The French were taking over Gough’s right, but showed no signs of counter-attacking; in fact their infantry was mostly coming up in trucks ahead of the artillery and with little ammunition but what was carried on the men. A gap between the allies was appearing. The R.F.C. was displaying magnificent courage and self-sacrifice. It had been told to take ‘all risks’, to fly ‘very low’, and to ‘bomb and shoot everything they can see on the enemy’s side of the line’. It did all these things.

Pétain, though he had moved or was moving eleven divisions to the aid of the British, was doubtful whether this was the main German attack. He was right to think of his own front, but it was extremely unlikely that the Germans could mount two vast offensives at once. Worse still, it was clear to Haig that Pétain’s intention was to fall back covering Paris rather than to maintain contact at all costs with the British armies. Pétain thought that it was Haig’s intention to fall back covering the Channel ports. Ludendorff had prophesied that the French would not be in a great hurry to aid their allies and it looked as though he were going to prove right. It was urgently necessary that the defence should be co-ordinated. But how? The Supreme War Council had failed completely because neither Haig nor Pétain would hand over to it the reserves which it demanded. The situation was desperate. In an attempt to better it the British Government sent out, on Haig’s demand, the recently appointed Secretary of State for War, Lord Milner, and the C.I.G.S., Sir Henry Wilson, who had superseded Robertson in February.

The visit led on 26 March to the Doullens Conference, a milestone of the war. The President of the French Republic, Raymond Poincaré, took the chair. The others present were Clemenceau (Prime Minister since the previous November), Loucheur (Minister of Munitions), Foch, and Pétain; Milner, Haig, Wilson, Sir Herbert Lawrence (Haig’s C.G.S.), and Montgomery (from the Supreme War Council). Haig had been on friendly terms with Pétain. He found most French generals too voluble, whereas this northerner was taciturn like himself and stuck to essentials. He had not been equally well disposed to Foch. Now they were reversed in his estimation. He wrote in his diary: ‘Foch seemed sound and sensible, but Pétain had a terrible look. He had the appearance of a commander who was in a funk.’¹

Pétain remarked to Clemenceau that the Germans would beat the British ‘in the open field’.² He spoke of the defence of the railway junction of Amiens. Foch struck in: ‘We must fight in front of Amiens. We must stop where we are now.’ Haig said: ‘If General Foch will give me his advice I will gladly follow it.’ Finally a formula was found and signed.

‘General Foch is charged by the British and French Governments with the co-ordination of the action of the Allied Armies on the Western Front. He will make arrangements to this effect with the two Generals-in-Chief, who are invited to furnish him with the necessary information.’

It may be added that his powers were increased on 3 April when another conference, at Beauvais, decided ‘to entrust to General Foch the strategic direction of military operations’. In this case Pershing and General Tasker H. Bliss, American representative on the Supreme War Council, added their signatures to the document. On 14 April Foch was accorded the title of ‘Général-en-Chef des Armées Alliées en France’.

So the unified command in French hands, which Haig had resisted in the case of Nivelle and which had lapsed after the spring offensive of 1917, was established on Haig’s initiative. It was a different sort of command. In February 1917 Haig had been placed under the orders of the French Commander-in-Chief. Now he was under a ‘supreme allied commander’ who bore responsibility to Britain as well as France. Foch regarded his appointment in this light.

Having issued orders to Pétain on the movement of reserves he set out on a series of visits to the headquarters concerned. Pétain cancelled the order of 24 March based on the defence of Paris and directed more divisions to Haig’s support.

‘Act 1, Scene 2’ of the German offensive was named ‘Mars’, an extension to Vimy Ridge, north of the Scarpe. It was astoundingly ambitious. Final objective Boulogne, seventy-two miles by road from Arras!¹ If this had gone as well as the attack of 21 March the war might have been nearly as good as won. Unluckily for the gambler Ludendorff, his nine divisions assaulting astride the Scarpe on 28 March struck four British as good as Britain could then show and of all the types in her Army: regular, New Army and Territorial.² The two south of the river had withdrawn to their battle zone, in general on orders, because the southernmost stood at the hinge of the original German attack and its right had been completely turned. The defences north of the Scarpe were intact. All were well dug and wired. The Germans attacked with sparkling vigour and skill. They were fought to a finish and beaten by a defence at once elastic and resolute. Ludendorff stopped the attack that very night. ‘As the sun set behind rain clouds, there also vanished the hopes which O.H.L. had placed on the attack.’³

The British achievement should be inscribed in gold letters on Britain’s roll of honour. The defence of 28 March not only killed Ludendorff’s plan to expand the battle but virtually ended the battle itself.

