Fields of Victory

by Mrs. Humphry Ward

Meanwhile, on this side of the sea, the anxiety for men grew steadily stronger. Who knew what the coming spring campaign would bring forth? The French Army during 1917 had passed through that dépression morale of which I have spoken in an earlier letter. Would a country which had borne such a long and terrible ordeal of death and devastation be capable of yet another great effort during the coming year, whatever might be the heroic patriotism of her people? One heard of the enormous preparations that America was making in France—of the new docks, warehouses, and railways, of the vast depots and splendid camps that were being laid out—with a mixture of wonder and irritation. A friend of mine, on coming back from France, described to me his going over a new American dock with two French officers: "Magnificent!" said the Frenchmen, in a kind of despair—"but when are they going to begin? Suppose the war is over, and France swallowed up, before they begin?" A large section of American opinion was shaken with the same impatience.

American letters to English friends, including those of Mr. Roosevelt to his many English correspondents, among whom, to some small extent, I was proud to reckon myself, expressed an almost fierce disappointment with the slow progress of things. Ultimately, of course, an independent American Army, under its own Commander-in-Chief, and fully equipped from American factories. But why not begin by sending men in as large numbers as possible to train with the British and French Armies, and to take their places as soon as possible in the fighting line, as integral parts of those armies, allowing the Allies to furnish all equipment till America was really ready? It was pointed out that Canada and Australia, by sending officers and men over at once to train and fight with the British, and leaving everything else to be supplied by the Allies, had in nine months from the outbreak of war already taken part in glorious and decisive battles. Or why not adopt a two-fold policy—of supplying men to the Allies as rapidly as possible, for immediate aid, carrying on preparations the while for an independent American Army with all its own supplies, as the ultimate goal? Time, it was urged, was of the utmost importance. And what object was served by experimenting with new types of munitions, instead of adopting the types of the Allies, which the American factories were already turning out in profusion? And so on.

With such feelings did many of us on this side of the water, and a large section apparently of American friends of the Allies on the other side, watch the gradual unravelling of America's tangled skeins. The North American Review asked in December, 1917: "Are we losing the war? No. But we are not winning it." In January, 1918, the editor warned his readers: "The Allied forces are not in condition to withstand the terrific onslaught which Germany is bound to make within six months. America must win the war." In April the New York Bankers' Bulletin said: "We have not made progress as far as we might or could," while months later, even in its September number (1918), the North American Review still talked of "our inexplicable military sluggishness," and rang with appeals for greater energy. There was of course an element of politics in all this; but up to March last year it is clear that, in spite of many things not only magnificently planned, but magnificently done, there was a great deal of sincere anxiety and misgiving in both countries.

But with the outbreak of the German offensive in March, as we all know, everything changed. American troops began to rush over:—366,000 in round numbers, up to the end of March, and 440,000 more, up to the end of June, 70 per cent, of them carried in British ships; a million by the end of July, nearly a million and a half before the Armistice. Wonderful story! Nobody, I think, can possibly exaggerate the heartening and cheering effect of it upon the Allies in Europe, especially on France—wounded and devastated France—and on Italy, painfully recovering from Caporetto. How well I remember the thrill of those days in London, the rumours of the weekly landings of troops—70,000—80,000 men—and the occasional sight of the lithe, straight-limbed, American boys marching through our streets!

And yet, curiously enough—what was exaggerated all the time, on both sides of the Atlantic, both here and in America, was the extent of the British set-back hi March and April, and its effect on the general situation. That is clear, I think, when we look back on our own Press at home, and still more on American utterances, both in the States and in France. In August of last year Mr. Secretary Baker said: "We are only just beginning"—and he pointed to the millions of men that America would have in France by 1919. On August 7th General March, Chief of the American General Staff, said in the Senate Committee, that America would have four millions of men in France, with one million at home, for the campaign of 1919. "The only way that Germany can be whipped is by America going into this thing with her whole strength. It is up to us to win the war.... We must force the issue and win." The editor of the North American Review wrote in August, and published in his September number, phrases like the following: "But the hand of the enemy cannot be struck down for a long time to come." "Virtually impregnable positions" are still held by him. "No military observer is so sanguine as to anticipate anything like conclusive results from the present campaign. The real test will come next year, in the late spring and summer of 1919." By then the Allies must have "a great preponderance of men and guns. These America must supply."

