n unfair
advantage of the enemy, to launch the assault. That had always been the
English way and that was our way in many battles of the great war, which
were won (unless they were lost) by the sheer valor of men who at great
cost smashed their way through all obstructions.

The Germans, on the whole, showed more original genius in military
science, varying their methods of attack and defense according to
circumstances, building trenches and dugouts which we never equaled;
inventing the concrete blockhouse or "pill-box" for a forward defensive
zone thinly held in advance of the main battle zone, in order to lessen
their slaughter under the weight of our gun-fire (it cost us dearly for
a time); scattering their men in organized shell-craters in order to
distract our barrage fire; using the "elastic system of defense" with
frightful success against Nivelle's attack in the Champagne; creating
the system of assault of "infiltration" which broke the Italian lines at
Caporetto in 1917 and ours and the French in 1918. Against all that we
may set only our tanks, which in the end led the way to victory, but the
German High Command blundered atrociously in all the larger calculations
of war, so that they brought about the doom of their empire by a series
of acts which would seem deliberate if we had not known that they were
merely blind. With a folly that still seems incredible, they took the
risk of adding the greatest power in the world--in numbers of men and
in potential energy--to their list of enemies at a time when their own
man-power was on the wane. With deliberate arrogance they flouted
the United States and forced her to declare war. Their temptation,
of course, was great. The British naval blockade was causing severe
suffering by food shortage to the German people and denying them access
to raw material which they needed for the machinery of war.

The submarine campaign, ruthlessly carried out, would and did inflict
immense damage upon British and Allied shipping, and was a deadly menace
to England. But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in
his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break
her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over
great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in
underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the British
navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities. By those
miscalculations they lost the wa