was to be learnt from the German offensive, was getting ready every
day to give the final strokes in the war, aided, when the moment came,
by the supreme leadership of Marshal Foch, by the successes of
Generals Mangin and Degoutte on the Marne, by the masterly campaign of
General Gouraud in Champagne, and the gallant push of General Pershing
in the Argonne. This position of things was not sufficiently realised
by the general public in England, still less by the American public,
as is shown by the extracts I have quoted. So that the continuous
series of British victories, from August 8th onward, which ended in
the Armistice, came as a rather startling surprise to those both here
and abroad who, like von Kluck in 1914, had been inclined to make too
much of a temporary British retreat.

Moreover, behind the military successes of Great Britain--and not only
on the French front, but in the East also--stood always the deadly
pressure of the British blockade. When after the capture of the
Hindenburg positions, the line indicating "prisoners," on that chart
at G.H.Q., a reduced copy of which will be found at the end of this
book, leapt up to a height for which the wall in the room of the
Director of Operations could hardly find space, it meant not only
victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of
German _morale_ at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch
which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by
the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to
Germany's undoing, since the opening of the struggle. The final
victory of the Allies when it came was thus in a special sense Great
Britain's victory, achieved both by her mastery of the sea, and the
military expansion forced upon her by the German attack; conditioned,
of course, by the whole earlier history of the war, in which France
had led the van and borne the brunt, and immensely facilitated by the
"splendid American adventure," to use the phrase of an American.

For to show that, in a strictly military sense, the British and
Dominion Armies, backed by the British Navy, brought the war to a
successful end--a simple matter of figures and dates--is not all, or
nearly all. The American intervention, and especially the marvellous
speeding-up of American action, from March to the end of the war,
quite apart from the brilliant promise of America's first appearances
in the field, had an effect upon Europe--Great B