But when General March said in August: "It is up to us to win the war," and the North American Review talked of "virtually impregnable positions," and the impossibility of "anything like conclusive results from the present campaign"—the capture of those "impregnable positions" by the British Army, and thereby the winning of the war, were only a few weeks away! Similar phrases could be quoted from the British Press, and from prominent Englishmen, though not, unless my memory plays me false, from any of our responsible military leaders. The fact is that the view I represented, in my second article, as the view taken by the heads of the British Army, of the March retreat, had turned out by the summer to be the true one. The German armies had to a large extent beaten themselves out against the British defensive battle of the spring: and while the Americans were making their splendid spurt from April to August, and entering the fighting field in force for the first time, the British Army, having absorbed its recruits, taken huge toll of its enemies, and profited by all there 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 Dégoutte 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 Britain, France, Italy—akin to that which the American climate and atmosphere produces on the visitor from this side of the Atlantic. It breathed new life into everything, and especially into the heart of France, the chief sufferer by three years of atrocious war. As weary and devastated France watched the American stream of eager and high-hearted youth, flowing from Bordeaux eastwards, column after column, regiment after regiment, of men admirable in physique, fearless in danger, and full of a laughing and boundless confidence in America's power to help, and resolve to win—at last it seemed that the long horror of the war must be indeed coming to an end. "Three thousand miles!" said the French villager or townsman to himself, as he turned out to see them pass—"they have come three thousand miles to beat the Boche. And America is the richest country in the world—and there are a hundred millions of them." Hope rose into flood, and with it fresh courage to endure.

Nor was the effect less marked on the British nation, which had not known invasion, and on the British Army, for all its faith in itself. The rapid growth of American strength in France from March onward in response to the call of the Allies, provided indeed a moral support to the two older armies, which was of incalculable value and "influenced the fighting qualities of both; while the knowledge of these mounting reserves enabled the Allied Commanders to take risks which otherwise could hardly have been faced." I am quoting a British military authority of high rank.

It was at Metz that—outside Paris—I first came in contact with this "America in France," which History will mark on her coming page with all the emphasis that belongs to new chapters in the ever-broadening tale of man. It was in the shape of some "Knights of Columbus," pausing at Metz for a night on their way to Coblenz. We only exchanged a few words on the steps of the hotel, but I had time to feel the interest and the strangeness of this American Catholicism in Europe, following in the track of war, and looking with its New World eyes at those old, old towns, those ancient churches in which American Catholics were at home, yet not at home. At Strasbourg I saw no Americans that I can remember. But our arrival at Nancy at midnight, very weary after a long day in the car, during which we had missed our way badly at least once, is linked in my recollection with the apparition of two young American officers just as we were being told for the third time that there was no room in the hotel to which we had driven up. Should we really have to sleep in the car? There seemed to be not a single vacant bedroom in Nancy; and there had been snow showers during the day! But these two Americans heard from our French Lieutenant that there were two English ladies in the car, and they came forward at once, offering their rooms. Luckily we found shelter elsewhere; but I shall not soon forget the kind readiness of the two young men, and the thrill of the whole scene. There we stood in the beautiful Place Stanislas, that workmen from Versailles built for the father-in-law of Louis Quinze. A flickering moonlight touched the gilding of the famous grilles that shut in the square; and the only light in the wide space seemed to come from this one hotel taken by the American authorities for the use of their officers and Red Cross workers passing to and from the Rhine. When that square was built, George Washington was a youth of twenty, and after one hundred and seventy years it stood within the war-zone of an American Army, which had crossed the Atlantic to fight in Europe!