all that ghastly fighting, that the fine mechanism of the
Second Army applied to those battles in Flanders was utterly misspent,
that after the first heavy rains had fallen the offensive ought to have
been abandoned, and that it was a frightful error of judgment to ask
masses of men to attack in conditions where they had not a dog's chance
of victory, except at a cost which made it of Pyrrhic irony.

Nevertheless, it was wearing the enemy out, as well as our own strength
in man-power. He could less afford to lose his one man than we could our
three, now that the United States had entered the war. Ludendorff
has described the German agony, and days of battle which he calls
"terrific," inflicting "enormous loss" upon his armies and increasing
his anxiety at the "reduction of our fighting strength."

"Enormous masses of ammunition, the like of which no mortal mind before
the war had conceived, were hurled against human beings who lay, eking
out but a bare existence, scattered in shell-holes that were deep in
slime. The terror of it surpassed even that of the shell-pitted field
before Verdun. This was not life; it was agony unspeakable. And out
of the universe of slime the attacker wallowed forward, slowly but
continually, and in dense masses. Time and again the enemy, struck by
the hail of our projectiles in the fore field, collapsed, and our lonely
men in the shell-holes breathed again. Then the mass came on. Rifle and
machine-gun were beslimed. The struggle was man to man, and--only too
often--it was the mass that won.

"What the German soldier accomplished, lived through, and suffered
during the Flanders battle will stand in his honor for all time as a
brazen monument that he set himself with his own hands on enemy soil!

"The enemy's losses, too, were heavy. When, in the spring of 1918, we
occupied the battlefield, it presented a horrible spectacle with its
many unburied dead. Their number ran into thousands. Two-thirds of
them were enemy dead; one-third were German soldiers who had met here a
hero's death.

"And yet the truth must be told; individual units no longer surmounted
as before the demoralizing influences of the defensive campaign.

"October 26th and 30th and November 6th and 10th were also days of
pitched battle of the heaviest kind. The enemy stormed like a wild bull
against the iron wall that kept him at a distance from our U-boat base.
He hurled his weight against the Houthulst Wood; he hurled it aga