The Germans gave way slowly, after stubborn defence, from every yard
of cratered earth. Their own roads were choked with the traffic of the
wounded—an endless tide of human agony. Behind them there was a welter
of death and wreckage. Their man power was giving out on the Western
Front. The collapse of Russia, stricken by infernal losses—four million
dead!—with the very machinery of its life broken down under the weight
of war, in revolt against the corruption of its own state, enraged by
treachery from within, and weakened by a spreading anarchy among men
who declined any longer to be slaughtered like sheep, gave Germany her
last and only chance of flinging fresh forces on to the Western front
and smashing through to victory by a last prodigious effort.
France was exhausted, but not yet spent. Her youth also had been thrown
into the furnace fires recklessly, without a chance, time and time
again, from the very beginning. Some of her generals had blundered,
quarrelled, intrigued, while the manhood of France was bleeding to
death. Battalions of young boys—as at Souchez—had flung themselves
against almost impregnable positions and had fallen like grass before
the scythe. Her coloured troops had been slaughtered like poor dumb
beasts in storms of fire. Grand offensives in Champagne had been broken
after losses hidden from the French people, though leaking out. The
defence of Verdun, saving France from surrender, had drained it of
its most precious life’s blood. There were periods when France almost
despaired, when there seemed no hope at all of final victory, but only
of gradual extermination, which would leave France anyhow with but
women and cripples and blinded soldiers and old men, and politicians,
and profiteers. At the back there were periods of mortal depression.
At the front the spirit of the men was sullen. There was mutiny in
many ranks. They refused to be launched into another of those “grand
offensives” at the bidding of generals who wasted blood like water. The
French Army ceased fighting, while the British struggled in Flanders,
at the cost of 800,000 casualties in five months.