of this war.' 'August 8 put the decline of our fighting power beyond all doubt, and in such a position as regards reserves I had no hope of finding a strategic expedient whereby to turn the situation to our advantage,' and so depressed was he that he tendered his resignation. It was refused, but on August 14 he told a Crown Council, over which the Kaiser presided, that Germany could not hope to win the war, and that it was necessary to sue for peace. The last chapters of the book deal less with the conduct of the war than with the shortcomings of the German Government and with the responsibility for the acceptance of the terms of armistice; but Ludendorff has already told us more than enough to confirm Foch's opinion that it was hiefly the hammer blows of the British army which forged victory in that last wonderful campaign on the Western Front.

III. BY LIEUTENANT-COLONEL

REPINGTON

THE memoirs of Chiefs responsible for the conduct of great operations of war must always possess both value and fascination if they are written in a spirit of sincerity. When such memoirs relate to the Great War of 1914-1918, and take us behind the scenes of the most frightful tragedy of history, they become of absorbing interest, and find us all predisposed to read them and to weigh carefully what the writer has to say.

General Ludendorff was de facto Commander-in-Chief of the German armies from August 29, 1916, until the close of the war, and was largely responsible for 'the general direction of the armed forces of Germany's friends. He was not nominally in command. The Ober-Feldherr des Deutschen Reiches remained the Kaiser throughout, while

during the period of Ludendorff's chief activities Field-Marshal von Hindenburg occupied the position of Chief of the General Staff, as the great Moltke had occupied it in the wars of 1866 and 1870-71. Ludendorff was only First Oberquartiermeister, or Sub-Chief of the staff. We do not yet fully know the parts played by the Kaiser and Hindenburg from August, 1916, onward, but it is believed that the Kaiser did not interfere much in the conduct of operations, and that the old Marshal was more a symbol and a figurehead than a real director of the mighty forces under him. He never filled, nor attempted to fill, the "place taken by Moltke in the wars that united Germany. He always and very loyally supported Ludendorff and covered him with his authority, but the aspiring spirit and dominating temper of the younger man led him from the first virtually to become the mainspring of all plans and decisions.

If Ludendorff had remained content with his legitimate General Staff duties, his career might have been less meteoric and his fall less portentous, but he might have served his country better. His ardent character led him to interfere in almost every department of state, in which he settled nothing and unsettled everything, and a large part of his memoirs is devoted to matters which are not of the competence of a General Staff at all. Diplomacy, policy, and internal adminis'tration of every sort occupy his time, and when he admits that 'one man alone must have the power,' and that 'I alone was responsible,' we find ourselves in the presence of an autocrat who endeavored unsuccessfully to fill a rôle in which even a Napoleon might have failed.

Ludendorff was no Napoleon. He was, like Rüchel, whose character he most resembles, the concentrated es

sence of a Prussian. He had all the narrow and exclusive prejudices of his race, brightened a little by the Junker's cult of Fatherland and of Kingship, but militarist to the core, a believer in force as the only remedy, and entertaining always a contempt for democracy and liberalism in all their forms and manifestations. He was hard-working, technically competent in the science of war, but wooden and without grandeur. So long as things went well he was lauded to the skies. But when things went ill his unfinished education in the arts of empire and of the government of men came out strongly, and his nerve did not stand the test of defeat.

His memoirs do not give us the true explanations of his military failures. They are full of complaints of the incompetence of German statesmanship and of the bad behavior of the German people. That Germany badly needed a Bismarck, and never found one, goes without saying. But if Ludendorff had studied German statesmanship as closely as we had, he could safely have counted upon it to make every mistake possible. Bethmann-Hollweg, with his immortal fatuity about the 'scrap of paper,' and the row of dummies who succeeded him in the Chancellorship, are shades that flit across the stage of the war, utter a few piercing cries, and then disappear into the gloom. As for the German people they do not deserve the hard things said of them. They were sick of the war in 1916, and yet for two years longer they supported the most dreadful sacrifices and sufferings, if not uncomplainingly, at least with their old docility.

Ludendorff never understood the art of war. Signs of masterful strategic competence and of the power to weigh great national interests are nowhere conspicuous in his apologia. He dis

plays no power of sustained thought. He did not know how to profit by the good fortune of the Russian collapse in 1917. He admits that the revolution had broken the back of the Russian army in July of that year, yet in November there were still eighty German divisions, or a third of the army, in the east, and the best chance of overwhelming us in the west before America could appear in strength was thrown away. He did not, again, know how to profit diplomatically by his culminating point of victory, and would never abate his pretensions until all was lost. He could never make up his mind to allow German diplomacy to offer reasonable terms, and went on until the military instrument had broken in his hands. He then endeavored to make German diplomacy responsible for the surrender. He had no reasoned or large views. He had no sense of realities or of what was practicable and the reverse.

