in France or Italy. The campaign was of the older type; there were never enough troops on either side to make necessary a trench line. Eventually the one great crowning exploit of the campaign was that in which the British cavalry in force rode around the Turks and caught them in the rear, while Allenby's infantry attacked them in front. These are the probable reasons for the interest of the public in these campaigns.

The story itself is soon told. On April 29, 1916, General Townshend surrendered at Kut-el-Amara. British forces at once started from India, advanced up the Tigris and Euphrates, and on February 24, 1917, General Maude retook Kut-el-Amara. A campaign was waged then during the summer and autumn, by Allenby from Egypt, on Jerusalem, which fell December 10. In 1918 both British forces, aided by Arabs, pushed steadily on. September 22 was the great victory over the Turks in Syria. On October 1 the British entered Damascus; October 26 Aleppo surrendered, followed on October 31 by the surrender of Turkey, and the war in the Near East came to an end.

BOOK VI

THE WAR IN 1918

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE GERMAN PLANS FOR THE CAMPAIGN OF 1918

THE Germans saw in 1917 that it would be essential for them to win the war in 1918. If they delayed, they would never win it at all, and a failure to win a military decision would be complete disaster. The Americans could not arrive in force in 1918, but in 1919 they would place in the field millions of well-trained men who would decidedly outnumber the Germans and win the war without a doubt. We must never forget the character of the war it was for the Germans an aggressive war intended to win control of Europe, an object to be attained only by substantial victory.

But in 1918 they considered their object all but assured. Russia had been defeated partly by the German army but principally by the revolution. She was now ready to become a German political and economic colony in which the German secret service could mold things at pleasure. What mattered the loss of colonies in Africa and in the Pacific! The lost German territory had at most a few millions of people, crude and undeveloped, buying little and producing less. Even Mesopotamia was undeveloped and without inhabitants and only time could render it the sort of market adequate to meet the German needs for expansion.

But now at their very door was a colony of one hundred and eighty millions of people, already producing exactly what Germany wished to buy, already buying exactly what Germany was anxious to sell. It was in their hands already, its resistance overthrown

for good. They had only to assure their future possession of it to have in their hands the solution of all serious problems. Nothing stood in the way except the obstinate British and the stubborn French in the west, who were beaten, but declined to admit it.

The war itself had created the great Pan-German Confederation. Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey had been so tightly bound to Germany by circumstances that they could never again escape. The miserable peoples, who had hitherto stood out and refused to coöperate, had been trampled on and destroyed during the war while the trampling had been good. Rumania and Serbia