Ludendorff's Apologia

I

THE most powerful man in Germany during the war was, undoubtedly, Ludendorff; and his book of War Memoirs which has recently been published in Germany — and by the time these words are in print will have appeared in an American edition — is the most authoritative and comprehensive survey of the war that has yet appeared. He was head of the Operations Department of the German General Staff from 1904 until 1913, and must not only have been privy to all the German preparations for war, but also have had a hand in shaping them. At the outbreak of war he was attached to General von Bülow’s army and took part in the attack on Liége as liaison officer between von Bülow and von Emmich. Three weeks after the outbreak of war he went to Russia as Chief of Staff to Marshal von Hindenburg, won the battle of Tannenberg, — perhaps the greatest single victory in the war, — and took an important part in the subsequent operations against Russia in 1915 and 1916.

After the fall of von Falkenhayn in 1916, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, who had saved East Prussia from the Russian invasion in the first month of the war, were given supreme command of all the German armies. Hindenburg took the title of Chief of Staff, and Ludendorff, offered the title of Second Chief of Staff, chose that of First Quartermaster, on the ground that there could be only one chief of staff. He preferred the reality to the title of power, for it is quite obvious that, although Hindenburg was the great popular idol, Ludendorff was both the chief thinker and the chief driving force in German military policy. Ludendorff from time to time in his book remembers that Hindenburg is his superior officer and he always speaks of him as ’the Field-Marshal.’ But this is only the nominal homage that a masterful prime minister might pay to his constitutional sovereign. Hindenburg and he may have had differences of opinion, but, if they had, Ludendorff always had his way.

Ludendorff came of a family of Pomeranian merchants who lived at Posen up to the Franco-Prussian War. They were not well-to-do, and one of the few personal touches that Ludendorff allows himself in his book is his reference to his early struggles as a poor hardworking subaltern. Ludcndorff’s was a simple and loyal nature in the personal attachments of life. His homage to his father and mother for their ‘ devoted efforts which brought them no earthly reward’ increases respect for the man. He never had children of his own, but he was deeply attached to his two step-sons, both of whom were killed in the war. There was in Ludendorff nothing of the class pride of the Prussian Junker. His political views, honest, if retrograde, were the result, not of class prejudice, but of warped and one-sided study. East Prussia is a Scotland which has never produced a Burns. In Ludendorff’s character there is a good deal of Scottish strength and warmth, but nothing, unfortunately, of Scottish open-mindedness and democratic instinct.

His book concedes no more to popularity than his politics. It is hard and brutally written; it is long, graceless, and, truth to tell, a little indigestible; but for its strength, its honesty, and its stiff-necked obstinacy, it is the most indispensable of all books to an understanding of the Prussian military character.

In 1913 Ludendorff drafted a plan for a great increase in the German army, which was rather more than the civil government could stomach; and the rejection of this plan was the beginning of his quarrel with von BethmannHollweg, which assumes monstrous proportions before the book is finished. Ludendorff lays the blame for the mess into which German military plans had fallen by the end of the first month of the war on the refusal of the government to give him the three new army corps that he asked for in 1913. Von Moltke, then Chief of Staff, bore a great name and was personally liked, but Ludendorff evidently thought him an old woman. He tells us that the plans of campaign begun in August, 1914, were the conception of von Schlieffen. They were made by him ’for the event of France’s not respecting the neutrality of Belgium or of Belgium’s joining up with France.’ ‘On this assumption,’ he adds, ‘ the advance of the German force into Belgium followed as a matter of course.’ The alternative of an offensive against Russia and defense on the side of France seems to have been discussed and made the subject of innumerable war games, but the conclusion drawn from them was that this policy meant a long war, and on that account it was rejected.

This was the biggest miscalculation made by the General Staff in the whole course of the war; for if Belgium had not been invaded and France not attacked, the war might well have been over soon after the first Christmas. England might not have come in; France, if her territory had not been invaded, would have been very lukewarm in the war; and Belgium would not have attacked, or, without a struggle, allowed anyone else to attack through her territory. We know from Lord French’s book that one of the worries of the French and English General Staffs before the war was to know what Belgium would do in the event of attack. Belgium remained a dark horse up to the last, and, most unfortunately, she could never be persuaded to decide upon her attitude in the event of a general war. ‘ The idea of attacking Germany through Belgium, or in any other direction,’ writes Lord French, ‘never entered our heads.’

