Chapter 2 THE DEFENSIVE BATTLE OF LAST SPRING

I.

March, 1919.

Among the impressions and experiences of my month in France there are naturally some that stand out in particularly high relief. I have just described one of them. But I look back to others not less vivid-an evening, for instance, with General Horne and his staff; a walk along the Hindenburg line and the Canal du Nord, north and south of the Arras-Bapaume road; dinner with General Gouraud in the great building at Strasbourg, which was formerly the headquarters of the German Army Corps holding Alsace, and is now the French Préfecture; the eastern battle-field at Verdun, and that small famous room under the citadel, through which all the leaders of the war have passed; Rheims Cathedral emerging ghostly from the fog, with, in front of it, a group of motor-cars and two men shaking hands, the British Premier and the Cardinal-Archbishop; that desolate heart of the Champagne battle-field, where General Gouraud, with the American Army on his right, made his September push towards Vouziers and Mézières; General Pershing in his office, and General Pershing en petit comité in a friend's drawing-room, in both settings the same attractive figure, with the same sudden half-mischievous smile and the same observant eyes; and, finally, that rabbit-warren of small, barely furnished rooms in the old Ecole Militaire at Montreuil, where the British General Staff worked during the war, when it was not moving in its staff train up and down behind the front.

But I do not intend to make these letters a mere omnium gatherum of recollections. All through, my object has been to lay hold of the main outline of what has happened on the Western front during the past eleven months, and if I could, to make them clear to other civilians, men and women, as clearly and rapidly as possible, in this interval between the régime of communiqués and war-correspondence under which we have lived so long, and those detailed and scientific histories which every Army, and probably every corps and division, is now either writing, or preparing to write, about its own doings in the war. Meanwhile the official reports drawn up by each Army under the British Command are "secret documents." The artillery dispositions of the great battles which brought the war to an end cannot yet be disclosed. There can, therefore, be no proper maps of these battles for some time to come, while some of the latest developments in offensive warfare which were to have been launched upon the enemy had the war continued, are naturally not for the public for a good while ahead. And considering that, year by year, we are still discussing and investigating the battles of a hundred years ago-(look for instance at the lists of recent books on the Napoleonic campaigns in the Cambridge Moddern History!)-we may guess at the time mankind will take hereafter in writing about and elucidating a war, where in many of the great actions, as a Staff Officer remarked to me, a Waterloo might have been lost without being missed, or won without being more than a favourable incident in an otherwise perhaps unfavourable whole.

At the same time, this generation has got somehow-as an ingredient in its daily life-to form as clear a mental picture as it can of the war as a whole, and especially just now of its closing months in France. For the history of those last months is at the present moment an active agent in the European situation. What one may call the war-consciousness of France, with the first battle of the Marne, glorious Verdun, the Champagne battle-field, the victorious leadership of Marshal Foch, on the one hand-her hideous losses in men, her incalculable loss in material and stored-up wealth, and her stern claim for adequate protection in future, on the other, as its main elements; the war-consciousness of Great Britain and the Empire, turning essentially on the immortal defence of the Ypres salient and the Channel ports, the huge sacrifices of the Somme, the successes and disappointments of 1917, the great defensive battle of last March, and the immediate and brilliant reaction, leading in less than five months to the beginning of that series of great actions on the British front which finished the war-all interpenetrated with the sense of perpetual growth in efficiency and power; and finally, the American war-consciousness, as it emerged from the war, with its crusading impulse intact, its sense of boundless resources, and its ever-fresh astonishment at the irrevocable part America was now called on to play in European affairs:-amid these three great and sometimes clashing currents, the visitor to France lived and moved in the early weeks of the year. And then, of course, there was the Belgian war-consciousness-a new thing for Belgium and for Europe. But with that I was not concerned.

Let me try to show by an illustration or two drawn from my own recent experience what the British war-consciousness means.

