• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1040 0

they had gained at such terrible cost during the great battles at the Somme and Passchendaele. By early April, German forces had advanced 40 miles, overrunning 1,200 square miles of France—yet still not enough to veer toward the coast as planned—and a shockingly high percentage of British losses continued to be men taken prisoner: 90,000 in just the first two weeks of the offensive. German newsreel cameramen eagerly filmed them, along with newly captured French and Belgian towns. Canisters of film were rushed back to Berlin, and soon evidence of the seemingly unstoppable drive toward Paris was on screens throughout Germany.

The German advance brought another new and terrifying weapon into the war, the first sign of which came two days after the offensive began, when Parisians were startled by a succession of massive explosions, each 20 minutes apart—in front of the Gare de l'Est, by the Quai de la Seine, in the Jardins des Tuileries, in the suburb of Châtillon, and at other widely scattered spots. As buildings collapsed, crushing those inside, people on the street rushed for shelter—but it was unclear what they were sheltering from, for the Germans were some 70 miles away, and there were no airplanes in the clear blue sky. It took several hours and a sharp-eyed French military aviator to discover that Paris was being bombarded by specially manufactured guns mounted on railway cars, their barrels more than 100 feet long. It took about three minutes for each giant shell to cover the distance to the city, climbing to an altitude of 25 miles at the top of its trajectory. This was by far the highest point ever reached by a man-made object, so high that gunners, in calculating where their shells would land, had to take into account the rotation of the Earth. For the first time in warfare, deadly projectiles rained down on civilians from the stratosphere.

When he returned to London, friends found Milner looking pale. He and the rest of the War Cabinet found new troops for Haig, but only by desperate measures: two divisions were recalled from Palestine and one from Italy, and the army lowered the minimum age for the draft to 17½. The government also took a momentous, long-delayed step: it announced it would extend conscription to Ireland. For fear of the response—both in Ireland and among Irish Americans—this had never been done before, but how, people in England now complained, could the army call up even 17-year-olds and let the Irish be exempt?

Over several months, as the British and French held many urgent high-level strategy meetings, Milner spent about half his time in France, ironing out disputes. Few of the two countries' generals spoke each other's language well, and Milner's fluency in French helped; he sometimes interpreted for Lloyd George. Between trips he reported to the King, who at one point invited him to Windsor Castle for the weekend—although of course Violet could not go with him.

In purely military terms, the spring of 1918 was Haig's finest hour. Paradoxically, when the mere appearance of weakness or indecision at the top might have been fatal, the same qualities that had led him to uselessly sacrifice so many British lives at the Somme and Passchendaele—his stubbornness, his unshakable faith in the rightness of Britain's cause, his almost mindless optimism in the face of bad news—proved essential. They made him into the calm, unyielding defensive commander that British troops needed.

The Germans still had many more troops on hand than the Allies, for the collapse of Russia had enabled them to add a stunning 44 divisions—more than half a million men—to their army in the west. In early April, after German forces launched another storm-trooper-led attack near Ypres, Haig issued a dispatch to all his soldiers, drafted with few changes in his own steady, confident handwriting: "Many amongst us are now tired. To those I would say that victory belongs to those who hold out the longest.... Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in