the coöperation of historians and economists, who had been in the service of the Committee on Public Information and the State Department since early in the war. Before they had outlined their tasks it was announced that Colonel House would shortly proceed to Europe at the head of the American delegation to the Inter-Allied Conference. The Inter-Allied Conference opened in Paris November 29, 1917, with the United States represented by a delegation that included the Chief of Staff of the army, Inter-Allied Bliss; the Chief of the Naval Operations, Ben- Conference son; an assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Crosby; a member of the Shipping Board, Colby; the chairman of the War Trade Board, McCormick; a delegate of the Food Administration, Taylor; a representative of the Priorities Commission, Perkins; with their several staffs. Before opening the formal sessions in Paris, Colonel House and his associates spent several days in London in conference with the British Government. Here on November 18 Colonel House made public his instructions from the President to support the doctrine of unity of control at the forthcoming Paris Conference. cil The American experience in financing the Allied cause and starting a train of events that moved toward unity of policy was reënforced by the Austro-German Supreme drive that plunged down the Alps into the plains War Counof Lombardy on October 24, 1917. Sweeping away in a few hours all of the gains that Italy had laboriously put together in two years of war, the Central Powers threatened not only to capture Venice, but to overrun Italy as they had overrun Serbia and Roumania. The Ital-, ian Government called for aid from her allies, and Lloyd George and Painlevé hastened from London and Paris for an immediate conference with Orlando. The three premiers met on November 6 in conference at Rapallo where they agreed that a Supreme War Council should be erected to sit continuously and advise the Allied Powers on their military policy. The German drive was checked in course of time, but the movement that it started joined forces with the movement originating in the United States. In a speech at Paris, as he returned from Rapallo, Lloyd George talked with brutal frankness upon the failure of the Allies to coördinate their military policy and explained the Supreme War Council which was to consist of the Prime Minister and one of his associates from each of the Great Powers, and to meet monthly at Versailles in conjunction with the permanent military staff that was to be maintained there. The Bolshevist victory in Russia in November made the need for Allied coöperation more imperative by the time the Allied Powers met for their Paris conference. Upon motion of the American delegation, the conference divided into separate committees upon finance, munitions, ocean tonnage, and food, and spent its time not upon oratory, but upon a comparison of the several national programs. The American experts gathered the information needed to guide the United States in its military contribution of 1918. On December I the Premiers assembled at Versailles for the formal opening of the Supreme War Council, and a few days later the American delegation started home. Transport, The Inter-Ally Council on War Purchases and Finance began its work at London in the middle of December under the presidency of Oscar T. Crosby. Its experiences in coördinating the demands of the several Allies stimulated an inter-Allied coöperation in other fields similar to the unification of resources that the war was forcing upon every country. The Allied Naval Council, agreed upon at Paris, went into continuous session to direct the blockade of the Central Powers. In March, 1918, the Allied Maritime Transport Council began business in London with sub-sections representing the merchant marine of England, Italy, France, and the United States, and worked for a better utilization of ocean tonnage. In July the Munitions Council was convened in Paris with Edward A. Stettinius present as the American representative, and the various food controllers came together in London to complete the pooling of food resources for the use of the Allies. The unity of conduct which the Allies had not evolved before the end of 1917 was the object of continuous pressure from the United States, and became a reality as the great councils built up their organization in 1918. The Supreme War Council, meanwhile, was developing in the same direction under the influence of the logic of events. At the end of January the Premiers were again at Versailles for a renewal of their discussions. France and Italy were now asking that the Council be expanded into a new Inter-Allied General Staff with one general in command of all the armies. In England there was violent attack upon Lloyd George because of his Paris speech and the reluctance of the British army officials to subordinate their independence of command to any foreign commander. The fear of such interference brought about the resignation of the British Chief of Staff, Sir William Robertson, but did not prevent the steady evolution of the Supreme War Council toward a real command. The Council at this meeting discussed whether the American troops should be used as a unit or merged with French and British organizations. However they were to be used, General Haig believed they could not be available as a force in 1918. The Supreme War Council met again in March when the determination of Germany for a peace by conquest had been fully revealed. While the discussion of the Drive of "fourteen points" had sounded as though peace 1918 might be near, preparations were being completed for a new drive along the Somme in the hope of breaking through the line near the junction point of the British and the French. The new drive, put in motion on March 21, 1918, completed the process begun in November at Rapallo. On the 26th, at the village of Doullens, a little north of Amiens on the endangered front, the military and political leaders signed a momentous document "to coördinate the action of the Allied armies on the western front," and placed the French general Ferdinand Foch in a supreme position of supreme command. A few hours later General Pershing, with four divisions ready for the field, Foch and command offered them all to the new commander to be used as needed. "If we must have one commander," said the London Nation, "and we still doubt the necessity or suitability from a political point of view, we could have no one better than Foch." BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE A. D. Howden Smith, The Real Colonel House (1918), is a journalistic work. The utterances of President Wilson upon the basis of peace are in newspapers, as well as in the Congressional Record into which they were invariably introduced by some Congressman within a day or two. There has not been any adequate historical treatment of the Supreme War Council or the inter-Allied conferences, although there is much scattered material upon them. The dissemination of the American point of view was entrusted in part to the Division of Military Intelligence of the Army, and in part to the Committee on Public Information, and is discussed in Heber Blankenhorn, Adventures in Propaganda (1919), and Vira B. Whitehouse, A Year as a Government Agent (1920). CHAPTER LIII WORK OR FIGHT THE German Friedensturm was designed by Ludendorff to be a final stroke to break the power of the Allies before the promised American aid should come. The mag- Battle of nitude of American preparations indicated that 1918 it might soon be too late to break the Allies, and the submarines, on which reliance had been placed in 1917, had failed to starve England or to crush her spirit. On March 21 the German divisions advanced in the first phase of the greatest battle in history, whose active front extended from Verdun to the North Sea, and which lasted in its succeeding phases until November 11. The immediate front on which the activities commenced was some fifty miles wide across its line of advance from the vicinity of Cambrai toward Amiens and the estuary of the Somme. The apparent purpose was to split the English and French armies, crumple the former on its narrow footing along the Channel, and then sweep to the left for an attack on Paris. The blow struck the British front at its right end, and on the days following March 21 the German machine pushed back all resistance at a rate of from five to seven miles a day until at the end of the first week there was a gap at the point of junction, and the British Fifth Army on the extreme right was stretched to the breaking point if not beyond. "Where the wave struck it was bound to wash something away," wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. That the wave was checked on its seventh day, and that Amiens did not fall, were due to that law of diminishing returns that affects all drives after their earliest stages and to the gallantry of a scratch division composed in part of American engineer troops and other miscellaneous units not directly prepared for fighting, that was organized in the very face of the advance and that not only resisted it, but drove it back. The |