had evidently been given to the Germans that at any cost they
must break through. They hurled themselves against the British with
unprecedented ferocity. I have told a little of that battle, of the
frightful casualties, so great among the Germans that they carried
their dead back and burned them in great pyres. The British Army was
being steadily weakened. The Germans came steadily, new lines taking
the place of those that were gone. Then the French came up, and, after
days of struggle, the line held.

General Foch opened a drawer of the desk and showed me, day by day,
the charts of the battle. They were bound together in a great book,
and each day had a fresh page. The German Army was black. The French
was red. Page after page I lived that battle, the black line
advancing, the blue of the British wavering against overwhelming
numbers and ferocity, the red line of the French coming up. "The Man
of Ypres," they call General Foch, and well they may.

"They came," said General Foch, "like the waves of the sea."

It was the second time I had heard the German onslaught so described.

He shut the book and sat for a moment, his head bent, as though in
living over again that fearful time some of its horror had come back
to him.

At last: "I paced the floor and watched the clock," he said.

How terrible! How much easier to take a sword and head a charge! How
much simpler to lead men to death than to send them! There in that
quiet room, with only the telephone and the ticking of the clock for
company, while his staff waited outside for orders, this great
general, this strategist on whose strategy hung the lives of armies,
this patriot and soldier at whose word men went forth to die, paced
the floor.

He walked over to the clock and stood looking at it, his fine head
erect, his hands behind him. Some of the tragedy of those nineteen
days I caught from his face.

But the line held.

To-day, as I write this, General Foch's army in the North and the
British are bearing the brunt of another great attack at Ypres.[E] The
British have made a gain at Neuve Chapelle, and the Germans have
retaliated by striking at their line, some miles farther north. If
they break through it will be toward Calais and the sea. Every
offensive movement in this new warfare of trench and artillery
requires a concentration of reserves. To make their offensive movement
the British have concentrated at Neuve Chapelle. The second move of
this game of