principles. German
suggestions of an informal discussion of peace terms were therefore
declined by the allied powers, and in March, 1918, all eyes were turned
toward the Western front in anticipation of a long-threatened German
drive.

THE WORLD'S GREATEST BATTLE

All previous battles of the Great War paled into comparative
insignificance when the German offensive of 1918 opened on the Western
front, March 21, with a desperate and partially successful attempt of a
million men to break through the British line, attacking fiercely from
the Ailette to the Scarpe, along a front of sixty miles. For weeks the
battle raged over the territory of the Somme, and when a second German
drive occurred farther north, from Givenchy to Ypres, fully 3,000,
men were engaged on both sides, and all records of human combat were
broken.

The loss of life was appalling, but in the absence of official reports
while the fighting was in progress, could only be guessed at, though the
world knew that the rivers of France and Flanders ran with blood. The
Germans attacked in masses and successive waves, and paid the penalty of
their desperate strategy. For though the British, and later the French,
lines were bent backward for miles, and gaps were occasionally torn in
them by the foe's furious attack, the Allied defensive withstood the
onslaught and after a month of the most terrific struggle the world has
ever seen, both British and French forces presented an unbroken front to
the disappointed enemy.

The city of Amiens, one of the keys to Paris, had been a chief objective
of the German drive, but all efforts to capture that important railroad
center failed. True, Noyon, Peronne, Bapaume, Albert and Montdidier,
on the south, and Festubert, Neuve Chappelle, Armentieres, and
Paaschendaele, to the north, were successively captured from the Allies,
in spite of the most gallant and heroic resistance. But then the lines
held firmly, and all the Germans had to show for an awful sacrifice
of life and morale was a few miles of advance into territory already
devastated by war.

On April 21, when the Hun offensive had lasted a full month, not only
were the armies of the Allies intact, and better still, their spirit and
morale unbroken, but the utmost confidence prevailed among them. All the
Allied forces, British, French, Canadian, and American, on the Western
front, had been by this time placed under the supreme command of the
eminent French strategist