From all these doubts and ambiguities Germany freed us by attacking Belgium herself. This blunder, so far from shortening the war, made a long conflict certain, and as a matter of fact, lost Germany the victory. After the Marne, the plans of von Schlieffen were in ruins.

It was from these ruins that Ludendorff rose to eminence. Before the Germans had suffered any check in France, the Russians had invaded Prussia with two strong armies under Rennenkampf and Samsonoff, both of which vastly outnumbered the German armies opposed to them. Germany had already paid a frightful penalty for her concentration against Belgium and France and for her underestimate of Russia. In this, the first crisis of the war, Ludendorff was drawn from the French front and made Chief of Staff to Hindenburg.

All stories about the association of this pair previous to the war are fiction. They first met at Hanover on August 23. The situation was indeed serious, for it had actually been decided to withdraw the German armies in East Prussia behind the Vistula — a decision which would have abandoned to the Russians more German territory than France had in hostile occupation during the war. But Ludendorff, who had taken a surer measure of the enemy than von Schlieffen had been able to in the staff war-games, vetoed this retirement and executed one of the boldest manœuvres in military history. He withdrew almost the whole of the German army confronting Rennenkampf and united it with the German army in front of Samsonoff. From August 27 onward, there was nothing between Rennenkampf and Königsberg but two brigades of cavalry, and on his left were the exposed flank and rear of the German army marching to the Narev front. Had Rennenkampf advanced quickly, he must infallibly have overwhelmed the tiny forces left in front of him, and he might, had he seen his opportunity, have prevented the German army from reaching the Narev by a sudden attack on its unprotected flank and rear. But he moved slowly. His immense army lowered like a thundercloud in the northeast, but the cloud never burst. In the meantime, Ludendorff with his augmented army broke through Samsonoff’s centre and won the stupendous victory of Tannenberg.

Tannenberg was not an elaborately prepared battle according to long-settled plan, but a sudden inspiration, one of the greatest gambles in military history, justified only by success, and by Ludendorff’s knowledge of the enemy’s psychology.

‘A general,’ he writes after describing the manœuvres before this battle, ‘carries a heavy burden and requires strong nerves. The layman is too much inclined to think that war is only the working out of an arithmetical problem with given numbers. It is anything but that. On both sides it is a wrestle with powerful unknown physical and psychological forces, a struggle which inferiority of numbers makes all the more difficult.’

Ludendorff, or rather Hindenburg, his chief, was now the most famous man in Germany. But for the invasion of Belgium, the way would have lain open to victory. One half of the effort vainly expended in the so-called battle of Calais in the autumn of 1914 would, if employed against Russia, have brought her to her knees before midsummer. But having invaded Belgium, the Germans had acquired a vulnerable flank in the west which they were compelled to make secure; otherwise, as Lord French’s book shows, the whole of the British army would have joined up with the Belgians, and French, in command of an Anglo-Belgian army, would have played Stonewall Jackson to Marshal Joffre’s Lee. In consequence, Ludendorff was compelled to follow up his great victory at Tannenberg with insufficient troops, and the winter campaign of 1915 was one of the most arduous in the war.

When spring came, it was obvious, even to the German General Staff, that Russia, not France, must be the field of their offensive operations. The most promising line of attack on Russia was on the north flank of the great Polish salient, where rapid progress, such as might have been expected, would automatically have relieved Austria and forced the Russians to withdraw to the defense of Petrograd and Moscow. Unfortunately for the Germans, the reverses of the Austrians had been so heavy that they could not be trusted to stand their ground if left unsupported. German troops who would have been more profitably employed on the Niemen front had to be diverted south to support the Austrians; and when the Germans made up their mind definitely to fall back on the defensive in the west, the decisive blow against Russia was delivered, not on the flank where it would have been most effective, but at Gorlice, where the Russian advance threatened to spill across the Carpathians toward Cracow and Vienna. Ludendorff pays a justly deserved compliment to Mackensen for his victory at Gorlice, but it is quite evident that he regarded the whole scheme of operations against Russia as, at most, second best.

