December 26, 1918 
LAND 6? WATER 
5 
for use upon that fifty miles. They were prepared to pay, 
and did pa}' a very heavy price. Upon the second day of 
the assault the enemy achieved a break-through just north 
of west from St. Quentin. There was, for a moment, a dis- 
integration of the line and vast captures of prisoners and of 
guns on something like half the scale of Caporetto ; the 
reserve armies which had been painfully formed behind the 
Allies' lines were, for the most part, rapidly absorbed in 
checking such a tidal wave. It was not until the tenth day 
of an advance, covering nearly fifty miles, that this last of 
the vast efforts undertaken by all belligerents in turn to 
break completely the siege wall upon either side failed as 
all others had faOed. It failed just in front of Amiens ; 
but, though it had failed, the peril was still extreme. 
It is one thing to hold your enemy when he is stronger 
than yourself and pushes you back against a wall ; it is an- 
other to find the strength to maintain your defence against 
the further blows which will succeed his first rush. 
Here we shall do well to consider particular phenomenon 
in the use the enemy had made of that superiority in the 
interval between the collapse of Russia and the advent of 
the Americans. He had attacked, as we have seen, at Ca- 
poretto ; he heavily defeated the Italian armies ; had 
taken a quarter of a million prisoners, and over 2,000 guns ; 
yet had not obtained a decision ; he had not the enemy at 
his mercy. 
Now, why had he attacked at [Caporetto ? For the answer 
to that question we have, I think, the answer to the problem 
of the whole war. The enemy attacked the Italian sector 
for precisely the same reason that he failed at the Marne. 
His strategy did not allow for a sufficient calculation and 
sectirity. He was all for adventure and for some stroke of 
genius, I know not what, sporadic, dramatic, incalculable. 
He was therefore inclined to see the best opportunities for 
triumphs rather than the best opportunities for victory. 
Short of the complete destruction of the Italian armies, the 
Italian front was not the front to attack. 
Well, we are about to observe exactly the same spirit in 
what followed the failure in front of Amiens. He had got 
his 100,000 prisoners of war, his eleven or twelve hundred 
guns, his whole ten days' advance. He had paralysed the 
main lateral communications of the AUies from the coast 
to Paris. By April 4th he was held. 
But what did he do ? Did he methodically continue and 
develop that success ? Did he go through the painful pro- 
cess of "slogging" when at last "slogging" might have done 
what it could never have done in the earlier and fresher days 
in front of Verdun ? He did not. He bethought him of 
dodges. He suddenly attacked in the North upon the Lys 
because that was a long way off, and so the reserves of ^he 
Allies would be drawn away from the centre. An unexpected 
success upon the Lys drewjiim on and he spent himself in 
a vain "side show" attempt to reach the Channel, which, 
even if he had reached it, would give him no decision. Ex- 
hausted there, he thought it clever to attack, after a month'^s 
intervcd and ample preparation, upon the other extremity 
of his concentration on the Aisne. Another triumph ; another 
advance ; another check. Then, next month, an attack in 
the Valley of the Matz. There he was held more easily upon 
the third day. It was a series of adventures. 
He mounted each affair, indeed, with great care, but with 
no consecution of thought linking ail. 
Upon July 15th of this year he began his last and disastrous 
effort. 
Since the disaster of the 21st and 22nd of March American 
nimibers had been rapidly augmented. The brigading of 
American units with French and British had been permitted, 
and the new AUies had shown high tactical value in the field, 
though they had not yet attempted to act cis an independent 
army. 
The Germans had lost in their scattered efforts of nearly 
four months nearly a million men, counting lighter casualties 
and sickness. All the strength that remained to them was 
mustered for the great assault on a front of 50 miles east and 
west of Rheims, and exactly divided by that city into two 
halves. The operative wing of this assault lay east of the 
city. It was conducted by fifteen divisions in the front line, 
with ten in immediate reserve. General Gouraud, command- 
ing the French forces wjth certain American divisions added, 
opposed this charge. He broke it altogether. His Intelli- 
gence Department had given him sufficient notice of the 
enemy's details and time table. His organisation in depth 
made them spend their effort in the void. The German 
attack was launched at dawn ; by noon it had failed, and here 
you may say ends the siege phase of the war. 