It was a beautiful January day when we started from the little inn at Cassel for Ypres, Menin, Lille, Lens, and Vimy. From the wonderful window at the back of the inn, high perched as Cassel is above a wide plain, one looked back upon the roads to St. Omer and the south, and thought of the days last April, when squadron after squadron of French cavalry came riding hot and fast along them to the relief of our hard-pressed troops, after the break of the Portuguese sector of the line at Richebourg St. Vaast. But our way lay north, not south, through a district that seemed strangely familiar to me, though in fact I had only passed forty-eight hours in it, in 1916. Forty-eight hours, however, in the war-zone, at a time of active fighting, and that long before any other person of my sex had been allowed to approach the actual firing-line on the British front, were not like other hours; and, perhaps, from much thinking of them, the Salient and the approaches to it, as I saw them in 1916 from the Scherpenberg hill, had become a constant image in the mind. Only, instead of seeing Ypres from the shelter of the Scherpenberg Windmill, as a distant phantom in the horizon mists, beyond the shell-bursts in the battle-field below us, we were now to go through Ypres itself, then wholly forbidden ground, and out beyond it into some of the ever-famous battle-fields that lie north and south of the Ypres-Menin road.

One hears much talk in Paris of the multitudes who will come to see the great scenes of the war, as soon as peace is signed, when the railways are in a better state, and the food problems less, if not solved. The multitudes indeed have every right to come, for it is nations, not standing armies, that have won this war. But, personally, one may be glad to have seen these sacred places again, during this intermediate period of utter solitude and desolation, when their very loneliness "makes deep silence in the heart-for thought to do its part." The roads in January were clear, and the Army gone. The only visitors were a few military cars, and men of the salvage corps, directing German prisoners in the gathering up of live shells and hand-grenades, of tons of barbed wire and trip wire, and all the other débris of battle that still lie thick upon the ground. In a few months perhaps there will be official guides conducting parties through the ruins, and in a year or two, the ruins of Ypres themselves may have given place to the rising streets of a new city. As they now are, a strange and sinister majesty surrounds them. At the entrance to the town there still hangs the notice: "Troops are not to enter Ypres except on special duty"; and the grass-grown heaps of masonry are labelled: "It is dangerous to dig among these ruins." But there was no one digging when we were there-no one moving, except ourselves. Ypres seemed to me beyond recovery as a town, just as Lens is; but whereas Lens is just a shapeless ugliness which men will clear away rejoicing as soon as their energies are free for rebuilding, Ypres in ruin has still beauty enough and dignity enough to serve-with the citadel at Verdun-as the twin symbol of the war. There was a cloud of jackdaws circling round the great gashed tower where the inner handiwork of the fifteenth-century builders lay open to sky and sun. I watched them against the blue, gathering in, also, the few details of lovely work that still remain here and there on the face of what was once the splendid Cloth Hall, the glory of these border lands. And one tried to imagine how men and women would stand there a hundred years hence, amid what developments of this strange new world that the war has brought upon us, and with what thoughts.

Beyond, we were in the wide, shell-pocked waste of the huge battle-field, with many signs on its scarred face of the latest fighting of all, the flooding back of the German tide in last April over these places which it had cost us our best lives to gain, and of the final victorious advance of King Albert and the British Second Army which sent the Germans flying back through Limburg to their own land. Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which, at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt. In the south-eastern distance rises the spire of Menin church. And this is the Menin Road. How it haunted the war news for months and years, like a blood-stained presence! While to the south-east, I make out Kemmel, Scherpenberg, and the Mont des Cats and in the far north-west a faint line with a few trees on it-Passchendaele!

