This is the essential fact which governs all that follows; for if, as the German official press says with a measure of truth, the German objective is not a city or a port, but the complete destruction of the allied armies, so our objective is not to hold a certain geographical area, but to punish the advance so that the enemy forces will be exhausted, while ours are being constantly recruited from oversea for the last stroke that will give us the victory.
The smallness of the enemy's gains in this fourth phase of the grand battle is merely the sign that von Hutier found across his path an adversary prepared as far as was humanly possible, determined and able to contest every yard of ground.
Thus the village of Courcelles, only two miles from the old front, was lost, retaken, lost again, recovered, and remains in the hands of the French. Thus Plemont, a position insignificant as compared with the Aisne Heights, although encircled and covered with fire, was being defended till last evening. Since then no carrier pigeon has come in, and it must be presumed that the heroic handful of men who held this point of the front have been overcome. Their countrymen will not forget them.
The Turning Point of the Battle
By WALTER DURANTY
[Copyrighted]
The turning point of the great battle came on June 11, when the French delivered a desperate counterblow south of Montdidier and drove the Germans back from the Aronde River, regaining important ground along a front of seven and one-half miles, and capturing 1,000 prisoners and many heavy guns. This phase of the struggle is described by Walter Duranty, another special correspondent, whose dispatch is copyrighted for Current History Magazine. It is dated June 11, 1918.
As the battle continues it seems that the second week of June will rank as one of the bloodiest and most decisive periods in the world's history.
It is the veritable climax of four years of struggle. In the last twenty-four hours the violence of the fighting has increased still further. The limit of human endurance has been forced yet another notch higher. Along a front of nearly twenty miles the Germans are driving more than a quarter of a million men forward through a sea of blood. The defenders say that it is as though the whole of the German Army is engaged against them; no sooner is one battalion annihilated than another takes its place, and another and another.