From this time dates his virulent dislike of the Austrians, a dislike which they returned. Early in 1915 he made a tour through the Carpathians in the company of von Linsingen, and was struck with the backward condition of the country and, in particular, with the badness of the housing. ‘When I saw these hovels I realized that this nation could not know what it was fighting for.’ He quotes, with approval, a remark made by a Jew in Radon — that ‘he could not understand why so strong and vital a body as Germany should ally itself with a corpse.’ His political views on Austria were not very different from those of Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London, and he bitterly resented the foreign policy which, he maintained, made Germany the tool of the effete and selfish Dual Monarchy . On the other hand, even he had to admit the force of the Austrian complaint that, owing to the German concentration in the west, she had been forced to bear the whole brunt of the fighting against Russia.

The second great crisis of the war came at the end of 1916. The invasion of Belgium had been punished by the Russian invasion of East Prussia and by the military breakdown in Austria which forced the Germans to despatch troops to her relief and deprive them of the chance which, but for the straits of the Austrian army, they would undoubtedly have had, of bringing off a great strategic coup against Russia. Ludendorff praises the strategy of the Grand Duke Nicolas, but does not disguise his opinion that the escape of the Russian army followed inevitably upon the fact that the Germans had to deliver their attack against the Russian centre instead of on the flank. The Russian armies, in his opinion, would not have escaped complete disaster, as they did, if German strategy had not been tied down to the relief of the Austrian armies.

The military moral of the war, then, so far had been that, with Austria in her weak condition, the whole idea of concentration against France and Belgium was fundamentally unsound. The campaign of 1915 had removed this danger, and by 1916 not only did the west seem fairly stabilized, but Germany was in a position to finish off the war in Russia once and for all.

It was a great opportunity for the General Staff to repair its original mistakes. Instead, von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the General Staff, chose in this year to repeat them. Instead of finishing off the war in Russia as he might have done, he squandered the resources of Germany in the campaign against Verdun. Instead of disciplining Hungary’s ambitions, he allowed her intransigence to bring Roumania into the war, with the result that the halfhealed wound on the eastern front broke out afresh. The crisis of 1914 recurred in even more dangerous form. As the first crisis brought Ludendorff into fame at the victory of Tannenberg, this second crisis was the last step by which he rose to supreme power. In the autumn of 1916, Ludendorff became the real director of the whole of the German war policy.

II

At this time Ludendorff was so despondent concerning German military prospects that he was anxious to conclude peace on the first opportunity. He had hopes that the United States would intervene with an offer of mediation. When these wore disappointed, he consented to Germany’s making overtures for peace, stipulating only that they should not be made before the fall of Bucharest. His first business, then, was to defeat Roumania. The battle of the Somme was still in full progress, and it needed some hardihood to begin an ambitious now campaign against Roumania; but, while Russia was still undefeated, it was impossible to leave Germany exposed to the danger of a hostile combination between her and Roumania.

Once more Ludendorff showed military genius of a very high order. Von Falkenhayn’s plan had been that von Mackensen should cross the Danube and make for Bucharest. Ludendorff vetoed the plan and substituted for it the march into the Dobrudja which was strategically one of the cleverest movements of the war. It closed the most promising avenue of coöperation between Russia and Roumania; it pleased the Bulgarians; and it also vexed the Austrians, which Ludendorff was not at all unwilling to do. His plans worked out perfectly, and by December 6, Bucharest had fallen and the way was open for the peace offer on December 12.

Ludendorff had insisted that the offer should be made in terms that would not imply that Germany thought she was beaten; and that was why von Bethmann-Hollweg’s speech in which the peace offer was made sounded like the rattling of a sabre. But he is at pains to contradict the argument that an offer of peace made to such a rolling of the drums was doomed to failure at the outset. ‘The charge,’ he writes, ‘that the tone of our overtures had from the first excluded the possibility of reaching an agreement cannot be maintained. Our general position required a confident tone. I insisted on this from the military side. Our troops had accomplished much.’ How would it have affected them if he had spoken differently? The peace overtures were bound not to be such as would weaken the fighting spirit of the army.

