been shown an official report of the proceedings. The person who showed them to Colonel Repington can only have been an officer of the General Staff, and it is perfectly easy to guess who it was. That officer was certainly not General Robertson, who is far too rough and straightforward for these devious methods. But it must have been an officer of the General Staff of which General Robertson was the chief, and to defeat a plan which General Robertson opposed he disclosed that plan to a journalist, and thus through him to the enemy. It not only told Ludendorff the plan, plan, but through the article suggested to him a means of parrying the blow, to "evade Allenby's offensive by retiring, and bring the U-boats down the Danube to Constantinople." No officer was punished in consequence of the conviction of Colonel Repington and the editor of the Morning Post.'

Foch

The Executive War BoardFoch, Wilson, Bliss, Cadorna -got to work at once. proposed that the General Reserve should begin by being a seventh of the total Allied force from the North Sea to the Adriatic, and fixed it at thirty divisions; and letters were addressed to each commander-in-chief asking him if he would contribute his quota, proportionate to the number of divisions he commanded, to the General Reserve. On February 15th, Sir Henry Wilson succeeded Sir William Robertson as Chief of the Imperial

General Staff in London, and was succeeded at Versailles by General Rawlinson.

Foch, when he came to Versailles, was an old man, unwell and worn with anxiety, and beginning to lose his trim horseman's figure. He shone in debate as much as he did in action. In his profound

grasp of any question: in his capacity for dealing at once, and conclusively, with any opposite point which he rejected: in the skill with which he exposed the fallacy of an unsound argument: in the flexible readiness with which he adapted his attitude to any contrary idea he felt unable to refute: in the facility and rapidity with which he evolved schemes to reach a common agreement: in the closely woven and orderly logio of his thought: in the rapid, almost exuberant, flow of his speech: in the flashing power of illustrating his meaning: in his ruthless contempt for weaker dialecticians,-in all these he resembled a great Chancery special. In the simplicity of his ways-he had not even an A.D.C., and he used to arrive alone, his papers under his arm, with an absence of ceremony astonishing to any one accustomed to the pomp that surrounds even a brigadier : in the roughness of his ways, a strong contrast to the gentlemanly English and grand manner of the Italians: in his extreme piety,-in all these he was like a rustic French curé, redolent of the soil, the true soil of France, the soil of peasants and soldiers, descend

ants of those who accomplished the Gesta Dei per Francos, very different from the glittering foam of Paris. In sheer in tellect he towered above every one at the Supreme War Council as much as Mr Lloyd George did in courage.

During the first half of the month of February the German scheme of attack became olearer. The Allied and the German lines formed an angle, and the German divisions in large masses began to accumulate towards the point of the angle: here also appeared Von Hutier at the head of an army. He was a specialist in surprise attacks, and at the capture of Riga, in the preceding autumn, the Germans had used a new manœuvre invented by him. Instead of collecting their attacking divisions in front of the point at which it was aimed to break through, they were kept very far back from the line, and brought up to the point stealthily the night before, so that the enemy, though he might guess the region, could not guess exactly where. While these divisions were at this distance from the line, they practised over ground artificially made to resemble the real point of attack. It was an invention appropriate to the German genius for secret and tireless organisation.

Fooh in effect said to the Executive War Board

"Ludendorff must launch his mass of attack either westward or southward, either towards the British side of the angle and Cambrai, or towards the French side of the

angle and Rheims. But if he is successful and drives one or other of these lines back, he himself presents an unguarded and open flank, and the more successful he is, and the more he enlarges the angle, the longer and therefore the more open and unguarded his flank will be.

"I will therefore divide my General Reserve into three portions, each larger than the other. The smallest portion I will place in Dauphiné, close to the best crossing into Italy; the largest I will concentrate round Paris; the third portion I will place round Amiens. From the concentration of German troops the attack must come in the Rheims or Cambrai region; therefore the bulk of the General Reserve round Paris is best situated to come to the help of either region. The Amiens portion stands behind the British Fifth Army, the weakest point of the line, and ready to support it. The Dauphiné portion is situated so as to be able to go to the assistance of the Swiss or the Italians, in the unlikely event of their being attacked, or to rejoin the rest of the General Reserve."