Passchendaele!-name of sorrow and of glory. What were the British losses, in that three months' fighting from June to November, 1917, which has been called the "Third Battle of Ypres," which began with the victory of the Messines ridge and culminated in the Canadian capture of Passchendaele?[4] Outside the inner circle of those who know, there are many figures given. They are alike only in this that they seem to grow perpetually. Heroic, heart-breaking wrestle with the old hostile forces of earth and water-black earth and creeping water and strangling mud! We won the ridge and we held it till the German advance in April last forced our temporary withdrawal; we had pushed the Germans off the high ground into the marsh lands beyond; but we failed, as everyone knows, in the real strategic objects of the attack, and the losses in the autumn advance on Passchendaele were an important and untoward factor in the spring fighting of 1918.

How deeply this Ypres salient enters into the war-consciousness of Britain and the Empire! As I stand looking over the black stretches of riddled earth, at the half-demolished pill-boxes in front, at the muddy pools in the shell-holes under a now darkening sky; at the flat stretches between us and Kemmel where lie Zillebeke and St. Eloi, and a score of other names which will be in the mouth of history hundreds of years hence, no less certainly than the names of those little villages north and south of Thermopylae, which saw the advance of the Persians and the vigil of the Greeks-a confusion of things read and heard, rush through one's mind, taking new form and vividness from this actual scene in which they happened. There, at those cross roads, broke the charge of the Worcesters, on that most critical day of all in the First Battle of Ypres, when the fate of the Allies hung on a thread, and this "homely English regiment," with its famous record in the Peninsula and elsewhere, drove back the German advance and saved the line. I turn a little to the south and I am looking towards Klein Zillebeke where the Household Cavalry charged, and Major Hugh Dawnay at their head "saved the British position," and lost his own gallant life. Straight ahead of us, down the Menin road towards Gheluvelt, came the Prussian Guards, the Emperor's own troops with their master's eye on them, on November 11th, when the First Division in General Haig's First Corps, checked them, enfiladed them, mowed them down, till the flower of the Imperial troops fell back in defeat, never knowing by how small a fraction they had missed victory, how thin a line had held them, how little stood between them and the ports that fed the British Army. Here on these flats to my right were Lord Cavan's Guards, and on either side of him General Allenby's cavalry, and General Byng's; while, if one turns to the north towards the distance which hides Sonnebeke and Bixschoote, one is looking over the ground so magnificently held on our extreme left by General Dubois and his 9th French Corps.

Guards, Yorkshires, Lancashires, London Scottish, Worcesters, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Highlanders, Gordons, Leicesters-all the familiar names of the old Army are likend with this great story. It was an English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Islands, won before the "rally of the Empire" had time to develop, before a single Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.

But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter in this bloodstained book. Memory runs on nearly six months, and we come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh troops had come up. It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the Canadians had for the first time, while not called on to take much active part themselves, seen the realities of European battle; and the cheers of the British troops at Ypres as the exhausted Dominion troops came back from the trenches will live in history.

Messines, and the victory of June, 1917-Passchendaele, and the losses of that grim winter-all the points indeed of this dim horizon from north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great Britain and the Dominions. For quite apart from the main actions which stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.

Then, as the great Army of the gallant dead seemed to gather round one on this famous road, and over these shell-torn flats, a sudden recollection of a letter which I received in August, 1918, brought a tightening of the throat. A Canadian lady, writing from an American camp in the east of France, appealed to myself and other writers to do something to bring home to the popular mind of America a truer knowledge of what the British Armies had done in the war. "I see here," says the writer, "hundreds of the finest remaining white men on earth every week. They are wonderful military material, and very attractive and lovable boys. But it discourages all one's hope for the future unity and friendship between us all to realise as I have done the last few months that the majority of these men are entering the fight, firmly believing that 'England has not done her share-that France had done it all-the Colonials have done all the hard fighting, etc.'" And she proceeds to attribute the state of things to the "belittling reports" of England's share in the war given in the newspapers which reach these "splendid men" from home.

A similar statement has come to me within the last few days, in another letter from an English lady in an American camp near Verdun, who speaks of the tragic ignorance-for tragic it is when one thinks of all that depends on Anglo-American understanding in the future!-shown by the young Americans in the camp where she is at work, of the share of Great Britain in the war.

