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reserve; this made him equal in rifle strength, but perhaps still inferior in guns.

On Thursday, March 21, an attack was made in the morning on the Fifth and part of the Third British Armies: 64 German divisions, a total higher than the whole British army of 57, were set in motion against this sector. On that first day of battle against twothirds of the line held by Gough's 14 divisions, 40 of these 64 German divisions were set in motion; motion; and against one-fifth of the line held by him, Von Hutier brought off his Riga manœuvre. On the Wednesday this sector had had 4 German divisions in line; spread fanwise behind them, with the farthest tip of the fan forty miles away, Von Hutier had 19 other divisions. These were brought up in the night between the 20th and the 21st, and the whole 23 were swung against a front, just in front of St Quentin, of 3 or 4 British divisions.

On this first day the casualties of the Fifth and Third British Armies were estimated at 40,000; but Gough, though his line was badly dented in three places, was by no means broken. The Germans were still "firmly held in the battle zone." The British troops, as the German communiqués announced, had resisted with their "usual tenacity." But soldiers oould struggle against this avalanche of numbers without reinforcements. All Gough's divisions had been engaged on

the Thursday. Now Haig and Petain's armies were equal to Ludendorff's. They ought to have taken dispositions to come to the help of Gough, who held the weakest portion of their common line. This help could come either from the British or French.

The official despatches of Sir Douglas Haig do not seem to come from the pen of Sir Douglas himself, but from some subordinate, for their style is very different from his personal communications to Versailles or the War Cabinet, to which the historian of the war is again earnestly referred. The despatches are candid, but they have not altogether the plain candour of the Field-Marshal's character. Dealing with the Thursday fighting, the despatches say, "It became both possible and necessary to collect additional reserves from the remainder of my front and hurry them to the battlefield"; also, "My plans for collecting reserves from other parts of the British front were put into immediate execution." This is true; but it is not a complete story. During the oourse of the Thursday Gough appealed for help. He was told not to expect any British assistance for seventy-two hours-that is, until Sunday; and the first British reinforcements that reached the Fifth Army were a few brigades of the 8th Division, that had come all the way from St Omer, and which reached the battlefield late on Sunday afternoon.

Then there were the French, Petain with his 97 divisions who had had no serious fighting for nearly a year. "On different occasions, 88 the battle developed, I discussed with him the situation and the policy to be followed by the Allied armies," say the despatches. This is the courteous expression of a disagreeable fact. British G.H.Q. and the Grand Quartier - General did begin discussing how many French divisions Petain would give, but Petain maintained that this attack was not Ludendorff's main attack, which was to be towards Rheims, where a violent preliminary bombardment had taken place. On Saturday morning the two commanders-in-chief were still arguing, and Petain had not got further than granting 3 divisions. Meanwhile, on Friday morning, Gough's front had given way under the pressure of the enormous masses in front of him, and had begun to retreat, necessarily bringing backwards with him the Third Army, who had not been moved by the Germans. Mr Lloyd George, at the Saturday meeting of the War Cabinet, expressed his regret over the General Reserves so bitterly and emphatically that the secretary made a record of it.

On the afternoon of Saturday the 23rd, the commandersin-chief finally agreed. "As the result of a meeting held in the afternoon of 23rd Maroh," say the despatches, "arrangements were made for the French to take over as rapidly

as possible the front held by the Fifth Army south of Péronne, and for the concentration of a strong force of French divisions on the southern portion of the battle front." But Ludendorff did not wait on these arrangements: Von Hutier's army had been sweeping forward during Friday and the morning of Saturday, driving before it Gough's army, which was losing its cohesion more and more. At midday on Saturday the Germans had found a gap at Ham and crossed the Somme, so that the seotor it was decided on Saturday afternoon that the French should take over had already been occupied by the Germans when the decision was taken. Petain, however, did not hurry. Debeney, who was to command the "strong force of French divisions," was brought all the way from Lorraine and received his instructions on the Sunday afternoon, and did not reach the battlefield till Monday afternoon. Two French divisions, the 9th and 10th, did come into action on Gough's right on Saturday afternoon and another on Sunday, but they were carried away in the torrent. Only the "usual tenacity" of the British troops had kept Von Hutier till Saturday evening from reaching the objectives assigned to his troops for Thursday evening.

Still, during the week-end they drove on towards Amiens, pushing before them the shreds of Gough's army. If they reached Amiens the British and French armies were separ

gave Hindenburg a decoration that has only been given on one other single occasion in Prussian history, to Blücher after Waterloo: perhaps St Quentin is the greatest German victory of the war.

ated, for no real communica- week the German Emperor tion could be established between them on the lower reaches of the Somme below Amiens. Once separated, Ludendorff could take breath, and fling his mass of manœuvre of 100 divisions against each separately and in turn, either the reduced British pressed against the Channel ports, or the French with a vast front to cover.

During the week-end, therefore, at London, Paris, and Versailles, disastrous events were discussed and desperate resolutions taken: measures for the evacuation of Paris were considered. Clemenceau declared he would fight to the Pyrenees, and calculations were made whether it would be possible to re-embark and save the remainder of the British Army. But, however determined their statesmen might be, the two nations might have refused to make a further effort. The loss of Amiens might involve the loss of the war: everything hung upon it. Viotory, therefore, was again within the grasp of the Germans.

