days work. It could not be said that the tanks were alone responsible for the victory, for infantry, artillery, and cavalry all played their part. Nevertheless, the tanks drove the entering wedge without which the triumph would have been impossible. In a few hours they tore to shreds lines of barbed wire, the demolition of which by a concentration of artillery would have required days. Furthermore, their employment made possible a secret attack, and this would have been out of the question had artillery been brought into play. The tanks demonstrated fully their power in saving the lives of men and conserving ammunition.

The casualties among the infantry were exceedingly light. Two battalions had only one casualty each and one suffered the loss of only three men. This was almost unprecedented in an attack of such magnitude. The casualties among the crews of tanks also were light. Some hundreds were in action. Of all the men who went forward less than twenty were killed and less than one hundred wounded. Many casualties were due to the fact that men left the tanks to perform work in the open, where they came under the fire of snipers. Some of the tanks were veterans, but many had never been in an engagement before. Many hundred tons of petrol had been brought up secretly and stored pending the attack, and so quietly that few soldiers in the territory involved knew what was going on. Twleve tanks led the way into Marcoing. They went about the business methodically, each taking the position designated. At Ribecourt they arrived just as the Germans were sitting down to breakfast. The crews got their morning meal from the food prepared for Germany. Some of the tanks were knocked out by direct hits from German guns; some were overturned by shell-fire; others got bogged; one or two buried their noses in the soft earth or turned over when trying to climb steep banks. One fell into a canal, but the greater number plunged ahead unhindered and little hurt.

Haig's troops, in a little more than two day's fighting, had overrun an area equal to that won by the Germans in fifteen days of their first drive at Verdun. So hard-prest for men were the Germans next day that two companies of cripples and convalescents were recruited hastily at one

camp and thrown into the line in the region of Masnières. Some of these pitiful objects fell into British hands and had to receive medical treatment. One prisoner, in the last stages of tuberculosis, had to be moved to prevent the disease from spreading to others who were in a state of exhaustion and virtually helpless from their attempts to fight under the lash of unrelenting officers. The first counter-attack came over the ridge from northeast of Masnières, the Germans advancing in massed formation as in the early days of the war. The British had concentrated a large number of machine. guns at this point, and were hoping for a counter-attack. They permitted the enemy to advance to within a thousand yards before they opened fire. Then the machine-guns and artillery were turned on the Germans, and they were smashed in a withering storm. An attack on Marcoing was attempted by the Germans, but, as in the former case, they were caught in a heavy artillery- and machine-gun fire and turned back, after suffering severely.

An hour later another body of Germans advanced on Noyelles, which was held by one company of British troops. Here some of the stiffest fighting of the battle took place at close quarters. Both sides rushed up reinforcements and for two hours the battle surged back and forth through the streets and among the buildings. It was a mêlée in which the bayonet played the principal part. The Germans fought well, but not well enough to withstand the fury of the British assault, and were forced back across the canal to the east. Among the prisoners taken were several officers. One regimental commander came tramping back in an elaborate fur coat, followed by two servants, who carried more of his finery. He was swearing mad at the turn of events, the sight of a company of British cavalry throwing him almost into a frenzy. The language which he directed at the British drew a smile even from the hardened "Tommy," who had a somewhat picturesque vocabulary of his own.

For three days the forces of Byng kept to their task. Having driven the enemy from fortified strongholds, they were forced to battle with him in the open, tanks and dashing cavalry everywhere opening the way for onslaughts by infantry. Altho the stroke was delivered over a front of

thirty-two miles, from the Scarpe to St. Quentin, it was in the center and in the direction of Cambrai that it reached its greatest strength. Here the wedge was driven in more than six and a half miles, and numerous towns and villages fell into the hands of the British, many of them already deserted by the surprized Germans, who had fled in apparent disorder, leaving equipment and stores behind them. The operations of the cavalry were described as brilliant, horsemen making gallant charges into villages and even against machine-gun positions, the entire gun-crews of which were shot or sabered. Fontaine-Notre-Dame was captured in a brilliant attack, but the Germans in a counter-attack regained it. In addition to heavy losses in men killed or wounded, more than 9,000 Germans were made prisoner. The British casualties were declared to be considerably less than the number of prisoners taken. Haig, himself a cavalryman, had clung to mounted troops through many weary months of trench-fighting. He believed some day he would have a chance to use them, and his judgment was now vindicated.

