chance revelations, but they are very illuminating.

Next we turn to the question why that strange diversion was made toward the Kennel Hills: the Battle of the Lys, which went so far to exhaust the remaining forces of the enemy after he had failed in his great attack on Amiens.

I think the true explanation has been well put by Major Grasset in his short study on the strategy of Marshal Foch, which forms the preface to the excerpts from that soldier's writings (about to be published by Messrs. Chapman & Hall in a translation which I am just completing), Major Grasset says, briefly, that the enemy could not for the moment again attack on a front of 40,000 yards, so he chose a shorter front of 25,000 yards with the object of crushing in the British left, throwing the British army back on the sea and obtaining the Channel ports. It was a 'strategic second best.' I think I am right in saying that no strategical second best has ever succeeded in the whole history of war.

In his description of the Battle of the Lys the author does make an allusion to the critical point, but not a sufficient one. He says, in the last lines of page 607: 'On the left, at Givenchy and Festubert, we were held up. The result was not satisfactory.' Now that is all right as far as it goes, but it is quite insufficient. The heroic tenacity of one British Division from Lancashire if I remember right— turned the whole of that affair. The enemy could not push forward thoroughly so long as the neck of his salient remained narrow, and narrow it would remain so long as the corner at Festubert was held against him. It was held, as we know; and to the men who held Festubert in April, 1918, we very largely owe the final victory in this war.

Well, then, one turns from the ac

count of the Lys to the account of the final great affair the German breakdown before Rheims and the famous counter-stroke of July 18, which is one of the few capital dates in the history of Europe.

The German line of attack before it went forward on what was to be the supreme day, July 15, 1918, lay like a broadly open pair of compasses with the ruined town of Rheims in the angle thereof and each limb about 25 miles long. At the extreme right of the right-hand limb a sort of flank guard curled back from Château Thierry to Soissons. It was on that flank that Foch unexpectedly struck and won on the fourth day of the battle. It was as though an army which lay from Croydon to just north of Windsor, and thence round, slightly deflecting from the straight line, to somewhere beyond Newbury, had the task of advancing southward with its western flank covered by a line of troops running north from Newbury across the Downs to Oxford. In the same way the German line lay in front of Rheims in a broad angle, and, beyond Château Thierry, sharply curled round north in a sort of flank guard to Soissons. The Germans meant the main army to go forward on either side of Rheims and the flank between Château Thierry and Soissons to hold. The main army failed to get forward in front of Rheims because the French army, under Gouraud, organized a very thin defensive in depth, quite deceived the attack, and shattered it in the first seven hours. Still they might have held upon their flank. They did not. They were here completely surprised. Foch had secretly accumulated against that flank great forces under Mangin and Degoutte, French and American, and fell upon it with crushing effect; an effect so crushing that from that moment onward the destruction of

the German army continued uninterruptedly till the whole Prussian organization, civil and military, had to capitulate.

Now the interesting thing is that Ludendorff tells us in one place that the attack was foreseen. Frankly it is impossible to believe it. Though he assures us the attack was foreseen, I can, I think, from his own text prove a sheer contradiction, and I believe any reasonable student of military history will bear me out. He tells us (on page 666) with regard to the front of the Marne that 'on the 17th (of July) the retreat was fixed for the night between the 20th and the 21st.' I say it is not credible that in the expectation of an attack between Soissons and Château Thierry on the 18th a retreat would have been planned for the 20th and 21st. I do not believe, and no one will ever believe that those two assertions can both be true. Either the order for retreat was not given (I think it was) or, much more probable, the imminence of the Franco-American attack in the flank was not foreseen, and came as a great surprise. Ludendorff says, with good proof (upon page 667) that he was opposed to the extraordinary plan which the German General Staff had conceived, after the failure by Rheims, of attacking again in Flanders! At any rate he was at Avesnes at 2 o'clock in the morning of that fatal day, the 18th, and the only new point he gives us as the history of the great surprise (for such I still take it to be) is that a particular German Division which was specially relied upon, southwest of Soissons, broke early against all expectation. He is wrong when he says (upon page 670) that Foch's intention was to cut off the salient. The salient was far too broad for that. Foch's intention was to attack, to dent one side, to compel a rush of enemy troops to aid retirement from the dented salient,

and then to attack again elsewhere, continuously, uninterruptedly, increasingly; so that the enemy, reeling from the first blow, should not rally, and that intention Foch and the Allies carried out in an unbroken chain of success up to the armistice.