Foch did no more than outline the part to be played by the General Reserve, for it never was to come into existence. Major Grasset quotes Napoleon as saying that the art of war is simple enough to understand; it is doing it that is difficult. The outline of Fooh's plan was perfectly simple: Ludendorff had formed his mass of manoeuvre near the apex of the angle formed by

In March he chose the British side, and flung himself at Gough's Fifth Army. Ludendorff has also told us why he ohose this line of attack: the Allied line was thinnest there, and he chose the line of least resistance. This choice the prescience of Fooh had also divined when he intended to put the bulk of the General Reserve round Paris and Amiens. But the General Reserve was never constituted, so Fooh never carried out his plan.

The letters sent to the commanders-in-chief by the Executive War Board, asking them to contribute their quota to the General Reserve, were dated February 6: by February 19 19 the French and Italian answers were received assenting.

On February 22nd Sir Douglas Haig and Petain met at the Grand Quartier General, and arranged another detailed soheme of defence on a completely different principle to that of the General Reserve. It was the principle that if one army was attacked, the other

would give a colleague. It was the principle upon which the offensives against the Germans had been conducted in France, and which the Military Representative at Versailles had considered was unsuited to a defensive plan.

This new scheme must have been known to the leaders of the Allies, and certainly would not have been initiated by Petain, as it was, without the assent of M. Clemenceau. But it was unknown to Foch, who waited patiently for the English answer the whole of February. The fighting was expected to begin the first week in March. On March 3 (and it is the knowledge of this date that shows how well informed Major Grasset is) a letter from Sir Douglas, dated March 2, reached the Executive War Board refusing to contribute any divisions to the General Reserve, except British divisions in Italy, which were not under his command. Italian military representative immediately declared the Italian contribution to the General Reserve must be considered as withdrawn, if there was to be no English contribution. The General Reserve thus vanished, and with it with it the

The

which conceals and propaganda which suggests the false, does what it likes with modern public opinion in time of war: people are far more uninstructed and misled by newspapers than ever they were by rumour in the past, before the spread of education had made it possible to induce people to believe anything by printing it. Propaganda can persuade generals themselves that they are geniuses, who must be kept in place at all costs, however much they fail. This great two-handed engine the General Staffs also control, for military reasons. So the Staff ceases to exist for the nation: the nation lives for the benefit of the Staff. Victory or defeat ceases to be the prime interest; what matters it whether dear old Willie or poor old Harry shall command, or the Chantilly party score a point over the Boulevard des Invalides party. The Central Powers seem (as far as we can see from Count Czernin's Memoirs') to have suffered even more, and their Emperors and Chancellors to have been treated like valets; but tough and slippery as the General Staff might be with us, Mr Lloyd George was more so, and he kept war a function of politics, and victory as the end of the

war.

But before the campaign of 1918 began, of the two parts of the plan of campaign which may be called that of Mr Lloyd George, Sir Henry Wilson, and Fooh, one part had been published and betrayed, and the

The Allies therefore went back to the position they had been in the preceding autumn; and the consequences they had rightly anticipated and feared from that position unrolled themselves at once, and in an aggravated form: aggravated because only one part of their military plans was left intact, the extension of the British line. This portion of their design had been connected with the Executive War Board and the General Reserve; Reserve; but though the reserve was never formed, and the Board never had any functions, the British line remained extended; and there from its extremity at Barisis northwards to Gouzeaucourt lay our Fifth Army, composed of only fourteen infantry divisions and three cavalry divisions, strung out over 42 miles, on an average front of 6750 yards to each division: this was very thin. The Third Army, Byng's, immediately to the north, had one division on every 4200 yards.

The German divisions from the East were still flowing inte France in March, but had at the beginning of the month not yet risen to the level of the Allies. On March 13, Ludendorff had 186 divisions at his disposal, of which 79 were in reserve: this gave him 1,370,000 rifles and 15,700 guns. the 167 Allied divisions (58 in reserve) gave them 1,500,000 rifles and 16,400 guns. They still had the odds. On March 21, Ludendorff had 192 divisions, of which 85 were in

But