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 fick