On page 671 Ludendorff tells us that one of the reasons for the breakdown of July 18th was that the men had ceased to believe in the possibility of an attack, and oddly enough, upon this page he does call the movement a surprise. He also blames influenza and monotonous diet; as I said of Caporetto; but such phrases of excuse may always be neglected.

One rises from the description with the general judgment that the enemy was upon that memorable summer morning in the high cornfields of the Upper Ourcq and the Tourdenois completely outmanoeuvred, and that his then Chief Commander still bears toward that decisive stroke an attitude of bewilderment.

II. BY MAJOR-GENERAL SIR F.

MAURICE

THERE are two Ludendorffs in this book, Ludendorff the soldier and Ludendorff the director of Germany's military policy. The soldier gives us a straightforward and, except where it is marred by expositions of Prussian mentality, a convincing account of the military operations with which he was concerned. The would-be statesman is querulous and insincere; he has learned nothing from defeat, and is occupied in trying to shift the blame for disaster on to the shoulders of others.

The soldier shows himself to us as a deep and earnest student of his profession, a gallant man in action, a skillful organizer, and a tactician of great merit. His weakness was his truly

German failure to estimate correctly the forces arrayed against him. He did not appreciate either the power of resistance of the British army or its power of recovery from reverses; he did not appreciate the power of the British navy and of the British mercantile marine and its effect upon the transport of American troops across the Atlantic; he did not appreciate the endurance of France. Writing of the position just prior to America's entry into the war he says: 'Calculations pointed to a result favorable to us. It would thus be necessary, in order to transport 1,000,000 American soldiers in a reasonable time, to employ 5,000,000 tons of shipping space. Such a quantity of shipping, in view of the necessity for maintaining supplies to the Western Powers, could not be spared even temporarily.' We know that at the time of the armistice there were more than 2,000,000 American soldiers in Europe.

That psychological defect of overconfidence when things were, in appearance, going well, which beset all the German generals, vitiated the whole of Ludendorff's spring campaign of 1918. He believed that he could break through the trench barrier in the west, possibly with one, certainly with two or three great blows. There was in his strategy none of Foch's skill of fence, none of the preparation for the knockout blow, such as began on July 18 with the counter-attack in the second battle of the Marne and ended in St. Mihiel. Every blow from March 21 onward, save only von Hutier's abortive attempt to reach Compiègne in June, was meant to be a knockout blow, and was continued to the stage when he got little but heavy loss in return for his attacks. The result, following upon the bitter experiences of the German army in the west in 1917, was that Ludendorff exhausted his

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strength and was led to attempt with of insufficient force the desperate gamble of the second battle of the Marne. He had neither the nimbleness of mind nor the imagination which enabled Foch to solve the problem of the trench barrier in the west. Nothing shows his lack of imagination more clearly than his attitude toward the tanks. In a review of the situation at the beginning of 1917, he says: "The time has not come for us to undertake the construction of tanks.' Even as late as October, 1917, he was of opinion that 'there was no anxiety about tanks. They were not thought to be particularly dangerous.'

He was not able to picture to himself the possibilities of improvement of tanks. Yet the whole experience of the war should have taught him to be less decided in his first condemnation. The aeroplane of 1918 was very different in power and in range from the aeroplane of 1914, and so it was with the tanks and with many other engines of destruction. After the- to himfatal August 8, we find Ludendorff stating that the number and efficiency of our tanks, and above all their moral effect upon the German troops, were among the great causes of his defeat. Ludendorff the soldier, who is at his best in his first volume, which is devoted chiefly to the Russian campaign, was a good but not a great general.

