r in the long run, and by other errors
they made their loss more certain.

One mistake they made was their utter callousness regarding the
psychology and temper of their soldiers and civilian population. They
put a greater strain upon them than human nature could bear, and by
driving their fighting-men into one shambles after another, while they
doped their people with false promises which were never fulfilled, they
sowed the seeds of revolt and despair which finally launched them into
gulfs of ruin. I have read nothing more horrible than the cold-blooded
cruelty of Ludendorff's Memoirs, in which, without any attempt at
self-excuse, he reveals himself as using the lives of millions of men
upon a gambling chance of victory with the hazards weighted against him,
as he admits. Writing of January, 1917, he says: "A collapse on the
part of Russia was by no means to be contemplated and was, indeed, not
reckoned upon by any one... Failing the U-boat campaign we reckoned
with the collapse of the Quadruple Alliance during 1917." Yet with that
enormous risk visible ahead, Ludendorff continued to play the grand jeu,
the great game, and did not advise any surrender of imperial ambitions
in order to obtain a peace for his people, and was furious with the
Majority party in the Reichstag for preparing a peace resolution. The
collapse of Russia inspired him with new hopes of victory in the
west, and again he prepared to sacrifice masses of men in the
slaughter-fields. But he blundered again, and this time fatally. His
time-table was out of gear. The U--boat war had failed. American manhood
was pouring into France, and German soldiers on the Russian front had
been infected with ideas most dangerous to German discipline and the
"will to win." At the end, as at the beginning, the German war lords
failed to understand the psychology of human nature as they had failed
to understand the spirit of France, of Belgium, of Great Britain, and
of America. One of the most important admissions in history is made by
Ludendorff when he writes:

"Looking back, I say our decline began clearly with the outbreak of the
revolution in Russia. On the one side the government was dominated
by the fear that the infection would spread, and on the other by the
feeling of their helplessness to instil fresh strength into the masses
of the people and to strengthen their warlike ardor, waning as it was
through a combination of innumerable circumstances."

So the w