This same inability to profit by favoring circumstances was most marked in April, 1918, when the Germans were within grasp of Amiens, and had but to persevere to place us in a position which we can scarcely contemplate even now without a shudder. Had Ludendorff persevered he would have found our battle-worn armies outnumbered, with their backs to the sea and unable to retreat. Content with a half success, Ludendorff turned to the Lys and wasted Rupprecht's best divisions in its low-lying valleys. Then he switched to the Aisne and gave our armies several months for reorganization. Such fatal errors, first in the broad field of national policy and then on the decisive battlefield itself, destroy Ludendorff's reputation for leadership and destroy it beyond repair.

He was even smaller in defeat than in victory. When his failure on July 15, 1918, deprived him of all hope of carry

ing through his plans for the year, his initiative and will-power were completely paralyzed. He had no elasticity of mind and nothing to suggest. He became the sport of Foch's brilliant strategy, and his armies footballs for the kicks of Pétain, Haig, Pershing, and the King of the Belgians.

He tells us constantly of the terrible impressions which the battles in the West of 1916, 1917, and 1918 made upon him. If there are personages in political or other spheres in England who disliked, and in private violently criticized, the tactics of Field-Marshal Lord Haig and Sir Launcelot Kiggell, they will now observe that Ludendorff disliked these tactics a great deal more. They appear to have steadily worn down his nerve, and the process is visible throughout these memoirs. Lord Rawlinson's battle of August 8, 1918'the black day of the German army'

shook Ludendorff badly, but it was not till September 28 at 6 o'clock in the afternoon that he descended to Hindenburg's room below and explained his views 'as to a peace offer and a request for an armistice.' With these views Hindenburg agreed.

Within a week the news of the German request for an armistice flashed through the world. September, 1918, had been a month of British, French, American, and Belgian victories, and they had broken the proud spirit of the German Higher Command. At a later date Ludendorff attempted to recall his will for peace and to throw upon the government the onus of the surrender. A German White Book of August of this year has given all the documents relating to the genesis of the armistice, and that the responsibility rests with Ludendorff there is no reasonable doubt. Under the influence of impressions and emotions which a great commander would never have Land and Water, October 6

allowed himself to entertain, Ludendorff succumbed.

These are not the records of a great man or a great soldier. Ludendorff began the campaign of 1918 with, as he says, twenty-five to thirty divisions more than the Allies. He retained till mid-June, by his own showing, which is perfectly correct, a large superiority of strength. He could not profit by these advantages, nor by those which an army of a single people necessarily possesses over another made up of five or six different nationalities. He took no masterful decisions during the critical days from July 15 to the end, and this end was the military defeat of Germany and the flight of her Monarch into an alien land.

I find these memoirs extraordinarily interesting, and admire the enterprise of Land and Water, which has enabled us to study the English text before the German edition reached England. The full translation, which Messrs. Hutchinson are publishing, must necessarily find a place in every library of thinking soldiers. If it is not a military history of the war it is a most illuminating history of the workings of Ludendorff's mind, and the psychological interest cannot be gainsaid. Daily for over two years we sought to discover what was at the back of Ludendorff's mind. Now he tells us, and we can see where we were right and where wrong. We follow an honest soldier, not in the front rank of generalship, but also not a courtier, nor a trimmer, struggling with overwhelming difficulties and pursuing his course with a firm desire to do his duty. So we close his book with a not unkindly feeling toward a defeated foe whose name will be imperishably connected with the worst defeat and the most brilliant victories in the long history of British arms.

THE strike has not played a very large part in English history or English chronicle. Forms of it as a means of indirect political action have probably been commoner in Ireland than in this country. On the small scale, in which a tiny shock is administered, the strike is of almost daily occurrence and is almost entirely salutary. But where it is on a scale to paralyze a countryside the strike is a testimony to defective civilization. Mankind has, indeed, to be in a cleft stick between slavery and anarchy before it would easily be constrained to have resort to it. Aristophanes played with the idea of the ladies of Athens having recourse to it. Livy, and eventually Shakespeare, explained the horrid dilemma in the famous apologue of the Belly and the Members. Servile revolts, such as those by the Carthaginian mercenaries, were strikes upon a colossal scale. In England during the seventeen-nineties we had the naval mutinies, which were strikes that succeeded in the main, at the cost of heartrending scenes, in attracting the British conscience to horrible abuses. In those days, of the great war of a century since, to own lands or employ hands was the supreme virtue, and workmen were pitifully dependent upon the conscience of the rich. Mantraps eventually did prick the landed conscience; but that of the manufacturer was long armorproof against child labor and sweating of the most revolting kind. Have you read the sufferings of the 'little trappers' in the pages of Sybil, that shining record of the two races the rich and the poor, the conquerors and the conquered?-"There is more serfdom in England now (1844)