In the second volume we see the other Ludendorff, the director of Germany's military policy, and it is not a pleasing picture. The Chancellors with whom he served, Bethmann-Hollweg, Michaelis, Hertling, and Prince Max, are all drags on the German coach, and with them rests the responsibility for Germany's downfall. He shows no inkling that he has any understanding of the crimes and blunders which brought his country to ruin. The invasion of Belgium was a military

necessity, and there is nothing more to be said about it. It is ridiculous to suppose that it brought the British Empire into the war, for had not England cunningly planned the downfall of Germany? "The stories of Belgian atrocities are nothing but clever, elaborate, and widely-advertised legends.' As to unrestricted submarine warfare, 'if submarine warfare in this form could have a decisive effect and the navy held that it could- then in the existing situation it was our plain military duty to the German nation to embark upon it.' Ludendorff talks much of the morale of his troops, but he appears to have had no conception of the moral forces which the policy of the German General Staff brought into the field against him. In his introduction he tells us truly that 'in this war it was impossible to distinguish where the sphere of the army and the navy began and that of the people ended. Army and people were one. The world witnessed the War of Nations in the most literal sense of that word.' But as the war proceeds and his responsibilities increase he shows himself to us as less and less capable of guiding a nation at war. As a soldier leading a storming party into Liège or directing operations on the Russian front he is entitled to our respect; as a director of war he is contemptible, because he attempted to be a statesman and had not even a rudimentary knowledge of the craft. He exposes, the more effectively because unwittingly, the Achilles heel of militarism in excelsis. His second volume ends with a long and involved statement of his quarrels with his government, in which he endeavors to show that the German army was not defeated and that it was the German ministers who shamefully surrendered. But he has no more skill as a controversialist than he had as a statesman, and, though he suppress

es important documents which tell against him, he makes it plain that on September 29, when we broke through the Hindenburg line and Foch's great battle had reached its climax, he was a beaten man.

In all this Ludendorff teaches us nothing as to German thought and character which is very new. By far the most interesting feature of his book to us is the tribute which he unconsciously pays to Haig and to the British army. As a people we are prepared to stand any losses in defense. A grim defensive struggle against odds always appeals to us. But we are bitterly critical of loss in an attack which does not give us a visible and compensating advantage. We never murmured at the casualty lists which came home during the defensive battles round Ypres, and we have never troubled to ask who was responsible for our unpreparedness to meet Ludendorff's assaults of the spring of 1918, assaults which cost us far more than we suffered during the same period of time in any other battle of the war. But we have not yet ceased to regard the Somme and Passchendaele as costly failures, while even now we are loth to believe what Haig has told us, and what Ludendorff here tells us, that attack is less costly than defense and is the one and only means of winning victory.

Ludendorff gives us a view of what was happening on 'the other side of the hill,' and makes it as clear as daylight that those struggles exhausted the military strength of Germany, sapped the morale of the German army, and laid the foundations of victory. He draws a gloomy picture of the German position on the Western Front when he first went there in the middlee of the battle of the Somme. 'Not only did our morale suffer, but in addition to fearful wastage in killed and

wounded we lost a large number of prisoners and much material.' As to Passchendaele, he gives us one of the chief reasons why Haig fought that battle. He tells us that after the failure of Nivelle's offensive the French War Minister admitted in July that the attack had failed with losses as must not be incurred again. The losses were so great that the morale of the army began to suffer and mutinies broke out.' Haig attacked at the end of July to give the French time to recover, and the effect of that attack upon the Germans was, Ludendorff tells us, that 'the battles on the Western Front became more costly and more difficult for us than any which the German army had previously fought.' And again later: 'October came and with it a month which was one of the hardest of the whole war. The world saw Tarnopol, Czernowitz, Riga, Udine, the Tagliamento, and the Piave. It did not see the anxiety in my heart, it did not see my anxiety nor my deep sympathy with the terrible sufferings of our troops on the Western Front.' He ascribes the failure of his March attack to reach Amiens to the 'diminished fighting value' of his troops and to the fact that they were not always under the control of their officers. The losses of Passchendaele could not be replaced by like material.

. But it was Haig's victory at Amiens which impressed him most. It has been assumed by many writers that after the second battle of the Marne Ludendorff had decided on a general shortening of his front, and that Haig in August and the early part of September did little more than hasten the retreat of his enemy. Ludendorff makes it clear that retreat was not in his mind till after the battle of Amiens. That battle came upon him like a bolt from the blue: 'August 8 was the black day of the German army in the history