‘If the Entente had really desired,’ he says, ‘a peace of justice and reconciliation, it was possible for them, and it was their duty, to come to the conference table; they could have stated their case there. If it had happened that the proceedings revealed the persistence of a German desire for annexations, the Entente could have inflamed their peoples by explaining to them the German attitude; and in such circumstances we should have been unable to induce the German nation, so anxious for peace, to renew the war. Still less was it to be expected that our warweary allies would have agreed to continue with us. These considerations are quite sufficient to prove that we were ready for a peace of justice and reconciliation when we made the overture.’

What Ludendorff would have regarded as a peace of justice and reconciliation is not explicitly stated; for the proposals made by Count Bernstorff — with Ludendorff’s consent — for intervention by President Wilson are rather his idea of the basis of discussion than a draft of the peace that he would have liked.

Probably the nearest approach to a statement of Ludendorff’s real peace objects was made in a memorandum on the military economics of Germany which was delivered in the autumn of 1917. What Ludendorff wanted was a row of buffers, on both east and west, to protect Germany’s economic vitals. He pointed out that her iron-fields and coal-fields were near her frontiers. Silesia was exposed to Russian attack; Lorraine’s iron and Saarbrücken’s coal to French attack; and industrial Westphalia to the attack (save the mark!) of Belgium. At all these points he wanted protective belts. Belgium in particular must on no account be allowed to become a hostile area of deployment. ‘Her neutrality I considered to be a mere phantom on which no practical man would rely. We must ensure that her economic interests should become identical with those of Germany with which she was already united by such strong commercial ties. . . . The Meuse at Liége could be given up, if at all, only after Belgium had completed her economic union with Germany and, in accordance with her real interests, taken her place on our side.’

He applied the same principles along the eastern front, and we may put it broadly that his idea of ‘peace without annexation’ was the creation of a continuous belt of territory on the east and west, nominally neutral, but really dependent on Germany. Whether, if peace negotiations had been entered into, this nominal neutrality of the buffer states could have been converted into a real neutrality is very doubtful; certainly it would never have been, if Ludendorff had had his way. He is furious with Bethmann-Hollweg for continuing to dally with the idea of negotiation after the decisive rejection of the German overtures at the beginning of 1917.

What the Chancellor’s hopes were does not transpire through the continued abuse that Ludendorff heaps upon him throughout his book. It does, however, appear that Austria was anxious for a peace on the basis of a surrender of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany. Count Czernin, at a conference in April, 1917, suggested that, if Germany would surrender those two provinces, Austria would unite Galicia to Poland and press for the union of Poland and Germany. This solution evidently attracted Bethmann-Hollweg, and Ludendorff had to fight hard against it. He was even driven at one time to argue that, if Germany offered to cede Alsace-Lorraine to France, the Entente would see in it a confession of Germany’s military downfall and would at once increase their demands. Moreover, Ludendorff disliked the Austrian proposals with regard to Poland. A new Poland with Austria behind her (even if this Poland were united with Germany) would, in his opinion, destroy German unity and endanger Germany’s eastern provinces. Ludendorff had his way, not so much by argument as because the breakdown of Russia increased the prestige of the military party and encouraged Germany to hope for military victory. Had Russia held out, it is more than possible that Bethmann-Hollweg and Czernin would have won, and that in the middle of 1917 a genuine peace offer would have been made by Germany. Either Alsace-Lorraine would have been offered to France on the basis of the cession of Poland to Germany, or some sort of autonomy would have been proposed for Alsace-Lorraine corresponding with the autonomy of Poland, and equally real — or unreal.

Ludendorff dates the decline of German morale from this time. On succeeding to power in 1916, he had launched a big programme of industrial conscription. He wanted the wages of the soldiers increased and the wages of the munition workers decreased. He also wanted industrial conscription extended to women, and held that there was enough female labor to replace a great deal of male labor and free it for service in the army. He did induce the government to bring in a law for conscripting auxiliary labor, but he complains that it was neither fish nor flesh. ‘The law was really a changeling, especially in the spirit in which it was administered, and had nothing in common with our desire to call the whole people to the service of the Fatherland and thus to supply reinforcements for the army and fresh labor to the army and the nation.’

