achine guns and bombs, and rendered invaluable
assistance in damming the swelling tide of the Hun hordes. Having gained
the mastery of the air, as they did prior to the British drive on
the Somme in 1916, they retained it until the foe was halted. To a
considerable extent they replaced the heavy guns of the Allies by their
constant bombing and gun fire.

Between March 21 and March 31, the French and British pilots shot down
more than 100 German planes, losing about one-third of that number in
the air battles. After the first few clays there were practically no
German machines in the air over the fighting front, as was the case
on the Somme in 1916, but at the end of March the Hun planes began to
reappear in mass formation patrols, sometimes consisting of as many as
fifty planes in a group of patrols. Then followed a period of intense
air fighting, of which a single day's record of the French may be cited
as an example. On April 12, the Allied aviation report shows that French
fighting scouts made 250 flights, fought 120 combats in the sky, shot
down eight Germans and damaged 23 others, burned five enemy balloons,
damaged five more, and bombarded German troops with 45 tons of
explosives.

GERMANS FAIL IN THEIR OBJECT

The last part of the month of April was marked by a succession of minor
attacks by the Germans along the entire front of the halted offensive,
and by the development of counter-attacks by the Allies at various
points where it was deemed necessary or advisable to strengthen their
defensive positions, but up to May 1 the Germans were as far as ever
from their main objectives in the west. Judged from the standpoint of
their confident expectations, and the promises of success held out as
an encouragement to their troops, the long-heralded and long-prepared
spring offensive of 1918 was a failure. Their much-vaunted strength of
numbers and of organization failed as completely to gain a decisive
result as their initial drive on Paris in 1914. Though they threw into
the fighting in March and April about 125 divisions, they failed to
separate the French and British armies, which was a prime object of
their strategy, and they sustained losses which, while not irreparable,
must have greatly affected the morale of their men. "Remember Verdun!"
said a famous French commander, commenting on the drive. "The Boche is
making this tremendous effort and sustaining these losses to effect
a complete rupture of our front, and