d at all this effort, all this sacrifice with so
little show of accomplishment.

American troops, except a pitiful few, were still in America and
apparently doomed to stay. This could easily be proved by mathematics,
for there were not ships enough to carry them and their supplies. The
Germans were building up reserves in France, and they had every
advantage of inner lines. They could hurl an avalanche of men at any
one of a hundred points of the thin Allied line almost without
warning, and wherever they struck the line would split before the
reserves could be rushed up to the crevasse. And once through, what
could stop them? Indeed, the whisper went about that the Allies had no
reserves worth the name. France and England were literally "all in."

Success and the hope of success did not make the Germans meek. They
credited God with a share in their achievement and pinned an Iron
Cross on Him, but they kept mortgaging His resources for the future.
Those who had protested that the war had been forced on a peaceful
Germany and that her majestic fight was all in self-defense came out
now to confess--or rather to boast--that they had planned this triumph
all along; for thirty years they had built and drilled and stored up
reserves. And now they were about to sweep the world and make it a
German planet.

The peaceful Kaiser admitted that he had toiled for this approaching
day of glory. His war-weary, hunger-pinched subjects were whipped up
to further endurance by a brandy of fiery promises, the prospects of
incalculable loot, vast colonies, mountains of food, and indemnities
sky-high. They were told to be glad that America had come into the war
openly at last, so that her untouched treasure-chest could pay the
bills.

In the whole history of chicken-computation there were probably never
so many fowls counted before they were hatched--and in the final
outcome never such a crackling and such a stench of rotten eggs.

But no one in those drear days was mad enough to see the outcome. The
strategical experts protested against the wasteful "side-shows" in
Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Saloniki, and the taking of Jerusalem was
counted merely a pretty bit of Christmas shopping that could not weigh
against the fall of Kerensky, the end of Russian resistance in the
Bolshevik upheaval, and the Italian stampede down their own
mountainsides.

Of all the optimists crazy enough to prophesy a speedy German
collapse, no one put his fing