Alack! How can we bring our two nations closer together in this vital matter? Of course there is no belittlement of the British part in the war among those Americans who have been brought into any close contact with it. And in my small efforts to meet the state of things described in the letters I have quoted, some of the warmest and most practical sympathy shown has come from Americans. But in the vast population of the United States with its mixed elements, some of them inevitably hostile to this country, how easy for the currents of information and opinion to go astray over large tracts of country at any rate, and at the suggestion of an anti-British press!

The only effective remedy, it seems to me, would be the remedy of eyes and ears! Would it not be well, before the whole of the great American Army goes home, that as many as possible of those still in France-groups, say, of non-commissioned officers from various American divisions, representing both the older and the newer levies, and drawn from different local areas-should be given the opportunity of seeing and studying the older scenes of the war on the British front?-and that our own men, also, should be able to see for themselves, not only the scenes of the American fighting of last year, but the vast preparations of all kinds that America was building up in France for the further war that might have been; preparations which, as no one doubts, changed the whole atmosphere of the struggle?

"England has not done her share!"

How many thousands of British dead-men from every county in England and Scotland, from loyal Ireland, from every British dominion and colony-lie within the circuit of these blood-stained hills of Ypres? How many more in the Somme graveyards?-round Lens and Arras and Vimy?-about Bourlon Wood and Cambrai?-or in the final track of our victorious Armies breaking through the Hindenburg line on their way to Mons? Gloriously indeed have the Dominions played their part in this war; but of all the casualties suffered by the Armies of the Empire, 80 per cent of them fell on the population of these islands. America was in the great struggle for a year and a half, and in the real fightingline for about six months. She has lost some 54,000 of her gallant sons; and we sorrow for them with her.

But through four long years scarcely a family in Great Britain and the Dominions that possessed men on the fighting fronts-and none were finally exempt except on medical or industrial grounds-but was either in mourning for, or in constant fear of death for one or more of its male members, whether by bullet, shell-fire or bomb, or must witness the return to them of husbands, brothers, and sons, more or less injured for life. The total American casualties are 264,000. The total British casualties-among them from 700,000 to 800,000 dead-are 2,228,000 out of a total white population for the Empire of not much more than two-thirds of the population of the United States. There is small room for "belittling" here. A silent clasp of the hands between our two nations would seem to be the natural gesture in face of such facts as these.

II.

Such thoughts, however, belong to the emotional or tragic elements in the British war-consciousness. Let me turn to others of a different kind-the intellectual and reflective elements-and the changing estimates which they bring about.

Take for instance what we have been accustomed to call the "March retreat" of last year. The dispatch of Sir Douglas Haig describing the actions of March and April last year was so headed in the Times, though nothing of the kind appears in the official publication. And we can all remember in England the gnawing anxiety of every day and every hour from March 21st up to the end of April, when the German offensive had beaten itself out, on the British front at least, and the rushing over of the British reinforcements, together with the rapid incoming of the Americans, had given the British Army the breathing space of which three months later it made the use we know.

"But why," asks one of the men best qualified to speak in our Army-"why use the words 'retreat' and 'disaster' at all?" They were indeed commonly used at the time both in England and abroad, and have been often used since about the fighting of the British Army last March and April. Strictly speaking, my interlocutor suggests, neither word is applicable. The British Army indeed fell back some thirty-five miles on its southern front, till the German attack was finally stayed before Amiens. The British centre stood firm from Arras to Béthune. But in the north we had to yield almost all the ground gained in the Salient the year before, and some that had never yet been in German hands. We lost heavily in men and guns, and a shudder of alarm ran through all the Allied countries.

