Land & Water 
August 8, 19 1 8 
He chose for a sector of attack the fifty miles of country 
between the rivers Scarpe and Oise, and designed to break 
the line so near to the junction of the British and Frcncli 
forces as to separate the former from tlie hitter. An advance 
thence — that is, from somewhere in front of St. Quentin to 
Amiens and the Valley of the Somme — after the rupture, 
if it were accomplished with sufficient rapidity, wouJd cer- 
tainly isolate the British Army with the most complete 
consequences. The Lower Valley of the Somme from Amiens 
is broad, marshy, possessed of but one insufficient railwaj - 
crossing, and a few roads and bridges. Between Amiens and 
the North Sea the whole British force would have found 
themselves confronted by a greatly superior enemy, with 
no room to manreuvre and no power of retiring, for it would 
have been impossible to move these modem great masses of 
men, backed by a few ports, across the sea in time, even if 
such a retirement could be regarded as sufficient to save the 
war. A German break-through and a rapid reaching of the 
Somme line, with the isolation of the British from the French, 
would have meant the destruction in detail, first of the 
lesser, then of the greater half of the forces so divided. The 
new tactic employed was precisely, that of Caporetto upon a 
far larger scale : Some forty divisions in line, and as many 
others in reserve, with the power to call up for pursuit or 
extension another twenty, at least, was the immense weight 
the German commanders had gathered for their blow. 
First Results 
On the second day (March 22nd) they broke the line just 
west of St. Quentin, and the nine days following were a 
rapid retirement of the Fifth Army towards Amiens, with 
extremely heavy losses in men and material ; a swinging 
round of the Third Army to the north, pivoting upon Arras, 
and efforts by the French to pour in the reserve divisions at 
a sufficient rate from the south to stem the tide. 
The issue was an extremely close one. ' The position was 
just saved. By the beginning of April the enemy was held 
upon a curiously irregular line, forming a great bulge from 
Arras, covering Amiens by about ten or twelve miles, leaving 
Montdidier in German hands, and Noyon also, and thence 
joining the old line north of the Aisne to Soissons and Rlieims. 
But though he was held, the disaster had cost the loss of 
thousands of . prisoners and many 'guns. The old per- 
manent system of field fortification was destroyed over 
an extent of more than fifty miles ; a dangerous salient 
for the defending troops had' been created upon the bend 
Montdidier-Noyon-Soissons, and a further effort might well 
bnng the enemy to Amiens and the Somme Valley, though it 
was now rather late to expect the full consequences whicfi 
would have followed upon an immediate arrival at those 
points. 
This effort the enemy made upon April 4th. It was 
pursued with the utmost determination, and failed. Five 
days later— upon April 9th— he suddenly attacked again 
once more with all the effect of surprise and with the full use 
of his new tactical method far over to the north in front of 
Lille. He broke some miles of the front there held by the 
Portuguese, pushed across the Lys, and developed this 
success with as much rapidity as the preceding ones. 
A united command had come into practical working under 
the peril of the past few weeks. French reserve divisions 
were thrown northward into Flanders, as they had previously 
been thrown, to cover the gaps left by the defeat of the 
Third Army, and ultimately, though slowly, and only 
alter the loss of many prisoners and. many guns, the 
Flanders attack was in its turn stayed. But in the 
course of It much of the Ypres salient had to be given up 
and of the old permanent line between the Aisne and the 
."!! Sea nothing remained but the marshy lower reaches 
of the Yser and a small bastion stretching from Givenchy 
round Arras including the Vimy Ridge. This battle in 
Flanders, called the Battle of the Lys, cLe to an end upon 
April 29th. Upon that day the enemy, who has throughout 
mitc^ .T^ ^^"^ P"'^''^ '^^ ^^^'-"'^ j"^t beyond its possible 
limits, attempted a continued advance after his previous 
capture of Mount Kemmel. and failed, as he had failed three 
weeks before in front of Amiens. His losses in this one 
t^t K.^^T^'^"""'' 2ist-nearly six weeks before-were 
formidable. They were probably no less than 600,000 men 
r^n1.Ti'TP'"'l'°, ^ '''"S pause, during which he would 
hftr?„ "r °T. ^y '!?-'P"^' ■"'■^"•""^ ^"d by the sending to 
mIZ i'-r °^ ''T"^ '■"'™'*^ °f '^''^ young class of 1910. 