He talks of England and France as the Morning Post in its most disgruntled war-mood used to do of Germany. ‘Look at those democratic countries, England and France,’ he says in effect. ‘No shirking there, no slackening of the national fibre! no weak-kneed politicians depressing the resolution of the country.’ He is particularly indignant over the success of the British propaganda, and wonders why BethmannHollweg should not have done equally well for Germany. To his mind, propaganda is a mere manipulation of phrases, and he forgets, Prussian-like, that its strength is derived from the inherent justice of the cause that it defends. He complains that there were no grapes on the Prussian thistles. All our faith in freedom and democracy, the principles that the great democracies have debated eternally and fought for, are to him nothing but the cut and color of a uniform.

No book, not even Bernhardi’s, shows up so clearly how miserably Prussian realism fails to fit the facts of human nature and human conduct. Austria, with all her selfishness and incompetence, was nearer to the realities of the situation in 1916 than this masculine apostle of Prussian militarism. Throughout the pages which deal with the events of 1916 and 1917, one gets the impression that the Austrian view was steadily gaining the upper hand, and that it was only the downfall of Russia which released this bitter, hard doctrine of efficiency, this cold, merciless logic of the Prussian Ludendorff, to blow like an east wind over the world again.

III

What were the military ideas of Ludendorff? How did he propose to redeem the early errors of the General Staff? And what were the calculations on which he relied for victory?

His first principle of strategy was: Do nothing in the west until you have first settled in the east. He never wavered from his conviction that the war could be won only in the west, for to have done so would have been to cast down his idol, von Schlieffen, and to admit that thie General Staff, in its preparations for war, had been supremely incompetent. But he did differ very profoundly from the policy of von Falkenhayn in 1916, who left the job half finished in Russia in order to begin his disastrous campaign against Verdun. He was fully determined that that mistake should not be repeated. Granted that the war could be won only in the west, it was still necessary that the offensive campaign there should be deferred until the east had been settled once and for all; and although he did not admit it, his policy was a reversal of the main idea which governed the policy of the General Staff in 1914. Then the principle was: hurry the settlement in France, Russia can wait. Now his central idea was: temporize in the west, hurry in the east. He never wavered in this conviction, but there were times when he doubted whether his resources were equal to holding out in France until he could settle accounts with Russia.

Luck favored him. At the beginning of 1917, no one could have foreseen the downfall of Russia; but when Kerensky was succeeded by the Bolshevists, and it became evident that Russia had ceased to exist as a military power, Ludendorff must have felt like a man who unexpectedly finds his prison door standing ajar. Yet it is significant of the strength of the man that he should have been in no haste to rush out. He despised the Bolshevists even more than he hated them. Others, less strong than he, would have compromised and yielded; but Ludendorff, desperate as the call was from the west for reinforcements, insisted on the full rigor of his contract in the east, and was prepared to take any risk rather than leave it again possible for Russia to take offensive action. Only a very strong man would have undertaken the campaign in Courland in the autumn of 1917, or assisted the Austrian offensive in Italy with German troops. There were many moments in 1917 when he must have had the gravest fears for the security of his lines in the west. If they should give, what, he asked himself more than once, will they say about my Russian policy and my campaign in Italy? About the Italian campaign, in particular, he had the gravest misgivings, partly because Austria wanted it, and Ludendorff was never able to see any virtue in Austria, and partly because, true to his principle of finishing off Russia once for all and of building up his barrier of buffer states on the east, he would have preferred a campaign in Moldavia. The Italian campaign he regarded as a luxury, hardly to be afforded at such a time.

But he lived through the period of waiting, and by the beginning of 1918 he had his reward. Russia was definitely out of the war, and Germany could give her whole attention for the first time to the western front. Even Austria’s weakness, he thought, need be no longer an embarrassment. Caporetto had put a little oxygen in her lungs which would serve to keep her alive until the issue in the west was definitely settled.

Luck favored him, too, in his Fabian policy in France. After the unfortunate offensive on the Aisne in 1917, France had definitely dropped out of the war for the purposes of general (as distinguished from local) offense; and just as, in the first two years of the war, France had borne the main burden, so now, for the last two years, it fell on England. It was again pure luck that he captured the French plans for this offensive. The victories which General Pétain placed to the credit of France in 1917 were merely local, and were not part of any comprehensive joint offensive. The fact is that, although it was one of the best kept secrets in the war, a continuance of an offensive like the Somme battle would probably, even if it had been physically possible, have produced something like a revolution in the French army. It was not until later that Ludendorff knew of the mutinies that followed Nivelle’s battle of the Aisne, or he would have felt far easier in his mind than he did. As it was, the whole burden of the offensive fell on the British army.