Nevertheless what Europe was then witnessing-I am of course quoting not any opinion of my own, to which I have no right, but what I have gathered from those responsible men who were in the forefront of the fighting-was in truth a great defensive battle, long and anxiously foreseen, in which the German forces were double the British forces opposed to them (64 to 32 divisions-73 to 32-and so on), while none the less all that was vitally necessary to the Allied cause was finally achieved by the British Army, against these huge odds. Germany, in fact, made her last desperate effort a year ago to break through the beleaguering British, forces, and failed. On our side there was no real surprise, though our withdrawal was deeper and our losses greater than had been foreseen. The troops themselves may have been confident; it is the habit of gallant men. But the British command knew well what it had to face, and had considered carefully weeks beforehand where ground could be given-as in all probability it would have to be given-with the least disadvantage. Some accidents, if one may call them so, indeed there were-the thick white fog, for instance, which "on the morning of March 21st enveloped our outpost line, and made it impossible to see more than fifty yards in any direction, so that the machine guns and forward field-guns which had been disposed so as to cover this zone with their fire were robbed almost entirely of their effect-and the masses of German infantry advanced comparatively unharassed, so closely supporting each other that loss of direction was impossible." Hence the rapidity of the German advance through the front lines on March 21st, and the alarming break-through south of St. Quentin, where our recently extended line was weakest and newest. A second accident was the drying up of the Oise Marshes at a time when in a normal year they might have been reckoned on to stop the enemy's advance. A third piece of ill-luck was the fact that in the newest section of the British line, where the enemy attack broke at its hottest, there had been no time, since it had been given over to us by the French-who had held it lightly, as a quiet sector, during the winter-to strengthen its defences, and to do the endless digging, the railway construction, and the repair of roads, which might have made a very great difference. And, finally, there was the most dangerous accident of all-the break through of the Portuguese line at Richebourg St. Vaast, just as the tired division holding it was about to be relieved. Of that accident, as we all remember, the enemy, hungry for the Channel ports, made his very worst and most; till the French and British fought him to a final stand before Hazebrouck and Ypres.

British Official Photograph

The St. Quentin Canal which was crossed by the 46th in life-belts.

Meanwhile, the strategic insight of Marshal Foch, who assumed complete control of the Allied Armies in France and Belgium on March 26th, combined with the experienced and cool-headed leadership of the British Commander-in-Chief, refused to dissipate the French reserves, so important to the future course of the war, in any small or piecemeal reinforcement of the British lines. The risks of the great moment had to be taken, and both the French and British Commanders had complete faith in the capacity of the British Army to meet them. And when all is said, when our grave losses in casualties, prisoners, and guns are fully admitted, what was the general result? The Germans had failed to gain either of their real objectives:-either the Channel ports, or the division of the British Armies from the French. They wore themselves out against a line which recoiled indeed but never broke, and was all the time filling up and strengthening from behind. The losses inflicted on their immense reserves reacted on all the subsequent fighting of the year, both on the Aisne and the Marne. And when the British Armies had brought the huge attack to a standstill-which for the centre and south of our line had been already attained ten days after the storm broke-and knew the worst that had happened or could happen to them; when the Australians had recaptured Villers-Bretonneux; when the weeks passed and the offensive ceased; when all gaps in our ranks were filled by the rush of reinforcements from home, and the American Army poured steadily across the Atlantic, the tension and peril of the spring passed steadily into the confident strength and-expectation of the summer. The British Army had held against an attack which could never be repeated, and the future was with the Allies.

Let us remember that at no time in our fighting withdrawal, either on the Somme or on the Lys, was there "anything approaching a break-down of command, or a failure in morale." So the Field Marshal. On the other hand, all over the vast battle-field-in every part of the hard "waiting game" which for a time the British Armies were called to play, men did the most impossible and heroic things. Gun detachments held their posts till every man was killed or wounded; infantry who had neither rest nor sleep for days together, fought "back to back in the trenches, shooting both to front and rear." Occasional confusion, even local panic, occasional loss of communication and misunderstanding of orders, occasional incompetence and stupidity there must be in such a vast backward sweep of battle, but skill, purpose, superb bravery were never lacking in any portion of the field; and the German communiqués exultantly announcing the "total defeat of the British Armies" may be compared, mutatis mutandis, with the reports from German Headquarters just before the first battle of the Marne.