On the rest of the front, on which the southern face of the great bulge created by the offensive had been taken over by the French, things were beginning to go better. The most dangerous feature was the thrust towards Amiens, which caused acute anxiety before it was held. The offensive was closed down on 5 April. The Germans were tired out and had outrun their artillery and to a great extent their transport. Their losses were enormous, and the British and French reinforcements were taking an ever increasing toll.

For Germany it had been a magnificent tactical victory, but not a strategic success to anything like the same extent. Ludendorff was one of the greatest tacticians of the war but little of a strategist. His view was that if one punched a big enough hole the rest would follow. This is often true, but he failed to make the most of the breach he had opened. He should have kept the thrust-point north of the Saint Quentin-Amiens road, but he was seduced into exploiting the easy initial success farther south. Still, he had done what nearly everyone had come to believe was impossible and had taken 90,000 prisoners. He had inflicted a loss of 240,000 (British 163,000, French 77,000) on his foes. But his own casualties were at least as great as, if not greater than, the sum of these totals. He had put a strain upon the German infantry, badly fed by comparison with that of the Entente, owing to the pressure of the blockade, which was to exercise a grave effect within the next few months. For the moment the British were in the worse case. Haig began the month of April with only a single division in reserve out of sixty (including two Portuguese). Sixteen had been or were being made up with drafts largely consisting of lads between 18 and 19 years of age. For three others reduced to stumps drafts were not available. Foch had proved a splendid influence, but, on principle stingy with reserves, would not order French troops to take over the front farther north than the Amiens–Roye road. The French would not counter-attack until their heavy artillery came up. They had not done so when the next German blow fell.

The British Government, professedly on the advice of the C.I.G.S., General Sir Henry Wilson, ordered Haig to supersede Gough by Rawlinson and disregarded the Commander-in-Chief’s protest. Gough had done all that man could. He was denied an investigation; ‘democracy demands its victims’.¹ Rawlinson, then British military representative on the Supreme War Council, naturally changed the number of the Fifth Army to Fourth, because this had been his old command until its headquarters had been disbanded. Thus the ignorant believed that the Fifth Army had fled and disappeared.

By 9 April the German ‘battering train’, including 137 heavy batteries, had been moved north to Flanders. The wastage and fatigue due to ‘Michael’ were, however, so great that the programme for ‘George’ had to be cut; the reduction was marked by the change of the code name to ‘Georgette’. The frontage of the offensive was now to be only twelve miles, from Armentières to the La Bassée Canal, but if all went well it was to be extended next day to just south of Ypres. The objective, or rather the general direction, was the rail centre of Haze-brouck, but the Germans were prepared to exploit to the coast, which would mean the destruction of the greater part of the British Army.

They had a marvellous slice of luck. Home, pinched for troops, reluctantly postponed the relief of the tired and depressed Portuguese division in the centre of the zone to be assaulted. It was to have come out on the night of the 9th. Instead it came out that morning, but without being relieved. The attack was on the pattern of that of 21 March, preceded by a tremendous bombardment. On the right the German waves were shot to pieces by the troops of a rested, well-trained British division, but next door they drove the Portuguese in flight from the battlefield. Further north they rolled back another British division, exhausted and shaken in March. The Scottish Highland division, hurried forward to take the place of the Portuguese, had been refitting and absorbing drafts, a process only half complete. The 7th Gordon Highlanders had been to all intents and purposes destroyed. It had suffered a loss of 714 and had hardly a trained noncommissioned officer left. Its ranks were full of ‘boys’. When it moved the stores issued to it included only nine shovels.¹ Yet this division began by sharply checking the enemy’s advance.

The Germans were disappointed by a maximum progress of little more than three and a half miles, but their success amply sufficed to induce them to stick to their plan of extending the battle north of Armentières against the right of the British Second Army on 10 April. Again there was a March-pattern bombardment; again the British were hustled back. The situation was ugly, since Haig had virtually no further reserves. That evening Foch visited him and told him he was assembling a French relief force behind Amiens. Next day German progress was serious only in front of Hazebrouck and to Ludendorff ‘not satisfactory’. Haig was, however, gravely concerned because he had so little room in front of this vital objective. He was a man not given to fighting with words. Now he resorted to them. His famous order of the day ended: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.’