The two worst crises in these attacks were after the battle of Arras, April 9, 1917. ‘A breach 12,000 to 15,000 yards wide and as much as 6000 yards and more in depth is,’ Ludendorff observes, ‘not a thing to be mended without more ado. ... A day like April 9 upset all calculations.’

His other most anxious moment was after the battle of Cambrai. Ludendorff congratulates himself that Byng did not exploit this great initial success. If he had done so, ‘we should not have been able to limit the extent of the gap, and in that case, what would have been the judgment of the world on our Italian campaign?’

The awful battles in Flanders drive even Ludendorff to adjectives and metaphor. But though they inflicted on the troops on both sides more terrible trials than had ever been known in the history of war, it is evident that they did not cause Ludendorff so much anxiety for their result as Arras or Cambrai. This offensive in Flanders was ill-conceived and brought no reward at all proportionate to the expenditure of men and material.

All through 1917, Ludendorff’s object on the western front was to gain time, and, in spite of anxious moments, he had succeeded: at the end of the year he was ready to attack on the west, and everything seemed to be in his favor. He had settled Russia once and for all; the British army was exhausted by an offensive which had lasted almost without intermission for eighteen months; and the resolution of France, even though Clemenceau was now the Premier, was still uncertain.

Ludendorff was a great tactical innovator as well as strategist, and some of the changes he had made in his system of defense had worked remarkably well. The withdrawal from the Somme battlefield in the spring of 1917 was a master-stroke, and Ludendorff was justified in claiming it as a victory. His system of elastic defensive zones, which replaced the old rigid lines, had also worked admirably, and had it not been for the invention of the tanks, the defense would have more than kept pace with the increasing strength of the attack.

He had given long and anxious thought to the problems of attack, and by the middle of 1917 he had already begun to train his troops behind the line for the offensive for the coming spring.

Ludendorff tells us very little in his book of these new tactics. But there was no doubt that he had supreme confidence in their success; and if they failed, it was through their excessive elaboration, and through defects in material due to the blockade. The German system of light railways was perfect, but their road transport was immeasurably inferior to ours, and their troops suffered in consequence from lack of mobility.

But these were not the real causes of the failures of the German campaign in 1918, for which all of Ludendorff’s previous work must be regarded in the light of a preparation. The causes were moral. Ludendorff, who, like every great general, knew that an army is never beaten till it thinks it is beaten, lays the blame for the decline of German morale on the Chancellor’s vacillation and the infection of Bolshevism from Russia. But the master-cause was the unrestricted submarine campaign and the entry of America.

The contrast between the extraordinary liberality of Ludendorff’s mind to new ideas of every kind on the conduct of field operations, and his denseness and obstinacy on all questions of mixed strategy and politics, stands out boldly from every page of the book. The grossest of all the miscalculations of the German General Staff had been the concentration against France and the invasion of Belgium, which brought Britain into the war. One of these miscalculations, the neglect of Russia, Ludendorff had been at great pains to repair, and he had succeeded beyond his wildest hopes. But the other and worse miscalculation, which brought Britain into the war, he deliberately repeated, and for the same reason that the General Staff in 1914 took the risk of Britain’s coming in, namely, that they thought that she could not develop her military power in time to be of service.

Exactly the same mistake was made with regard to America. Ludendorff was misled by the estimates which were made by the German navy of the effect of the submarine campaign, but he never took them quite at their face value, and he was content in deciding his policy to make liberal deductions from it. Even so, for the sake of the chance of releasing the stranglehold of sea-power, he accepted a certain risk of America’s coming in. She might safely, he thought, be allowed to come in, for by the time that her intervention could be made effective, the war would be over. So completely had his military studies blinded Ludendorff to the working of politics and even to the facts of human nature.