"The defeat of the English is complete," said the German High Command in the latter days of August, 1914. "The English Army is retreating in the most complete disorder.... The British have been completely defeated to the north of St. Quentin"-and so on. And yet a week later, as General Maurice, with much fresh evidence, has lately shown, the Army thus disposed of on paper had rejoicingly turned upon von Kluck, and was playing a vital part in the great victory of the Marne. So last spring, the losses and withdrawals of a vaster defensive action, coupled with the stubborn and tenacious hold of the British Army, last March and April, were the inevitable and heroic prelude to the victorious recoil of August, and the final battles of the war. Inevitable, because no forethought or exertion on the British side could have averted the German onslaught, determined as it was by the breakdown of the whole Eastern front of the war, and the letting loose upon the Western front of immense forces previously held by the Russian armies. These forces, after the Russian débacle, were released against us, week by week, till in March the balance of numbers, which was almost even in January, had risen on the German side to a superiority of 150,000 bayonets! The dispatch of divisions to Italy; the recall of men to the shipyards and the mines to meet the submarine danger; the heavy fighting in the Salient and at Cambrai in the latter half of 1917; the lack of time for training new levies, owing to our depleted line and reserves:-all these causes contributed to sharpen the peril in which England stood.[5] But it is in such straits as these that our race shows its quality.

And in this fighting, for the first time in British history, and in the history of Europe, Americans stood side by side in battle with British and French. "In the battle of March and April," says Sir Douglas Haig, "American and British troops have fought shoulder to shoulder in the same trenches, and have shared together in the satisfaction of beating off German attacks. All ranks of the British Army look forward to the day when the rapidly growing strength of the American Army will allow American and British soldiers to co-operate in offensive action."

That day came without much delay. It carried the British Army to Mons, and the young American Army to Sedan.

* * *

Looking out from the Vimy Ridge six weeks ago, and driving thence through Arras across the Drocourt-Quéant line to Douai and Valenciennes, I was in the very heart of that triumphant stand of the Third and First Armies round Arras which really determined the fate of the German attack.

The Vimy Ridge from the west is a stiffish climb. On the east also it drops steeply above Petit Vimy and Vimy, while on the south and south-east it rises so imperceptibly from the Arras road that the legend which describes the Commander-in-Chief, approaching it from that side, as asking of the officers assembled to meet him after the victory-"And where is this ridge that you say you have taken?" seems almost a reasonable tale. But to east and west there is no doubt about it. One climbs up the side overlooking Ablain St. Nazaire through shell-holes and blurred trenches, over snags of wire, and round the edges of craters, till on the top one takes breath on the wide plateau where stands the Canadian monument to those who fell in the glorious fight of April 9th, 1917, and whence the eye sweeps that wide northern and eastern plain, towards Lille on the one side and Douai on the other, which to our war-beaten and weary soldiers, looking out upon it when the ridge at last was theirs, was almost as new and strange a world as the Pacific was to its first European beholders.

Westwards across the valley whence our troops stormed the hill, rises the Bouvigny Wood, and the long, blood-stained ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where I stood just before the battle, in 1917. To the north we are looking through the horizon shadows to La Bassée, Bailleul, and the Salient. Immediately below the hill, in the same direction, lie the ruin heaps of Lens, and of the mining towns surrounding it; while behind us the ground slopes south and south-east to Arras and the Scarpe.

