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confronted by smaller numbers of Allied troops. It was this, and not lost ground, that began to convince a dismayed General Ludendorff that Germany had lost the war. The day the latest Allied offensive began, August 8, he wrote in his memoirs, "was the black day of the German Army." Two days later, he offered his resignation to the Kaiser, who rejected it. The war continued, but rumors of pessimism at the top began to seep out. Several hundred thousand soldiers well behind the lines either deserted or else remained in uniform but evaded orders to go to the front. In the minds of the German high command was a rising fear that, if army discipline and morale collapsed, something even worse than an Allied victory could occur: revolution at home.

The specter of revolution frightened rulers in Britain too. One hundred thousand workers protesting food shortages had marched to Manchester's town hall in January. British trade union membership was rising, and 1918 saw more than 5.8 million workdays lost to industrial disputes, by far the highest total during the war years. In July a rash of strikes by munitions workers were quelled by a combination of patriotic appeals, threats, and deception. Basil Thomson sent a Scotland Yard agent to an affected area, who would settle into a pub frequented by striking workers and, after a few drinks, in strict confidence, drop the information that he worked for the national conscription authorities and had come to town to arrange for call-up notices. How, men asked him, could they avoid being drafted? Simple, he said: immediately go back to work. Once this rumor was planted, it worked wonders—or so Thomson claimed.

Nonetheless, work stoppages spread. London's Paddington station briefly shut down, as did some rail lines. Military units were put on alert, and an entire brigade moved to Newport, a center of strike activity, while a company of Scots Guards was dispatched to East London as a show of force against picketing rail workers. The Times advocated a military takeover of the railways for the duration of the war.

Particularly unnerving for ruling circles was something Britain had never seen before, a police strike. As was true for most British workers, their pay had not kept up with the soaring cost of living. On August 30, 1918, 12,000 London bobbies, the majority of the force, walked off the job. Even some Scotland Yard detectives—who normally spied on would-be strikers—joined them. The government rushed in soldiers to guard public buildings, and then, after Lloyd George convened an emergency meeting, promised to raise police pay and pensions. The bobbies were back on the job in two days, but the prime minister later said he felt Britain had never come "nearer to Bolshevism."

Although there was a sometimes desperate demand for troops on the Western Front in the first half of 1918, Brock Millman, a careful scholar of Britain's internal security measures, makes a convincing case that the government held back men and arms for fear of revolution at home. Four Royal Navy battleships, for example, were stationed in the Thames estuary, to no visible military purpose. Still more revealing, at the beginning of 1918 there were roughly 1.5 million soldiers in Britain itself. After taking into account troops in Ireland, in training, recovering from wounds, underage for overseas service, or serving in antiaircraft units, Millman calculates that this still left 175,000 fully trained extra troops on army bases at home.

Contingency deployment plans showed them being sent, if need be, to districts adjacent to, but not actually within, areas of trade union militancy, such as Scotland's River Clyde. Millman suggests that this would have put soldiers close enough to be rushed in for strikebreaking duties, but not so close that, when off duty, they could mingle at local pubs or soccer fields with the very people whose strikes they were breaking, who might remind them of the old socialist saying that a bayonet was a weapon with a worker at each end. In July 1918, a month of many strikes, the boundaries