in Paris for the end of July. That was on the 1 5th. On the 1 8th even the most optimistic among us understood that all was lost." To make clear the significance of that statement it is necessary to review briefly the condition of the opposing armies previous to the Soissons attack.
It was indeed well known to both sides that the German army was nearing the end of its offensive strength, but just how nearly German moral had been drained neither side fully appreci- ated until later for, superficially, it was good. The French army, on the other hand, was well known to be at its lowest ebb of moral. The French soldier, since April 1917, had ceased to be a war machine unit who could be depended on blindly to follow his leader and had assumed a certain independent thinking role. Discipline had slackened and orders to attack or defend stub- bornly had lost their force unless the soldier wished to attack or defend stubbornly. Petain considered, early in July, that, although he had a number of rested divisions in reserve, he had not a single division which could be relied upon to push home and exploit an attack successfully. Of such as he had the Moroccan Div. was rated the best. The superiority of the British moral had been offset by the numerical weakness of their battalions, and, although they were holding their own doggedly, their confidence in their allies had suffered a severe strain and grew still further impaired as the lower units became intermingled. The American army was, of course, as yet an undetermined factor.
It was therefore with a certain amount of reasoned justifica- tion that Ludendorff, aware of these conditions, to which more- over he added an amazing underestimate of the strength of the American effectives in France, conceived that one more push directed against the French army would put it into headlong flight and thus pave the way for a similar stroke against the British. The adverse factors in the Champagne-Marne. project were, first, that the method of attack, the so-called " Riga model," now lacked the element of surprise, since the methods of concentration for it were now too well known to make conceal- ment jpossible, and its success was further discounted because Petain had discovered the tactical means of effectively stopping such an attack; second, that Ludendorff had overcentralized his command. No army group commander or army commander was called on or permitted to exercise judgment or decision; he could only carry out the plans devised by Ludendorff and his staff by methods similarly devised and prescribed. In the lower ranks of officers this benumbing influence was, if anything, still more strongly felt. Meanwhile, synchronously with his success in thus centring the power of decision in his own hands, Ludendorff had become preoccupied with a multiplicity of problems which had no immediate relation to the conduct of the army on the western front. Germany's allies, her own internal questions, the Russian and Near East situations, were all constantly taking his time and distracting his attention from the western front, although nothing on that front could be done without his dictation. A further cause of weakness was that propaganda, among soldiers and civilians alike, had been overdone. Although the soldier indeed still responded to propaganda, it was only to the most extreme statements. Therefore in order to stiffen in the men the will to fight more resolutely in the attack planned for July 15 they were told that the French were already beaten and exhausted; that the British were ready to go out of the war; that the American army could not get to France, and that, even if it could, it could not fight; that the Champagne-Marne attack was to be the " peace-assault " which would end the war if successful, although as a matter of fact the utmost which Ludendorff really expected of it was that it would pave the way for a similar attack on the Lys. When therefore this attack of July 15 failed, and the French army showed itself anything but a beaten force, and when, three days later, the supposedly non- existent Americans established alike their presence and their fighting ability by marching through the German lines S. of Soissons in a fashion which compelled the evacuation of the whole Marne salient, the scales dropped from the eyes of the German soldier. To him the war was now lost; it was time to go
home. Thereafter, curiously enough, while no longer Crediting his own official propaganda, the German soldier became most receptive to Allied propaganda, and looked to it for the truth.
On the Allied side conditions and conceptions were in general more correctly adjusted. The French leaders knew the weak- nesses of their opponents, but were also cognizant of their own, and they were more successful psychologists in dealing with their own men. The British army, having again been recruited up to fighting strength, felt that it had nothing further to fear from the worn-down German army so long as the French line held. The American army, supremely confident in every rank, longed only for the opportunity to disprove the belittling judg- ments of its opponents and to remove the doubts of its allies as to its fighting capacity. Further, the Allied High Command had the supreme merit of being not only in capable hands but, to a rare degree, decentralized. The attention of its leaders was not distracted from its own field by the necessity of solving distant problems in politics or diplomacy, and was backed in all the principal Allied countries by statesmen who in every way supported and aided the military chieftains, without, on the whole, unduly interfering with the conduct of the armies. Although the Supreme Command was nominally in the hands of Marshal Foch, he was a coordinator of efforts rather than a dominant military commander; and in fact he lacked the staff which would have been necessary for such a control as that exercised by Ludendorff over the German armies.
The plan for the Soissons counter-attack of July 18 was not a new one. As early as the German offensive on the Aisne (May 27), it had been proposed by a member of Gen. Petain's staff, had been approved by his chief, and its details had been worked out. Marshal Foch had likewise favoured it, although hesitatingly, because of the attitude of the authorities in Paris. The difficulties of execution at that time lay in finding divisions of " attack-class " for the spear head at the crucial point. By the middle of July, with the increasing number of American divisions, which had gained and were gaining battle experience, that difficulty disappeared. On July n Petain, on Pershing's insistence, again urged this plan upon Marshal Foch, purposing now to make it immediately after the long-awaited German Marne attack. Foch gave it his approval, not indeed with any hope of gaining thereby any decisive advantage, but rather regarding it as a desirable counter-stroke to the German assault. The striking success of this counter-attack, which in two days gained and held control of the German communications in the Marne salient, and thereby compelled its evacuation, brought to the Allied leaders, as it did to many in Germany, the discovery that the tide of victory had already turned. On July 24 Foch arranged a meeting of the commanders-in-chief at Bombon, to discuss the means of following up this success and of preserving to the Allies the initiative thus unexpectedly gained.
The chief misgiving of the French , Government at this time, now that Paris had been rendered secure through the driving of the Germans back from the Marne, was the lingering appre- hension that the enemy might still drive a wedge between the French and the British armies at Amiens. It was therefore particularly welcome that Field-Marshal Haig should propose an attack on the Amiens salient to be made by the newly formed Australian corps, now in. that sector and desirous of making the attack, together with the Canadian corps, which had not yet been engaged in the year's battles. At this meeting also it was decided to assign to the American army the reduction of the St. Mihiel salient as its first distinctive operation, but meanwhile to employ this new army in completing the reduction of the Marne salient. All the commanders-in-chief at this meeting expressed themselves as favouring a continuation of offensive action, yet still with the idea of keeping the German army busy, of wearing it down, of seizing favourable occasions and localities for attacks to gain prisoners and material and reconquer useful bits of territory, rather than with any thought of a systematic plan for ending the war by victory before winter.
During the two weeks following this conference the German army was forced back slowly from the Marne salient, now become