The American army in France did not achieve the great strategic success that Foch at one time had in mind. It was his intention, not merely to defeat the German army, but to annihilate it;not to drive it back to the Rhine, but to prevent its ever leaving France. To this end the British army on the left and the American army in the Argonne were between them to execute a double encircling movement which would bring them together on the Franco-Belgian frontier and strangle the narrow artery through which the German armies were supplied by way of Belgium.

Ludendorff in his book calls August 8 the black day of the German army in the war. He had been disappointed by his failure to reach Amiens in his first great offensive. The second offensive toward Calais, which so alarmed England, revealed to the eye of Ludendorff a failure in the morale of some German divisions which made him apprehensive of what happened later. But what shocked him in the Allied victory of August 8 was the evidence that, in spite of our heavy losses, we were still able to take a successful offensive, and that in front of Amiens. That was the doing of the American troops. It was not that the Americans at this time had very great numbers in the front line, although they had some troops of fine quality who did invaluable service. Their most important contribution to the Allies was that they enabled us to throw all in. Foch could choose the exact moment for his counter-offensive because he knew that behind him he had the inexhaustible reserves of the American army. It was not the American troops actually in the field that won the war. It was the enemy’s fear of them and Foch’s absolute confidence in them. The mere shadow of the American giant falling across the battlefield shattered the morale of the enemy and brought him to the state of believing himself beaten, which is the only real defeat in war. Ludendorff had always hoped that, even if his offensive failed, he would be given a respite in which to fall back and rally on some strong defensive lines. That hope was lost on August 8.

In the next seven weeks the German army suffered a series of defeats almost unexampled in history, and it is not to Ludendorff’s credit that his narrative should at this point become sketchy and evasive. On September 18 began the drive for the Hindenburg line, which ended on September 29 with the British in possession of the whole of this thirtymile front, as well as of 50,000 prisoners and 600 guns. It was now that Ludendorff gave up hope, and the telephones between General Headquarters and Berlin buzzed with messages insisting on the necessity of immediate peace.

The Bulgarian collapse began on September 15. ‘ We could not answer every single call for help; we had to insist that Bulgaria must do something for herself, or, otherwise, we too were lost. It made no difference whether our defeat came in Macedonia or in the west. We were not strong enough to hold our line in the west and to establish in the Balkans the German front to replace the Bulgarians, as we should have had to do if we were to hold that front in the long run.’

Thus the breakdown in the east contributed to the overthrow of Germany, as well as the victories in the west. On August 8, Ludendorff could still console himself with the thought that, at any rate, the eastern front held, and that, if he had to retreat in France, it would be with his face to the enemy and without the embarrassment of having to turn east or south to fight Russia or bolster up Austria. Now, that consolation was gone, too. And just at this time the American offensive in the Argonne was beginning, and it was doubtful even whether he could retreat, or whether the German army in France might not undergo a superSedan. Ludendorff lost his nerve, and no wonder!

Later he changed his mind, and having, in the last days of September, insisted upon peace on any terms, he now urged that resistance should be offered in the last ditch. He explains this change of mind in his book by saying that the terms of the armistice were much more severe than he had expected. But that is not consistent with the view which he had stoutly maintained since the beginning of 1917, that nothing would satisfy the Entente but the complete humiliation of Germany. The real reason was that, whereas, at the end of September he feared that the German army could not get back at all, in the middle of October he saw that it could get back, broken, but still an army, and he was prepared to renew the gamble. It was too late. On October 24, Ludendorff issued an army order appealing to his troops to resist the demand to unconditional surrender, and attacking President Wilson. On the following day a storm of indignation burst out in the Reichstag over this act of insubordination at Headquarters; and on the evening of that day there was a discussion with the Minister of the Interior in which Ludendorff took part. His friends von Winterfeldt and von Haeften waited below. At the end of an hour and a half Ludendorff came out. ‘My inward anguish would only let me say, “No hope! Germany is lost!” They, too, shook with emotion.’

Ludendorff saw the Kaiser on the following day, for the last time. The Kaiser censured the army order of October 24; Ludendorff begged most humbly to be relieved of his office, and the Kaiser accepted his resignation. He went back to Headquarters and told his officers there that in a fortnight there would be no Emperor in Germany. On November 9, Germany and Prussia were republics.