Fields of Victory | Page 6

Douglas Haig, "the enemy's resistance was definitely broken;"
and thus "in three months of epic fighting the British Armies in France
had brought to a sudden and dramatic end the great wearing-out battle
of the past four years."
[Illustration: British Battles During 1918 (8th Aug. to 11th Nov.,
1918).]
Do these sentences--the utterances of a man conspicuously modest and
reticent in statement, indicate any consciousness of "lost prestige" in "a
last desperate campaign"?
The fact is--or so it seemed to me--that while the British Army salutes
with all its heart, the glorious record of that veteran Army of France
which bore the brunt of the first years of war, which held the gate at
Verdun at whatever cost in heroic lives, and inscribed upon its shield
last year the counter-attacks in the Marne salient, and the superb stand

of General Gouraud in Champagne; and while, at the same time, it
realises and acknowledges to the full the enormous moral and military
effect of the warm American tide, as it came rushing over France
through the early summer of last year, and the gallantry of those
splendid American lads, who, making mock of death, held the crossing
of the Marne, took Bouresches and Belleau Wood, fought their hardest
under General Mangin in the Soissons counter-attack of July 18th, and
gallantly pushed their way, in spite of heavy losses, through the
Argonne to the Meuse at the end of the campaign--there is yet no doubt
in any British military mind that it was the British Army which brought
the war to its victorious end. The British Army had grown, after the
great defensive battle of the spring, by a kind of national rebound, of
which there have been many instances in our history, to a wonderful
military strength and efficiency, and to it fell, not by any choice of its
own, so to speak, but by the will of the gods, and the natural disposition
of events, the final and decisive strokes of the war. The French had
already "saved Europe by their example," through three bloody and
heroic years, and they were bound, in 1918, to economise, where
possible, their remaining men; while, if the war had lasted another six
months, or if America had come in a year earlier, the decisive battles
might well have fallen to the American Army and General Pershing.
But, as it happened, the British Army was at its zenith of power,
numbers, and efficiency, when the last hammer-blows of the war had to
be given--and our Army gave them. I do not believe there is a single
instructed American or French officer who would deny this. But, if so,
it is a fact which will and must make itself permanently felt in the
consciousness of the Empire.
In one of the bare rooms of that Ecole Militaire, at Montreuil, where the
British General Staff has worked since 1916, I saw on a snowy day at
the end of January a chart covering an entire wall, which held me
riveted. It was the war at a glance--so far as the British Army is
concerned--from January, 1916, to the end. The rising or falling of our
bayonet strength, the length of line held, casualties,
prisoners--everything was there--and when finally the Hindenburg line
is broken, after the great nine days of late September and early October,
the prisoners' line leaps suddenly to such a height that a new piece has

to be added perpendicularly to the chart, and the wall can hardly take it
in. What does that leaping line mean? Simply the collapse of the
German morale--the final and utter defeat of the German Army as a
fighting force. I hope with all my heart that the General Staff will allow
that chart to be published before the fickle popular memory has
forgotten too much of the war.[3]
[3] By the kindness of General Sir Herbert Lawrence, Chief of the
General Staff, I am able to give a small reproduction of this chart,
which will be found at the end of the book, with an explanation written
by Captain W.O. Barton.
Let me then say, in recapitulation, and as presenting the main thesis of
these papers, that to the British mind, at any rate, so inarticulate often,
yet so tenacious, the Western campaign of last year presents itself as
having been fought by three national Armies:
(1) The veteran and glorious French Army, which, while providing in
Marshal Foch the master-spirit of the last unified effort, was yet, after
its huge sacrifices at Verdun, in Champagne, and many another stricken
field, inevitably husbanding its resources in men, and yielding to the
Armies of its Allies the hottest work in the final struggle;
(2) The British Army, which, after its victorious reaction from its
March defensive, was at the very