ittle and means everything--that the future
shall be worthy of the past.

And as to the feeling of the Army--it is expressed, and, as far as I
have been able to judge from much talk with those under his command,
most truly expressed, in Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's December
despatch--which came out, as it happens, the very day I had the honour
of standing at his side in the Commander-in-Chief's room, at G.H.Q.,
and looking with him at the last maps of the final campaign. "The
effect of the great assaults," says the Field-Marshal, "in which,
during nine days of battle (September 26th--October 5th), the First,
Third, and Fourth Armies stormed the line of the Canal du Nord, and
broke through the Hindenburg line, upon the subsequent course of the
campaign, was decisive.... Great as were the material losses the enemy
had suffered, the effect of so overwhelming a defeat upon a _morale_
already deteriorated, was of even larger importance." Again: "By the
end of October, the rapid succession of heavy blows dealt by the
British forces had had a cumulative effect, both moral and material,
upon the German Armies. The British Armies were now in a position to
force an immediate conclusion." That conclusion was forced in the
battle of the Sambre (1st to 11th November). By that "great victory,"
says Sir 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