It is a tremendous position. That even the merest outsider can see. In old days the hill must have been a pleasant rambling ground for the tired workers of the coal-mining districts. Then the war-blast at its fiercest passed over it. To-day in its renewed solitude, its sacred peace, it represents one of the master points of the war, bought and held by a sacrifice of life and youth, the thought of which holds one's heart in grip, as one stands there, trying to gather in the meaning of the scene. Not one short year ago it was in the very centre of the struggle. If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave indeed. Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third Army, "our main lateral communications-Amiens-Doullens-St. Pol-St. Omer-would have been seriously threatened if not cut." The Germans were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a desperate courage. Three assault divisions were to have carried the Vimy Ridge, while other divisions were to have captured Arras and the line of the Scarpe. The attack was carried out with the greatest fierceness, men marching shoulder to shoulder into the furnace of battle. But this time there was no fog to shield them, or to blind the British guns. The enemy losses were appalling, and after one day's fighting, in spite of the more northerly attacks on our line still to come, the German hopes of victory were in the dust, and-as we now know-for ever.

That is what Vimy means-what Arras means-in the fighting of last year. We ponder it as we drive through the wrecked beauty of Arras and out on to the Douai road on our way to Valenciennes. We passed slowly along the road to the east of Arras, honeycombed still with dug-outs, and gun emplacements, and past trenches and wire fields, till suddenly a mere sign-board, nothing more-"Gavrelle!"-shows us that we are approaching the famous Drocourt-Quéant switch of the Hindenburg line, which the Canadians and the 17th British Corps, under Sir Henry Horne, stormed and took in September of last year. Presently, on either side of the road as we drive slowly eastward, a wilderness of trenches runs north and south. With what confident hope the Germans dug and fortified and elaborated them years ago!-with what contempt of death and danger our men carried them not six months since! And now not a sign of life anywhere-nothing but groups of white crosses here and there, emerging from the falling dusk, and the débris of battle along the road.

A weary way to Douai, over the worst road we have struck yet, and a weary way beyond it to Denain and Valenciennes. Darkness falls and hides the monotonous scene of ruin, which indeed begins to change as we approach Valenciennes, the Headquarters of the First Army. And at last, a bright fire in an old room piled with books and papers, a kind welcoming from the officer reigning over it, and the pleasant careworn face of an elderly lady with whom we are billeted.

Best of all, a message from the Army Commander, Sir Henry Horne, with whom we had made friends in 1917, just before the capture of the Vimy Ridge, in which the First Army played so brilliant a part.

We hastily change our travel gear, a car comes for us, and soon we find ourselves at the General's table in the midst of an easy flow of pleasant talk.

What is it that makes the special charm of the distinguished soldier, as compared with other distinguished men?

Simplicity, I suppose, and truth. The realities of war leave small room for any kind of pose. A high degree, also, of personal stoicism easily felt but not obtruded; and towards weak and small things-women and children-a natural softness and tenderness of feeling, as though a man who has upon him such stern responsibilities of life and death must needs grasp at their opposites, when and how he can; keen intelligence, bien entendu, modesty, courtesy; a habit of brevity; a boy's love of fun: with some such list of characteristics I find myself trying to answer my own question. They are at least conspicuous in many leaders of the Allied Armies.

"Why don't you boom your Generals?" said an American diplomatist to me some eight months ago. "Your public at home knows far too little about them individually. But the personal popularity of the military leader in such a national war as this is a military asset."

I believe I entirely agree with the speaker! But it is not the British military way, and the unwritten laws of the Service stand firm. So let me only remind you that General Horne led the artillery at Mons; that he has commanded the First Army since September, 1916; that, in conjunction with Sir Julian Byng, he carried the Vimy Ridge in 1917, and held the left at Arras in 1918; and, finally, that he was the northernmost of the three Army Commanders who stormed the Hindenburg line last September.

It was in his study and listening to the explanations he gave me, so clearly and kindly, of the Staff maps that lay before us, that I first realised with anything like sufficient sharpness the meaning of those words we have all repeated so often without understanding them-"the capture of the Hindenburg line."

What was the Hindenburg line?