than at any time since the Norman Conquest.' Thomas Hood sang in the pages of Punch 'The Song of a Shirt.' 'Elle obtint un grand succès, mais ne produisit aucun resultat.' Charles Kingsley depicted the doings in a sweating den of Jewish tailors. The shrill cry of the old crone, 'No workhouse for an officer's daughter,' and the response of Lizzie, 'who goes out of nights,' touched many hearts. Were these pictures mere fables, or the stories of Mark Rutherford and a score of others who taught us 'How folks turned Chartists'? But who then who wore a white waistcoat had a word of compassion to say for Luddites, Blanketeers, Chartists, Saint Simonians, or Fourierists? It takes, it would seem, the mellowing effect of a generation to show that people who are ground down by actual griping poverty are not likely to be the most successful voluntary stabilizers of the commonwealth. In what strangely different accents does the historian Guglielmo Ferrero speak of the proletariat and the revolutionary agitators of Paris in 1848:

No impartial writer in 1919 will deny the Parisian workman of '48 the praise which courage, self-sacrifice, sincerity, and an ardent desire for good deserve, wherever these virtues succeed in piercing the hard crust of the earth amid the tangled thicket of the selfishness and the evil passions of the world. These humble workmen had felt from the bottom of their hearts the full fire of the tragedy which had come to pass in Europe when the old qualitative civilization had passed away, leaving a new quantitative civilization in its place. They had not reached the point of demanding the blessings of peace and plenty, but were ready to suffer and to die in order that the world might be purified and, in the abyss

of their poverty, they were moved by the misfortunes of Poland and Italy. They belonged, in fact, to that part of the human race whose virtues compensate for the vices of the rest and entitle them to all respect.

The horrors revealed in Sybil are focused around the abuses of the truck system:

This here age [says one of the characters in the Rising Sun] wants a great deal, but what it principally wants is to have its wages paid in the current coin of the realm.

I have been at play, Sir [says Sir Oracle], several times in forty years and have seen as great stickouts as ever happened in this country. I've seen the people at play for weeks together, and so clammed that I never tasted nothing but a potato and a little salt for more than a fortnight. Talk of tommy [truck], that was hard fare, but we were holding out for our rights, and that's sauce for any gander. And I'll tell you what, Sir, that I never knew the people play yet, but if a word had passed atween them and the mainmasters aforehand, it might not have been settled; but you can't get at them any way. Atween the poor man and the gentleman there never was no connection, and that's the wital mischief of this country.

It's a very true word, Master Nixon, and by this token that when we went to play in '28 and the masters said they would meet us: what did they do, but walk about the ground and speak to the butties [middle men]. The butties has their ear.

We never want no soldiers here if the masters would speak with the men; but the sight of a pitman is pison to a gentleman, and if we go up to speak wi' em, they always run away.

It's the butties [said Nixon], they 're wusser nor tommy.

When he writes on the state of England question, Disraeli employs a large brush, the siege of Mowbray Castle by an infuriated mob is described with the same breadth of color and chiaroscuro as a scene in Ivanhoe. This immense scenic touch was passed on by feuilletonists such as Soulié and Sue to Hugo and Zola. Zola in Germinal has designed what is perhaps the best-known strike epic. It is concerned

with the coal industry of the Lille district, under the Second Empire, and depicts a state of society not less bestial than that of Wodgate in Sybil. Lantier, a retired engine driver, is brought and seeks to raise their standard of to a leading position among the colliers living. The result is a strike of the most barbarous and resolute character on both sides. Belgians are introduced to the mines as scabs' or 'blacklegs,' riots supervene, the soldiers are brought in and the strike is broken. Had the oligarchy of that time, when the people of England were suspected of being continually on the point of 'about to rise,' only accepted Disraeli's insight as well as his leadership, and commissioned him to combat the callous views of economists and obscurantists, many flagrant wrongs might have been righted in time to prevent the necessity of Hard Times being written. The author's flamboyant tricks and ironical transitions cannot obscure the relevance of much that he saw in English history that has never been properly perceived to this day. Our written history, he says, at the end of Sybil, has been a contradiction between terms and facts.

Oligarchy has been called Liberty; an exclusive Priesthood has been christened a National Church; Sovereignty has been the title of something that has had no dominion, while absolute power has been wielded by those who profess themselves the servants of the people. In the selfish strife of factions two great existences have been blotted out of the history of England the Monarch and the Multitude; as the power of the Crown has diminished, the privileges of the people have disappeared; till at length the sceptre has become a pageant and its subject has degenerated again into a serf.

This was the manifesto of the Young England party. But its reception was so disheartening that by when he came to write Lothair Disraeli had abandoned his generous dreams for ironical