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By Root 2398 0

angry man, railing at the failure of his government, the failure of so many subordinates, the failure of the front-line troops to carry out the genius of Ludendorff’s plan. There had been rumors of Ludendorff’s collapse, some sort of mental or physical breakdown. But von Hindenburg would hear none of it, was still close enough to Ludendorff to understand what had happened to him. The failures were many and more costly than anyone could have predicted and Ludendorff could no longer energize the army by the fire of his will. Von Hindenburg knew that Ludendorff had used all his strength to combat the defeatism that was spreading through the entire army, through all of Germany. It was a struggle between what should have been and what was, the ideal against the practical. For over a year von Hindenburg had watched the ideal fall away, replaced by the consequences of so many mistakes, some of them made by Ludendorff himself. Ludendorff had never pushed for a German tank building program, did not ever believe that the British and French armor would be of any real consequence in the field. His troops told him differently. On the oceans, the convoy system used by the Allies had virtually eliminated the U-boat as Germany’s most powerful weapon, and with the German admirals too timid to confront the British navy, the control of the oceans was firmly in Allied hands.

The optimism from the scattered fronts of the war had collapsed along with Ludendorff’s spring offensives. In Italy, the enormous success of the Austrians at Caporetto the autumn before had been entirely reversed. The Austrians had taken their success one step too far, had extended their forces unwisely, and the new Italian commander, Armando Diaz, had taken full advantage. By mid-June, the Austrians had suffered an enormously costly defeat along the Piave River. The losses had so devastated the Austrians and their commander that von Hindenburg was convinced the Austrians would never again be able to mount any kind of offensive.

In the Middle East, the British had made consistent gains against the Turks for more than a year. Von Hindenburg had never regarded the Turkish leadership as a faithful ally, but the enormous benefit of tying up massive British forces in that region had clearly made the alliance worthwhile for Germany. But now, the Turks were in danger of a total collapse. The Bulgarians were already defeated, and the fighting in the Balkans had dwindled to scattered battles that added nothing to Germany’s efforts. With the growing inevitability of the failure of Germany’s allies, it was clear that in time, the enemy, particularly the British, could eventually retrieve their scattered armies, and feed them into the offensives now driving the Germans back along the entire Western Front.

For more than a year, the High Command had been elated by the overthrow of the Russian czarist government. Lenin’s revolution had thrown that country into total chaos, and had thus taken them completely out of the war. The inevitable result of the Russian collapse was a theme loudly voiced by every observer on both sides of the Western Front. It was a certainty that the enormous influx of German troops shifting from the eastern front to France would so add to German power that they could crush anything the Allied armies could put before them. In the spring, it had nearly worked. But there were forces at work in the ranks of the German army that Ludendorff had ignored, and even now von Hindenburg didn’t fully understand. The proximity of so many German divisions to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution had infected many of those troops with the stain of Bolshevism. By the time many of those troops reached France, they had passed through the heart of a depressed Germany, had seen too much of what the war had done to the home front, to the German people, to their own families. Even as Ludendorff’s great offensives were rolling forward, there was talk in the army of mutiny and revolt, rumors planted by supporters of a Marxist revolution that would restore Germany to a peaceful glory,