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British troops did indeed feel they had their backs to the wall. Haig's words embodied something else as well, absent from years of earlier exhortations: honesty. To say that "victory belongs to those who hold out the longest" was acknowledging at last that the war would be won not by dramatic cavalry charges, but by attrition. Which army would exhaust itself first? Moving over an already ravaged landscape now freshly gouged by new shell holes, the German advance continued.

In mid-April, as Britain's retreating armies continued to stagger backward under the worst German blows in nearly four years of fighting, Milner became secretary of state for war. His signature now appeared on the condolence cards sent to soldiers' families, below a standard message: "The King commands me to assure you of the true sympathy of His Majesty and the Queen in Your Sorrow. He whose loss you mourn died in the noblest of causes."

The cards flowed out in a ceaseless stream. (Families of officers were notified sooner, by black-bordered telegrams.) But when it came to Stephen Hobhouse's youngest brother, his parents, like so many others, simply received word that in the new German offensive the 23-year-old Paul was "missing, presumed killed." He had been seen fighting, then falling, when his unit's position was overrun. Several months later, the family's hopes were raised when a fellow officer passed on a rumor that Paul was wounded and a prisoner in Germany. With mail going through contacts in neutral countries, Stephen got in touch with a pacifist committee in Berlin. "I was very glad to be able to set on foot by this means a search for my brother Paul. Alas, no trace of him could be found. My poor mother for over six months ... persisted in the fond belief that Paul would return." During that time Margaret Hobhouse never ceased to write letters to her son, although they eventually came back marked "Undeliverable. Return to Sender." Paul's body was never found.

The German attacks of March and April 1918 were a severe setback to the British army but by no means a boost to antiwar feeling. When troops had their backs to the wall, the public showed little desire to question the war's aims. The number of workdays lost to strikes

dropped. "The recent severe fighting on the Western front appears to have had a most salutary effect on public opinion," the Scottish Command told army headquarters in a Weekly Intelligence Summary; in Aberdeen, overage men were volunteering, and a deserter surrendered himself "on account of the gravity of the situation." Another agent reported that "at Liverpool recent events have had a steadying influence on the working man." The intensified fighting produced the same result in Germany, where threats of labor militance temporarily evaporated.

Redoubling his efforts to keep up civilian morale, Rudyard Kipling spoke at munitions factories and barraged high officials with long, detailed memos about everything from mobilizing "parsons and priests" for the war effort to bringing documentary films—he sketched out scenarios for half a dozen—to factories so workers could see the splendid effect of the weapons they produced. The British workman "has a great respect for the gift of the gab," he declared. "...Almost as important as the cinema is the lecturer who accompanies [it].... The munitions workers listen best to a person they consider of their own class." John Buchan's propaganda offensive also aimed at the working class, taking labor unionists on tours of the front line; by mid-1918, more than 1,000 union leaders and rank-and-file members had been on these trips. Union men serving at the front were encouraged to write to their branches back home, especially when strikes loomed; military censors made sure it was the patriotic letters that got through. The jingoistic newspaper John Bull published a cartoon showing a CO sitting comfortably by a hearth, in an easy chair, with the caption "This little pig stayed at home."

In this bleak spring, Bertrand