sing
our advantage, could scarcely be expected to present itself again. The
decision was therefore taken and was justified by success.

"After this battle, our chief anxieties lay rather in the ability of
our supply system to keep pace with our Armies than in any resistance
that the enemy could offer. In the succeeding battles our troops
accomplished with comparative ease feats which earlier in the struggle
it would have been madness to attempt; and in the final battle of the
war, begun on the 4th November, the crossing of the Sambre and the
clearing of the great Mormal Forest furnished a wonderful tribute to
the complete ascendency which their earlier victories had enabled our
troops to establish over the enemy."

CHAPTER IV

GENERAL GOURAUD AT STRASBOURG

The Maine--Verdun--Champagne--it is in connection with these three names
that the French war consciousness shows itself most sensitive and most
profound, just as the war consciousness of Great Britain vibrates most
deeply when you test it with those other names--Ypres--Arras--the
Somme--Cambrai. As is the name of Ypres to the Englishman, so is that
of Verdun to the Frenchman, invested even with a more poignant
significance, since the countryside where so many sons of France laid
down their lives was their own adored mother-land, indivisibly part of
themselves, as those grim, water-logged flats north and south of the
Menin road could never be to a Lancashire or London boy. And no other
French battle-field wears for a Frenchman quite the same aureole that
shines for ever on those dark, riven hills of Verdun. But it seemed to
me that in the feeling of France, Champagne came next--Champagne,
associated first of all with Castelnau's victory in the autumn of 1915,
then with General Nivelle's tragic check in 1917, with the serious
crisis in the French Army in May and June of that year; and finally
with General Gouraud's brilliant successes in the summer and autumn of
1918.

Six weeks ago I found myself in Strasbourg, where General Gouraud is
in command of the Fourth Army, now stationed in Alsace. Through a long
and beautiful day we had driven south from Metz, across the great
fortified zone to the south of that town; with its endless trenches
and wire-fields, its camouflaged roads, its railway stations packed
with guns, its ammunition dumps and battery-emplacements, which
Germany had prepared at the outset of the war, and which still awaited
the Americans las