exact indemnities other than payment for injuries done by Germany in defiance of international law. President Wilson's address contained his famous Fourteen Points, of which fuller mention will be made later. These statements of America and England began effectively to drive a wedge between the German government and the German people, by convincing the masses that the Allies were warring only for freedom and for peace, and not for the destruction of Germany.

And now Germany herself made plain how absolutely right the Allies were in their contention that the Hohenzollerns could be trusted to keep no promises. March 3, 1918, the German militarists, with the grossest of bad faith, shamelessly broke their many pledges to the helpless Bolsheviki and forced upon Russia the "Peace of Brest-Litovsk." By that dictated treaty, Germany virtually became overlord to a broad belt of vassal states taken from Russia-Finland, the Baltic Provinces, Lithuania, Poland, Ukrainia—and even the remaining "Great Russia" had to agree to German control of her industrial reorganization. When the German perfidy had revealed itself suddenly, after long and deceitful negotiations, the angered and betrayed Bolsheviki wished to break off, and renew the war. They were absolutely helpless, however, without prompt Allied aid upon a large scale. This aid they asked for, but urgent cablegrams brought no answer. The Allies apparently had been so repelled by the Bolshevist industrial and political policy that they were unwilling to deal with that government, and preferred to leave Russia to its fate and to the Germans.

At that moment the result was disastrous. Murmurs in Germany against the war were stilled by the immediate prospect of an empire stretching from the North Sea to the Pacific, and of large accumulated stores of Russian wheat as soon as transportation systems could be restored to efficiency.

In all the Allied countries tremendous popular feeling was aroused against the Bolsheviki government. In part this was because the people-ignorant of the facts just men

The Brest

Litovsk

Treaty

The great German offensive in Picardy

in March

tioned - believed that government a mere tool of Germany. In part it was due to hatred and fear among propertied classes toward any Socialist régime. But more than all else, it was due to a false position adopted by the Bolsheviki in government. They excluded all people living on their capital from political life.

This of course was not a democracy: it was a class rule. True, in Russia it was the rule of more than ninety per cent of the whole population; but the example of a "proletarian dictatorship" was dreaded by the "upper” and "middle" classes everywhere. Moreover, the Bolsheviki announced a repudiation of the Russian national debt.1 The Russian bonds were owned mainly in France; and that country persuaded the Allies to treat the Russian government as an enemy. Soon, too, various reactionary and middle-class movements against the Bolsheviki tyranny found leaders for a vigorous civil war.

Naturally the Germans opened the campaign in the West at the earliest moment possible. They had now a vast superiority both in men and in heavy guns there. March 21 they attacked the British lines in Picardy with overwhelming forces. After five days of terrific fighting the British were hurled out of their trench lines and driven back with frightful losses nearly to Amiens, leaving a broad and dangerous gap between them and the French. It looked as though the Germans might drive the British into the sea, or the French back upon Paris, or both. But, as so often in their great offensives in this war, the Germans had exhausted themselves in their mass attack; and while they paused a French force threw itself into the gap, and British reserves reinforced the shattered front lines. For the first time since the First Battle of the Marne, the Germans had forced the fighting into the open, where they had always claimed

1 The Bolsheviki afterward offered to give up this policy if accorded recognition. Read William Hard's articles on "Bolshevist Russia" in the Metropolitan (June-October, 1919) — based on the account by Raymond Robins.

marked superiority; but they were unable to follow up their success decisively.

sive in

In April they struck again farther north, in Flanders, and The offenagain they seemed almost to have overwhelmed the British; Flanders but fighting desperately, " with our backs to the wall" as Haig in April phrased it in his solemn order to his dying army, and reinforced by some French divisions, the British kept their front unbroken, bent and thinned though it was.

sive on the Aisne in the

The Germans took another month for preparation, and then The offenstruck fiercely in a general attack on the French lines north of the Aisne. Apparently the French were taken by surprise. last of May The Germans broke through, for the moment, on an eighteenmile front, and once more reached the Marne. Here, however, they were halted, largely by American troops, at ChâteauThierry. Then, while the Americans made splendid counterattacks, as at Belleau Wood (renamed, for them, "Wood of Checked by the Marines"), the French lines were reformed, so that still the Allies presented a continuous front, irregular though it Thierry was with dangerous salients and wedges. At almost the same time, Austria, forced into action again in Italy by German insistence, was repulsed in a general attack on the Piave.

Americans at Château

for the

Time was fighting for the Allies. The disasters of the early Time given spring, the suggestion of the American commander, General Americans Pershing, and the imperative demand of Clemenceau, at last in- to arrive duced them to take the wise step of appointing a generalissimo. This position was given to Ferdinand Foch, mentioned above in the story of the First Marne. For the rest of the struggle, the Allied forces were directed with a unity and skill that had been impossible under divided commands, even with the heartiest desire to coöperate.

And now, too, America really had an army in France. Before the end of June, her effective soldiers there numbered 1,250,000. Each month afterward brought at least 300,000 more. By September the number exceeded two million.

The Germans could not again take up the offensive for five weeks (June 11-July 15), and in this interval the balance of

The last German offensive

available man-power seems to have turned against them. Hindenburg and Ludendorf (chief of staff, supreme for long past in German military councils) believed only in mass attacks over wide fronts. When one of these gigantic onsets had once

THE GERMAN LINES ON JULY 15 AND ON NOVEMBER 10.

been stopped, with its tremendous losses and demoralization, a considerable interval had to elapse before another could begin. July 15, preparations were complete, and the Germans attacked again in great force along the Marne, expecting this time to reach positions that would command Paris. But the onset

broke against a stone-wall resistance of French and American troops. For the first time in the war, a carefully prepared offen

sive failed to gain ground.

fensive

The German failure was plain by the 17th. On the 18th, Foch's conbefore the Germans could withdraw or reorganize, Foch began tinuous ofhis great offensive, by counter-attacking upon the exposed western flank of the invaders. This move took the Germans completely by surprise. Their front all but collapsed along a critical line of twenty-eight miles. Foch allowed them no hour of rest. Unlike his opponents, he did not attempt gigantic attacks, to break through at some one point. Instead, he kept up a continuous offensive, threatening every part of the enemy's front, but striking now here, now there, on one exposed flank and then on another, always ready at a moment to take advantage of a new opening, and giving the Germans no chance to withdraw their forces without imperiling key positions. That is, he kept the ball in his own hands; and though his forces perhaps were still inferior in numbers to the Germans, he took no intervals for rest which would have allowed the enemy to attempt a new offensive.

By the end of July the invaders had been pushed out of the The German ground they had gained in May and June, between the Aisne retreat and the Marne. Then the British, reorganized now, were brought again into action in Picardy, taking the burden of the offensive, while the French kept up activity enough to prevent any transfer of reinforcements to that district from the sector opposite them. For some weeks, the Americans, steadily growing in numbers and equipment, were held in reserve for the most part after their gallant fighting in stopping the last German offensive - but before the end of August the British and French had won back all the ground lost in the German offensives of

the spring.

Sedan

The Germans had made their last throw and lost. Foch's The Ameripressure never relaxed. In September American divisions cans at began an offensive on a third part of the front, culminating in a drive toward Sedan, to cut one of the two main railways that