Premier Lloyd George in his speech of April 9 [printed on Page 263]
compared the operations in Picardy with the battle of Cambrai. In fact,
the best way to understand what happened in the initial stage of the
great German drive is to remember the sequence of events in the German
attacks on the positions near Cambrai in 1917. At Cambrai there was a
mistaken confidence in the ability to hold the terrain, although German
attacks were expected. When these German assaults came, one was a
surprise, because there had been an unexpected concentration of German
troops; and this attack broke through the defense to such an extent that
it forced the abandonment of other positions, with losses of prisoners
and guns. All these tactical elements were present at the beginning of
the German drive in March, but on a much larger scale, because in this
case the German assaults were made on a front of some fifty miles.
The difficult problem for the Allies, in preparing to defend their long
front against the expected German offensive, was to provide against the
well-known German tactics of assembling superior numbers at the place of
battle. In this war the German "massed attacks" have not been so much a
matter of formation as of delivering streams of troops at the chosen
point of contact to overwhelm their opponents with superior numbers at
that point. These German tactics were again used in the attacks, begun
on March 21, against the British front from southeast of Arras as far as
La Fère.