Ludendorff proudly says the Germans at St Quentin did what no one else had done in the war. But even the Germans must be given their due, and he mistakes his own achievement. After resisting for nearly two years the attempts of Allied armies almost twice their size to break through their front, the Germans themselves broke through the Allied front with a bare equality of forees, and this with a plan of operations that was faulty. During the

In

It is certainly the greatest defeat we have ever suffered in our history, measured by any standard. By Wednesday, 26th March, the units of Gough's army had officially been considered 88 having ceased to exist. Of the greatest British army ever assembled, then 57 divisions, between a third and a quarter had been wiped out. Flanders and in Picardy, between 1st June 1917 and 30th April 1918, a period of eleven months, between 600,000 and 650,000 Englishmen beoame casualties. Never before, therefore, have Englishmen been slaughtered at such a rate and on such a scale; and at the end of this period the remainder were still on the brink of ruin, from which only their "usual tenacity" saved them.

The prognostics of Sir Henry Wilson and Foch in the preceding autumn were fulfilled as if by programme. The Germans, impelled by a single will, had in turn endeavoured to crush the separate armies of the Allies-the Italians at Caporetto, and the British at St Quentin-and very nearly succeeded. The system of three independent commandersin-chief had been disastrous on the defensive for just the same reason they had predicted, that the help which one commander

in-chief would give a colleague in danger would be either insufficient or too late, or both, and could only be decided by a supreme authority superior to them all. From the first week of March, when the plan of a General Reserve was abandoned, Gough's army was doomed. During the fortnight that preceded the battle no one on the immediate staff of Fooh had any doubt that a catastrophe was inevitable. The future historian of the war can easily satisfy himself of the accuracy of their their forecast. There are two documents, short and simple, which for this, as well as every other battle of the war, tell the story of the engagement at a glance, the order of battle of the Allied armies and the diary of G.H.Q.; these are worth for any battle all the mountain of documents that exist. The battle disposition for March 21 shows the Allied Reserves were so disposed that none of them could reach Gough in time to save him, and the diary of G.H.Q. that they did not.

It might have been far otherwise. The "terrible blow," as Major Grasset calls it, which Fooh inflicted on the Germans at the Marne in July 1918, might just as well, and perhaps more effectively, have been dealt on the Somme in March. When in June Ludendorff orossed the Aisne and prepared to oross the Marne, Major Grasset says, Fooh, then the Generalissimo and with power to do what he willed, "divined the error the enemy would make," that "he massed his reserves in the wooded hills of

the region of Compiegne-VillersCotterets," that is to say, to the north of Paris. He points out that it was an irretrievable mistake of Ludendorff's to oross the Aisne with a "master of manoeuvre" like Foch in possession of these wooded hills. But Ludendorff had committed no less an error in March (and Fooh had antioipated it) when he pushed across the Somme. If Foch had been allowed, as he intended, to concentrate the bulk of his General Reserve in these same wooded hills of Compiegne, a mass of Allied divisions, issuing from them, would have fallen on the German flank in March with an even more deadly weight than in July. Foch in the summer only returned to his original March manœuvre, just as Ludendorff returned to his original error.

On Sunday, March 24, Haig himself appealed to London for a supreme authority over both armies. Mr Lloyd George sent over Lord Milner and Sir Henry Wilson, who at Doullens, on Tuesday, met M. Clemenceau: he still vacillated between Petain and Foch, but, as Major Grasset tells us, "on the proposal of the British Government," Fooh was given authority to "co-ordinate the action of the two armies." Thus at the end of March Foch was put again in the position into which he had been placed at the end of January. To Mr Lloyd George we owe Sir Henry Wilson, and to Sir Henry Wilson, Foch.

Von Hutier, according to plan, was due in Amiens on

He was only appointed towards the middle of the day on Tuesday. But at a quarter to five, a few hours after his appointment, he managed to get through to Debeney on the telephone; he now had authority to command. He at once ordered him to take all his troops out of the line farther south on a front of six miles, risk leaving a gap there, and send them up in front of Amiens. Against these, on the Wednesday, the last effort of the spent German wave broke itself.

Sunday, but had been kept man, now sixty-seven years back by the "usual tenacity" old, who had snatched the of our troops, which (as prize from the Germans in 1914 Hindenburg says in his newly in Lorraine and Champague, published 'Aus Meinem Leben') just when it was in their grasp, so often repaired the errors of was to do so again in Picardy their leaders. On the Tues- in 1918, when again they had day, however, the Germans almost reached it. racing along the St QuentinAmiens road, with their artillery and supplies left far behind, suffering from hunger, and with little strength left in them, were only 12,000 or 13,000 yards away from the town; the exact distance, therefore, within which the Germans came to winning the war may, perhaps, be exactly computed in yards: it is the space along this road which separated them from Amiens. The meeting at Doullens was not very sanguine of saving it, and Foch outlined his plans of defence in case Paris had to be abandoned and the British armies were driven back to the coast. On returning to London Sir Henry Wilson reported to the War Cabinet next day, not very hopefully, that the safety of Amiens depended on whether the French could collect sufficient troops there in time to defend the town. For south of the Somme, where along the main road the Germans were expending all the strength that was left in them to reach it, there was nothing left but fragments of the Fifth Army, broken by five days continuous unrelieved fighting and retreat. As Major Grasset says, a leader of less steely determination than Foch would probably have considered the situation hopeless. But this same old gentle

So Foch, as soon as he was given a chance, found in himself at once, then, as before in 1914, the means of retrieving the faults and errors of other leaders, and so saved them, but only just, on the edge of ruin. Within six months of the day when he was given the desperate task of commanding armies defeated and pressed back to positions of the most imminent disaster, those same armies under his leadership were thundering victoriously at the gates of the Hindenburg Line, the safeguard and the symbol of German domination, and the leaders of the invineible German hosts who had awed Europe for half a century and very nearly overwhelmed it, had decided upon unoonditional surrender.

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