Attacks by the Royal Air Force² hampered German movements on the 12th, and on that and the two following days the advance generally lagged, but on the 16th it secured Messines Ridge. Meanwhile Plumer had been put in command of the whole defence and in front of Ypres had withdrawn from dearly bought ground to the Steenbeck. On the 17th the Germans were held with bloody loss and their attack on the Belgians north of Ypres was utterly defeated. Foch had been moving French forces north but, true to principle, holding them back. By the 21st, however, he put into line the four divisions of the newly-formed Détachement d’Armée du Nord (D.A.N.) to defend the Flanders heights and especially the commanding Mont Kemmel. Haig was still dissatisfied. From this period dates a chill in the relations of the two men, more on the Scotsman’s side than the Frenchman’s. It is probable that Foch sensed in the British, reduced to rags though most of their divisions now were and in some cases really unstable, a greater stubbornness than in the fresh French divisions. At all events he was completely honest. He had no thought of sacrificing British blood to save French. Soon he was to be reproached by Pétain for endangering the French front to save the British.

On 24 April the German command varied the programme by reviving the offensive on the Somme battlefield and striking again at Amiens. Villers-Bretonneux was captured from the British and Moreuil from the French. Villers-Bretonneux—notable for the only considerable tank combat of the war, thirteen German tanks and thirteen British, seven of the latter light, being engaged—was recovered by Australian and British brigades. And though the Germans clung to some of the ground won here as well as to Moreuil the affair was on balance a bad failure.

In the north the Bavarian Crown Prince and the commanders of his Fourth and Sixth Armies, Generals Sixt von Armin and von Quast, were disappointed. The Belgians, who had not been engaged in a major battle since 1914, had ‘shattered’ the attack launched against them. The anxiety of the German leaders was, however, not to be compared with that of Haig. His divisions were often ghosts. Time after time a hostile attack was followed by a flow rearward of his weary young soldiers. There was no panic and the defence never broke down altogether. When resistance failed at one spot it warmed at another. This would have been consoling had there been more room, but as it was every mile increased out of all normal proportion the prospect of utter disaster. And if the Flanders heights went . . . .

Kemmel went on 25 April, and the manner of its loss was disturbing. It had been successfully defended by worn-out British divisions; it was lost by relatively fresh French divisions. True, this was a tremendous blow with a colossal bombardment—per battery the most costly day for the British artillery of the entire war¹—and an assault by seven fresh German divisions. Even so, there was no getting away from it, the defence was feeble. And next day, when a counter-attack was arranged by the allies, the British divisions advanced alone and the French did not move. This was ominous, even though that afternoon the French began to resist in earnest and the Germans made little more progress.

On 27 and 28 April there was a pause. Foch felt, however, that the Germans had not yet made their final effort. It was vital to prevent them from seizing the rest of the Flanders heights. He shifted reserves farther north. He had not long to wait. In the small hours of the 29th another great bombardment began, gas changing to high explosive after two hours. The German Fourth Army attacked at 5.40 a.m., again with seven divisions. This time it met with a very different reception and a close and fierce fire fight developed. The French artillery and machine-guns, now well organized, staggered the attackers by the weight of their fire. The Germans gained two slight successes only. South of Ypres they drove in the British outpost line. At one point they gained ground from the French, penetrating to the Scherpenberg, the next hill behind Kemmel in the chain of the Flanders heights. Here was a danger-spot and the situation was not made prettier by wild rumours that the dent was deeper than was really the case. Everywhere else the assault was smashed with heavy loss.

It was the end. The Channel ports were saved. Haig might feel dissatisfied with Foch, but the Germans by no means made light of the aid which seven French divisions had afforded the British in Flanders. German opinion has since classed the Battle of the Lys as a Misserfolg (failure). Strategically, it was a worse failure than the March offensive. At times the Germans fought brilliantly, but on the whole not quite so well as in March. The majority of the divisions from Russia had never faced the British, and found them unexpectedly tough. Yet the majority of the British troops were only shadows of the old army: half-trained, immature, weakly led at the lowest level, and often hardly knowing their lieutenant-colonels by sight. But for that factor and the failure to relieve the Portuguese in time there would not have been cause for grave anxiety. Even as things were, it must be said that these lads, many of them none too well fed before enlistment, gave a good account of themselves. As in most of the great battles in the west, the losses of the opposing forces, German on one side, British, French, and Belgians, on the other, appear to have been extraordinarily similar, in the two offensives combined about three hundred and fifty thousand on both sides.

The staff work was remarkable. Though the Germans had made many preparations for the Lys offensive, they had to hurry the last stages and they did the job well. It is still more notable, however, that the French D.A.N., none of whose weapons or ammunition were interchangeable with the British, was brought into a British zone, over railways dislocated by the previous German offensive, and so supplied that it could expend artillery and small-arms ammunition on the vast scale which defeated the attack of 29 April.