The blow represented true strategy. Haig had hammered. at the enemy in Flanders until they were worn out, had driven them back as far as the mud would permit, and compelled them to call on every ounce of strength they had, and then suddenly sprang this surprize attack. The Hindenburg line on the Cambrai front was the strongest the Germans had in the west. Not only was it strongly fortified, but protected by a deep belt of barbed-wire. The tanks went through No Man's Land under the full observation of Ger-. man artillery, and, while the gun-fire was weak, some fire was directed on the tanks as they advanced. It was interesting to follow the trail of the tanks and to see where shells had struck nearby apparently without doing damage. In one whole section not one tank was knocked out. The operation was tactical in character, but in the preparation for it something like strategic genius was shown. Great principles of war were applied. The British fought on their own chosen ground and at their own time; they struck the enemy unawares; they had gathered before the attack an overwhelming preponderance of striking power; they employed

novelty, both as to plan and means, to such an extent as to bewilder the enemy and render all his plans and means of defense futile. Whether the credit was due to Haig or Byng, or was to be shared between them, the muster-roll of fame was enriched by the exploit and by the military inspiration which it exhibited.

In its bearing on the Allies' plans, the gain of ground at Cambrai counted heavily. Lens, north of Cambrai, was already so closely beset that it seemed to await the finishing blow. St. Quentin, south of Cambrai, seemed within reach of the British on one side and the French on another.

The enfeeblement of the enemy at Cambrai increased the strain on the two cities. The interdependence of Cambrai, Lens, and St. Quentin was plain. The Cambrai gains were not merely gains; they were demonstrations of a new method for puncturing the German line. They threatened to overturn the tactics of the Western Front; they promised to supply the one indispensable element without which a victory had been impossible. Tanks, in short, had revealed their worth when employed wholesale. A year ago they had roused the laughter of Germans and it seemed as if they had been driven by ridicule into the background. Now they

were used on a new scale, and they had set at naught all the routine defensive means of the German trench-system. Without the aid of tanks it would have been necessary to throw a million projectiles from thousands of cannon, at an expense of over $50,000,000, in order to occupy half a dozen square miles of territory, and the pounding would have required several days. Tanks, which were of doubtful utility on steep uplands, could be employed in half a dozen vital areas of the Belgian-French front and so promised to do what the monitor did for the Union in 1862 and Krupp cannon for Prussia in 1870 and 1914.

The progress of the Allies in recovering French and Belgian territory since the Hindenburg retreat in March, 1917, had two principal phases: gains made at a single bound in the course of that retreat, extending roughly over a period of a month, and gains achieved in subsequent operations along comparatively limited portions of the front from the North Sea to Reims. These sections, pieced together, made up nearly the whole of that front. Hindenburg's retirement began about March 10. His "voluntary" surrender of territory stopt on April 9, when Haig delivered the first of his strokes from Arras. Just a week later the French made their attack on the Aisne. After that the story of the year's campaign was principally one of a sustained British effort, with blows coming at increasingly frequent intervals. The French were contented with much less frequent efforts, and along a much more limited front, their attention being virtually concentrated on the section of the line between Soissons and Craonne, including Malmaison.

In the British campaign since the beginning of April, with its shifting blows from north to south, the first blow in time, and perhaps the first in the fierceness of the fighting, was made at Arras. The territory regained in this sector was a semicircle on a diameter of twenty miles, with Arras as the center. It was ten miles from Arras north to Lens and about the same distance southeast to the region of Bullecourt and Quéant. Here the British won back something like 120 square miles. Close in importance to the Arras sector was the Ypres sector, where the British drove forward northeast to a depth of five miles with Passchendaele as the