Meanwhile, no effort was made by the Allied Higher Com- 
mand to restore the situation. It^tood strictly upon the 
SSd'-f'^n'''"'^ " ''^*™"* ^^"^'^ those ^hoTd ,0 
understand its motives were too ready to criticise. 
There was one novel feature appearing in the situation 
during this critical period, and that was the cnibrigading of 
such American troops as were sufficiently trained in with 
French and British troops; an experiment justified only by 
extreme necessity. Such an experiment the enemv naturally 
looked upon as a proof of the straits to which the Allies were 
reduced. Nor was he wrong. But, on the other hand, it 
was al.so a proof of a certain elasticity in the American system 
which was to prove of the utmost value to the Allies, which 
the enemy would have done well to have noted, and which 
apparently hc> misunderstood. The moment the gravity of 
the situation was appreciated the transport of American 
contingents across the Atlantic rose with astonishing rapidity 
— a thing that would have been impossible to any military 
system more rigid and less alert ; a thing the more remark- 
able when we consider that it was experimental, with no 
tradition or precedent to help it. Within two months of the 
great German advance in March the rate of transport had 
multiplied by more than five — by nearly six — ^and, even so, 
was rapidly rising. True, the American troops landed in 
France could not proceed straight to the field. They re- 
quired further training upon European soil. The oppor- 
tunities for this had their limitations, and the contingents 
reaching the line could not do so as a single army, but were 
largely under Allied generals. None the less, it was this 
American effort which, combined with a right judgment 
upon the part of the Allied Higher Command in waiting for 
the new moment to counter-attack, was to change the face 
of the war. But before the new elements could tell, yet 
another disaster was to befall the Allied cause : the last 
and fourth Use of the new German method. Upon May 
27th the sector between Soissons and Rheims— a distance of 
aboht thirty miles— was attacked by the enemy with a 
success more complete in proportion " to the area menaced 
than was the effort which had preceded it. . With a remark- 
ably small expense in men and nong in material, the Germans 
broke through, and in three days swept thirty miles forward, 
reaching the line of the Marne itself from Chateau- Thierry to 
above Dormans. Rheims held, but Soissons was lost, and 
the victorious offensive -created a new great salient in all 
that district called the Tardenois, coming to the edge of the 
great Villers-Cotterets Forest on the west, and to that of the 
Mountain of Rheims on the east. 
The first week in June saw the completion of this last 
enterprise. The advance was at last held by the hurrying up 
of Allied divisions, including now not a few Americans in for- 
mation, and the whole situation could be appreciated. 
The Four Successes 
It was this: Since the Russian collapse had permitted 
the enemy to produce his new tactical system, he had used 
it four times, and each time with a complete success, so far 
as the breaking of the line was concerned. In these four 
great achievements— Caporetto, St. Quentin, the Lys, the 
Chemin-des-Dames— he had counted prisoners in thousands 
and captured a large number of guns. He had failed to 
achieve any complete and final rupture of the line 
and therefore any decision ; but each blow had weakened 
his opponent and strengthened himself both morally 
and materially. The whole war seemed to have taken 
on a different aspect, and the race between his advance 
towards a final decision and the strength of the Western 
numbers by the arrival of the Americans still seemed 
to incline in his favour. It remained for him to make yet 
another great effort during the fighting season of 1918 for 
though his own losses had been extremely heavy, he still had 
in hand a sufficient strength to repeat almost upon the same 
scale his attempted decision of March. 
To understand the general plan of the enemy for this 
last mam effort of his, we must consider the whole front 
and its possibilities. 
.x.^'^u^TJT '" ^''^''^'' h^^ produced a line upon which 
the Allied defensive held nothing permanent in all the long 
stretch between Arras and Rheims, and that long stretch 
had been forced into something hke a W, with a difficult 
and dangerous salient for the defensive to hold in the middle 
south of the town of Noyon. Beyond Rheims the old front 
stretched up to the Argonne, and thence beyond Verdun to 
Lorrame, the Vosges, and the Swiss frontier. After the gap 
of Swiss neutral territory the Alh^d line was continued by 
he Italians through the mountains and down the Piave 
to the Adnatic. The e-emy plan was apparently a united 
nliHHI. f'^ri^^^" hy trying to reduce the salient in the 
Zuif ■^- °^ '^^''^' ^ h=^^^ ^P°ken, which may be 
tn!n ;°'',<^°."^^"ie"^f.the salient of Compiegne, the principal 
town contained within it. If he were successful here^ it 
would, apart from a further heavy weakening of the Allies 