From the Allied right to the west of Rheims, and from the 
general reserve, some ten divisions were massed secretly upon 
the Allied left from Chateau Thierry to Soissons. The ex- 
hausted enemy failed 'to perceive the' move.. At dawn upon 
Thursday, July i8th, the counter-attack was delivered. It 
was completely successful. This " pocket " of the Marne 
occupied all the German energy defensively in the effort to 
avert destruction. 
' The "pocket" was slowly absorbed, worn down, and 
obliterated with the loss of many thousands of prisoners, 
many hundreds of guns, and many millions of rounds of 
shell, accumulated and abandoned. The process occupied 
the end of the month of July and the first days' of August. 
The enemy was pleased to ridicule the failure of Foch (now 
in command of the AUied armies as a whole) to break througli. 
Foch was attempting no such thing. He had in hand the 
true business of war, which is not to achieve a mathematical 
thesis upon paper, but to wear down and destroy and put 
out of action a living organism, the enemy's army. Hardly 
was the Mam'e sahent obhterated, at such an expense to the 
enemy, than the Amiens sahent followed. That new tactical 
instrument, the tank, did its work, and there was another 
absorption of another congested mass of the German forces, 
gradually reduced between August 8th and 20th to the chord 
of its arc with the usual complement of prisoners and 
guns. 
The Prussians called upon the Austro-Hungarians for aid. 
These sent a few divisions, but their whole national organisa- 
tion was already strained to breaking-point. They themselves 
had attempted, in the midst of the German offensive in the 
month of May, one last assault upon the Itahan hues of the 
Piave, and upon the French and British in the foot hills 
of the Alps ; that assault had completely broken down. 
A 100 MILES FRONT 
Foch, in command of the Allied Armies, rapidly and 
methodically proceeded to an orderly series of blows which 
must now conclude the siege. After the reduction of the 
Amiens salient, the end of August saw a further lighting up 
of^he line to the north in front of Arras, and of Douai. The 
enemy lost his last elaborate defence and fell back in fear 
of the tanks upon a water line just before Douai. It did not 
save him. The battle was now engaged from Rheims to 
Arras, a matter of 100 miles. 
Upon September 26th the American organisation, as an 
independent army, advanced to cut the German communica- 
tions south of the Ardennes, while the French struck west of 
the Argonne. Though this attempt to cut off the great 
German bulge in Northern France did not bear fruit, the end 
could be more tardily achieved in another fashion. The 
British attacked a week later south of Cambrai and completely 
broke through — that was upon Tuesday, October 8th. Blow 
after blow succeeded from the British armies throughout 
the month of October. The northern sectors came into play. 
The Belgian coast was lost by the enemy ; his whole line was 
backed against the Ardenne where it must break into two. 
There was prepared the final blow through Lorraine, which, 
we know not at what expense in men or in time, would have 
achieved the final dissolution of his armies. 
Of this last month of the collapse the heavy blows were 
British blows. The water-Unes south of Valenciennes were 
passed ; the line of the Scheldt was reached and carried. 
In the first week of November the enemy, who had already 
asked for an armistice, implored the AUies to treat. The 
end of the siege had come 
A siege ends in one of two ways : either the besieged stand 
and are destroyed and their siege area is sacked, or they 
capitulate and the fuU political effect is achieved at less cost^ 
supposing always that the besiegers preserve their strength 
of will after, as before, their victory. 
In tills case there was capitulation. The enemy having 
pleaded for an armistice, those terms of armistice were granted 
him with which we are now familiar. He found liimself 
unable to refuse and he accepted them. So ended tlie siege, 
for though terms of peace were not yet dictated, the enemy's 
mUitary power had ceased to be. 
With the political consequences of their coUapse 1 am not 
here concerned. The great siege had come to an end in the 
complete annihilation of the besieged. So all successful 
sieges end. Whether those fruits seem sufficiently dramatic 
or not is indifferent to the military or, indeed, to any 
other historian. Whether they are reaped or not de 
pends not upon the soldiers, but, unfortunately, upon the 
politicians. 
All the AUies of Prussia had coUapsed and abandoned her 
one after the other. The Turks wholly defeated in Palestine ; 
the Austrians surrendering their whole forces to an offensive 
in Italy ; the Bulgarians surrendering to a similar offensive 
in the Balkans. Mihtarily, the thing was complete. Politic- 
ally it is in the hands of othf^rs. 
