vantages, which would have made the Germans absolutely secure, as they felt they were, had they possest anything like the artillery of the British, they were now forced to give way until almost the entire ridge passed from their hands. Nothing proved more forcibly the superiority of the British in both quality and quantity of men and guns.

The time chosen for the attack was unusual. The Germans, appreciating the great importance of the positions which they had already lost, began the inevitable counterthrusts, heavier and more determined, and delivered by stronger forces than any counter-movements that had taken place on the Western Front that year. But they were unable to make any impression on the British line and were thrown back with heavy losses. Haig struck out again within less than a week after his first attack. For an average depth of nearly a mile the British went forward, reaching the outskirts of Gheluvelt and passing well to the east of Zonnebeke on the western slopes of the ridge. The Germans had to hold this ridge to save themselves. Their entire line both north and south was threatened by failure; failure, in fact, was staring them in the face. The drive of the British was bringing them directly toward the railroad from Menin to Roulers, which was the direct link between Lille and Ostend. When the ridge gave way there was no natural obstacle between the British and this line. There would still be a roundabout connection between these points through Roulers and

Courtrai, but it would be under direct artillery-fire at reasonably close range.

8

German newspaper correspondents now imprest upon the people at home the necessity of making sacrifices in order to back up the troops who were trying to hold the line in Flanders. Max Osborne said that, in the ferocious fighting before Ypres, "nothing more or less was involved than the world-historic decision as to whether England can crush us and break our backbone or not." Nobody at the German front concealed "the, colossal gravity of this endless struggle." On its outcome depended "whether England is able or not to wrest from our hands the strongest weapons we possess to frustrate her calculations.” In fact, decisions of life and death were being made-"of our life or our death," said he. Never before had "the defensive character of the whole war been so graphically revealed." "If we are defeated here," Osborne added, "we shall be face to face. with the certainty that all will be over with the glory of the empire and the splendor of the German name.

Striking together on a nine-mile front east and northeast of Ypres, on August 16, British and French troops carried out their objectives except on the right flank. The French. on the left drove the Germans from the tongue of land between the Yser Canal and the Martjevaart and captured the bridgehead of Dreigraethen. In the center Haig's troops captured the village of Langemarck, which had been held. strongly by the Germans ever since the Allied attack two weeks before, and pushed half a mile beyond. On the right, British troops attempted to seize the high ground almost directly east of Ypres which lies north of the road to Menin. They swept up and gained the ground, but, in the face of terrific losses, the Germans attacked with great fury, and finally pushed the British back from the terrain they had won. In addition to gains in the Ypres sector, the British made progress east of Loos and north of Lens. Severe fighting had been going on there ever since the Canadians. won Hill 70. Repeated German assaults had been futile.

It was a little less than two years before that Hill 70 had suddenly jumped into the headlines of newspapers. In Sep

8 The Berlin Vossische Zeitung.

tember, 1915, in the great battle of Loos, certain Scottish troops, acting on the left flank of the whole British army, pressing forward through Loos contrary to orders, dashed up Hill 70 and pushed down its eastern and southern slopes until Lens lay at their feet. German troops were already beginning to withdraw, heavy guns were going back, and the fate of Lens seemed sealed. But there were no supports for the

victors and none came in the dismal hours that followed. In the end the troops who had actually broken the German line. were almost destroyed and the ground lost. The tragedy of Loos, like that of Neuve Chapelle, had marked the mistakes of the British Staff. Troops had made progress beyond anything the staff had prepared for, but the staff found itself unable to keep pace with the soldier. It was the collapse of Loos that cost Sir John French his command in France,

and it was not until August 16, 1917, that the British again mounted the western slopes and attained the crest of Hill 70.

Between the two dates there had been created a modern British army and a new British Staff. The result was shown in the fact that in perfect rhythm with the artillery, the infantry had now cleared the hill until from Vimy Ridge and Hill 70 the British dominated the whole German position. Lens was even more ruined than Reims, but the real advantage was military, not material. By taking Hill 70 the British transferred the German position at La Bassée into a dangerous and ever-depressing salient. While the Germans held Vimy Ridge and Hill 70, La Bassée was impregnable so far as a southern attack was concerned. The German hold upon Messines to the north of the salient had been only less vital, and now the foundations of both ends of the salient were gone.

Turning to Langemarck, the mind traveled back to the last days of April, 1915, when the Canadians, now the victors of Hill 70, stood before Langemarck and St. Julien and westward to the point before Bixschoote, where their line joined that of the French Colonials. It was upon this French front that the Germans launched their first "poison gas" attack; it was across the ground that they had just reconquered that the French retreated, beyond the Yser Canal. This retreat uncovered the Canadians, and on the ground recovered in August, 1917, they had made the first great Canadian contribution to the Allied cause. That stand saved Ypres, saved the whole Franco-British cause in this sector and made impossible a German advance to Calais. Arras, Messines, Hill 70, Langemarck-these were modest stages but they were advances; they were gains of ground invaluable for the assailant and vital to the defender. As he lost high ground the German had to pay more to hold low; as he paid the price so he marched more rapidly to the point of exhaustion of numbers, and this was the true objective of his foe.

The beginning of the fourth year of the war had found the Germans making a radical change in their methods of defense in northern France and Belgium. The continuous lines of wonderfully constructed forward trenches, with their

deep dugouts, in which lived and fought great numbers of men, was fast passing into the discard. The Germans were adopting a system of scattering their advance forces over a great depth. Cunningly constructed strongholds among myriads of shell-holes along the front now concealed innumerable small, and more or less isolated, garrisons of men who had formerly fought shoulder to shoulder along great stretches of picturesque ditches through which communication was not broken for miles. This alteration had been brought about by the ever-growing preponderance of British

artillery, which had buried the German front-line trenches under an avalanche of shells and had left the defenses nothing but heaped furrows of earth, and converted famous dugouts into mantraps, in which thousands lost their lives without a chance of fighting back. As the Germans were gradually pushed back they of necessity were forced to invent another mode of stemming the advancing tide. The summer's Allied offensive east and north of Ypres disclosed many examples of this new scheme of fighting, which promised to take the place of the tactics of the three previous years. Wherever the German front-line trenches had been made untenable, or where a British attack was expected,