All who played any part in these great events well know that it was nothing of the kind; that nothing in the nature of a detailed time-table to control so vast a field of effort was possible. All Commanders, and the most exalted of them in a higher degree even than those wielding lesser forces, became opportunists, and bent their energies, not to the realization of a great general plan for a succession of timed attacks, but upon the problem of hitting whenever and wherever an opportunity offered, and the means were ready to hand.
In these matters it was the force of circumstances which controlled the sequence of events, and nothing else. An elaborate time-table controlled by definite dates and sequences for the successive engagement of a series of Armies would have been quite impossible of realization. Even a Corps Commander had difficulty in forecasting within a day or two when he would be ready to launch an attack on any given part of the front. For an Army Commander it was a matter of a week or even two.
All attempted time-tables were controlled by our Artillery requirements; both the assembling of the necessary guns—often drawn from distant fronts—and the accumulating of the requisite "head" of ammunition to see a battle through, were processes whose duration could only be very roughly forecasted.
The dumping, in the gun pits and in ammunition stores, of the necessary 500 or 600 rounds per gun meant days of labour in collection and distribution on the part of the railways and motor lorries. The breakdown of a few motor lorries at a critical time, or the dropping of a single bomb upon an important railway junction, were disturbing factors quite sufficient to have arrested the flow of ammunition, and to have postponed, indefinitely, any programme based upon its prompt delivery.
It will be obvious, therefore, that no reliance could be placed, days or weeks beforehand, upon a given attack taking place on a given day; therefore no plans could be made which depended upon such attacks taking place in a predetermined sequence.
Shortly put, therefore, the decisions of the High Command were confined to questions such as where an attack should be made, in what direction, and by what forces. The date was always a matter of uncertainty, and the only control that could be exercised was by postponement, and never by acceleration.
For the greater part of the offensive period it was therefore necessarily left to the Commanders of the Armies to conform to a general policy of attack, the time and method being left to their own decision or recommendation. And they, in turn, relied upon their Corps Commanders to seize the initiative in the pursuit of such a policy. Naturally, the Army at all times made every effort to secure co-ordinated action by its several Corps; but it rarely happened that more than one Corps at a time carried through the main effort—the other Corps performing subsidiary rôles. The great battle of September 29th to October 1st, which completed the final rupture of the Hindenburg line, was, however, a signal exception to this rule.
The attack by the Third British Army on August 21st is a case which illustrates the delays inseparable from battle preparations. The project of such an attack had already been mooted on August 11th, when General Byng (Third Army) paid me a visit to discuss my battle plan of August 8th, and I gathered on that occasion that he hoped to begin within four or five days. The event showed that the operation actually took ten days to materialize. No criticism is suggested. The conditions of transport of troops and munitions doubtless made its earlier realization quite impossible.
The attack coming when it did, however, considerably eased the situation of the Fourth Army, upon whose front Ludendorff had flung all his available reserves, drawn from all parts of the German front, in his endeavours to bring the Australians and Canadians to a halt.