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PUBLIC OPINION (New York) combined with THE LITERARY DIGEST Published by Funk & Wagnalls Company (Adam W. Wagnalls, Pres.; Wilfred J. Funk, Vice-Pres.; Robert J. Cuddihy, Treas.; William Neisel, Sec'y), 354-360 Fourth Ave., New York Whole Number 1488

Vol. LIX, No. 4

New York, October 26, 1918

T

TOPICS-OF-THE-DAY

CAUSES OF THE GREAT GERMAN DEFEAT

HAT "ONLY MILITARY REASONS" could have continues. His natural ambition, we are told, is to make the compelled the groveling Teuton pleas "for peace was

clear enough even if a leading German newspaper had not made the open confession. "Only military reasons," in the shape of Allied victories "from Dixmude to Damascus," accounted for the reported revival of gaiety in Paris while neutral observers told how in Berlin "everybody wants to group together just as before great disasters." Only military reasons, editors assure us, can account for the revolutionary outbreaks in the Central Empires and the Teutonic governments' panicky moves toward self-democratization. These October days have been fruitful enough in significant military events. Early in the month the Hindenburg line, "the impregnable Zion of Prussian Militarism," as one editor calls it, with its trench system, and redoubts, and gun-emplacements, and dugouts, and luxurious officers' quarters, "became a reminiscence," to use another newspaper phrase. So quickly and completely was it smashed by Haig, and so quickly did the foe withdraw from his long-held positions, that a Cambrai dispatch significantly reported: "The infantry is marching in columns of four through villages hastily abandoned by the enemy." On the 11th newspaper readers could scarcely believe the statements to the effect that Belgian authorities were directing Belgian residents in England to be ready to return to their homeland: within two weeks the German armies were leaving West Flanders. In the first weeks of October, the Brooklyn Eagle notes, "the battle to decide whether or not the enemy would stay in France and Belgium this winter" was fought and won. Not only have the Allied forces broken through the Hindenburg line, taken the Chemin des Dames and Laon, and forced the Germans from the Flanders fields, but all along they have been, as the same paper puts it, "giving the Hun his daily defeat." As the Germans give up western Belgium and northern France, Foch is making their retreat costly in man-power and war-materials, and "in plain words," says the Newark News, "such reductions mean the destruction of the German armies." It is largely a question of weather, writes Mr. C. H. Grasty from Paris to the New York Times: "with enough good fighting days before the mud slows everything down, the wounds that the German beast will lick in his winter quarters will be wounds he won't recover from." With the German host outflanked in Belgium and the Champagne, the battle-line, as one press-writer remarks, assumes "the shape of a vast trap thrusting its jaws out to engulf the German armies." No wonder, observes Mr. McPherson in the New York Tribune, that Ludendorff "sent Prince Maximilian into the market to buy a truce for him on the best terms possible," as he saw the German defense everywhere "getting more brittle," German units getting "hopelessly intermixed," the big German fighting machine "beginning to function awkwardly and painfully," and "no line of safety in sight, even on the French and Belgian border." Foch has been concurrently taking territory and destroying the German military establishment, this authority

retreat of the German armies-still a long way from home soil"if not as costly as Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, at least as costly as his retreat from Leipzig. Germany's power to continue the war ought to be definitely snuffed out before Ludendorff extricates himself from northern France and Belgium and establishes what are left of his two hundred odd divisions of March last on a line covering the west bank of the Rhine."

In one of the darkest moments for the Allied cause last spring, General Foch confidently told Mr. Lloyd George that even then he preferred his own position on the map to Hindenburg's. Our editors remember this now as they ascribe "the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and of the Allies in the field" to Foch's military genius and foresight and Hindenburg's or Ludendorff's lack of those qualities. Americans like to compare Foch to Grant. The Boston Transcript recalls Grant's "hammering blows," and quotes these words from the Union commander's final report as a perfectly good definition of the Foch strategy:

"I, therefore, determined, first, to use the greatest number of troops practicable against the armed forces of the enemy, preventing him from using the same force at different seasons against first one and then another of our armies and the possibility of repose for refitting and producing necessary supplies for carrying on resistance. Secondly, to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until, by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left for him but an equal submission with the loyal section of our common country to the constitution and laws of the land."

We are reminded by the Detroit Free Press that Foch saw the fatal weakness in the German plan of offensive to be the need of long pauses for rest and preparation between the gigantic blows. In these pauses the Allies were able to rally and reform, and so eventually to work the Germans' undoing. Foch devised a strategy of delivering blows on a smaller scale, whereby he has been enabled "to work concentrations and preparations with sufficient forces for fresh blows to fall constantly in new sectors immediately upon the cessation of fighting on other fronts." By this method, continues the Detroit Free Press, "he has been able to shift his blows from the Vesle to the Ancre, from the Ancre to the Somme, from the Somme to the Oise, from the Oise to the Lys, from the Lys to the Somme again, from the Somme to the Scarpe, and now from the Scarpe to the Aisne." Instead of "three periods" of intensive fighting of approximately a week each, such as Hindenburg staged, what we have had is three solid months of continuous battling with never a rest for the enemy. Now the smash-through between Cambrai and St. Quentin wins the applause of the onlooker, now the attack on the right wing in Champagne and the Argonne seems all important, again the mighty blows which drive the Germans from the coast cities of Flanders seem to be decisive. But in the end, observes the New York Evening Post, "it will be hard to say which has been the decisive stroke in the storm of blows which