October 3, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
THE WAR: By HILAIRE BELLOC 
Opening of the Main Offensive 
The First Four Blows 
IT was on Thursday, July i8th, that the tide of the war 
was turned. It was upon Thursday, September 26th — 
exactly ten weeks later — that the great battle of the 
West opened. The interval has been a series of pre- 
liminaries : preliminaries upon a large scale, but none 
the less preliminaries. ' 
The present vast series of actions is the main thing. It is 
not necessarily the final thing, indeed the odds are against 
its being the final and decisive thing, but it is the main opera- 
tion for which all the rest was a preface. We are only at its 
origin. I write this on the dispatches of Sunday night, i.e., 
upon the news only of the first four days : Thursday, Friday, 
Saturday and Sunday. Four successive blows, delivered in 
time and place so that the opponent should be compelled 
to accept battle everywhere under conditions of inferiority. 
Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. First the blow on 
the Argonne front, then the turning of the water iront 
of Cambrai and the forcing of its open gate between 
the two canals, then the British second army, with the 
Belgians far in the north, then the fourth blow, north of 
St. Quentin. 
I will take these four great actions (which are closely 
inter-dependent in motive, each forming part of one 
whole) in their order. 
First, let us appreciate the condition of the front before 
the battle was delivered. Not immediately before — it is 
impossible to give that accurately, because the enemy was 
necessarily trying to concentrate southward by his left 
where he knew the peril lay in the days before the battle, 
and therefore the account I am about to make does not apply 
to the very last moments before the issue was joined. But 
my account will sufficiently explain why the battle has taken 
the form it has. 
If you consider only the front between the Moselle (which 
it reaches south of Paegny, but well north of Pont-k- 
Mousson) and the North Sea, you are dealing with ten 
German .Armies, and a portion of an eleventh. 
These ten German Armies reading from the sea southward 
run thus. At the sea end opposite the Belgians and the left 
of General Plumer's second British Army^ you have the 
Fourth German Army under Arnim. On his left next to 
the south following past Ypres and down towards Lille, 
opposite the remainder of General Plumer's Army, you have 
the Sixth German Army under Quast. Next you have, 
reaching down I think to at least the Cambrai-Bapaume 
road, the Seventeenth Army, Below's. All the way from this 
point to the Aisne River, that is doing the heavy work of 
resistance to the great pressure of the last few weeks, all 
the way from south-west of Cambrai to Vailly on the Aisne 
you have three armies in their order from the north, 
the army of Marwitz, which is on the left of Below's, and 
the right of which covers Cambrai from the southward. Then 
you have Hutier's Army, which did most of the work in the 
great German offensive of six months ago. Then you have 
the army of Carlowitz, which has to take the pre- sure of Mangin 
and cover Laon. This last set of armies is under the general 
command of Boehn, and is known as the Boehn Group. After 
the Aisne is crossed and the Taon corner of the great German 
salient is turned, you come to the army which is commanded 
by Eberhardt, and which has the task of covering most of 
theChemin des Dames, and stretches to the neighbourhood of 
Rheims. Then right across the Champagne, from near Rheims 
to the Argonne forest you have the two armies of Murdra 
to the west or right, and of Einem to the left or east up to 
the Argonne forest itself. Within the .\rgonne forest there 
is only one thoroughly second-rate corps, the Eighth, which 
could hardly be used for open fighting at all. I do not know 
to which of the neighbouring. armies it is attached. After 
you leave the Argonne forest and begin going eastward again, 
you have the Fifth Army, which stretches round Verdun 
from the eastern end of the Argonne forest to the Village of 
Vaux. The Fifth Army stands therefore on either side of 
the Meuse. Lastly between the Meuse and the. Moselle is 
the right wing of yet another army, the body under Fuchs, 
which covers the vital railway junction of Lon^uyon, the 
Briey iron fields, and the communications through Luxem- 
burg, Thionville and Lorraine. 
It is important to have this order of battle clearly in mind. 
But a meie enumeration of these, units would give a very 
poor impression of the real situation, for the armies differ 
very much among themselves in density. 
In the sketch I have appended I have attempted to ' 
indicate in the most elementary fashion this difference of 
density as it stood, not immediately before the battle, but quite 
recently. 
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The first two armies next the sea, the Fourth and Sixth, 
Arnim's and Quast's, were depleted. Their lines were thinly, 
held. 
The next in order, Below's, had few men on its right, but 
was organised in considerable density upon its centre and 
left, for here one came to the water-line covering Douai and 
Cambrai — vital junctions. All the four armies succeeding, 
right away down to Rheims, were similarly dense formations. 
•My readers are familiar with the thesis continually main- 
tained in these p^es that the Allied Higher Command had 
deliberately compelled the enemy to keep up this heavy 
concentration within the outermost bend of his great salient, . 
because that put him into the greatest peril at what is his 
most vulnerable part, the south and east. By persistent pres- 
sure endured uninterruptedly for ten weeks, and occupying 
the enemy's every effort from Douai right away to Rheims, 
such a concentration has been imposed upon the Germans. 
After Rheims, going eastward across the Champagne, one 
had curiously depleted forces. Murdra's Army was stronger 
than Einem s, but it was, for the moment at least, not com- 
parable in strength to those upon its right, and Einem's, in 
particular, was such a skeleton that, if the French reports 
are accurate, only f^ve divisions held all the front covered 
by it. It was the same beyond Argonne. The whole of 
that great sweep round Verdun was held by only six divisions 
from the Argonne to Vaux. 
With this distribution of the enemy's force in mind, we 
can perceive the idea underlying the great action of which 
the first four days are now before us. The enemy was hur- 
riedly sending men — such men as he could spare — south- 
ward, against a blow which he m\g\k expect anywhere east 
and south of Rheims. He had already succeeded in 
strengthening considerably the nearer units, those of Murdra 
and Einem, but he had not yet brought a sufficient covering 
east of Argonne when the blow was launched last Thursday. 
That blow was struck, as we know, from the crossing of the 
Suippe River to the Meuse, a front of about forty miles, 
bisected into two almost equal divisions by the narrow belt 
of the Argonne forest, twenty miles of the front being to the 
east of that wood, and twenty to the west. The twenty to 
