ery date, and
Ludendorff played his trump cards and the great game.

Before that date I had an interview with General Gough, commanding
the Fifth Army. He pulled out his maps, showed his method of forward
redoubts beyond the main battle zone, and in a quiet, amiable way spoke
some words which froze my blood.

"We may have to give ground," he said, "if the enemy attacks in
strength. We may have to fall back to our main battle zone. That will
not matter very much. It is possible that we may have to go farther
back. Our real line of defense is the Somme. It will be nothing like a
tragedy if we hold that. If we lose the crossings of the Somme it will,
of course, be serious. But not a tragedy even then. It will only be
tragic if we lose Amiens, and we must not do that."

"The crossings of the Somme... Amiens!"

Such a thought had never entered my imagination. General Gough had
suggested terrible possibilities.

All but the worst happened. In my despatches, reprinted in book form
with explanatory prefaces, I have told in full detail the meaning and
measure of the British retreat, when forty-eight of our divisions were
attacked by one hundred and fourteen German divisions and fell back
fighting stubborn rear-guard actions which at last brought the enemy
to a dead halt outside Amiens and along the River Ancre northward from
Albert, where afterward in a northern attack the enemy under Prince
Rupprecht of Bavaria broke through the Portuguese between Givenchy and
Festubert, where our wings held, drove up to Bailleul, which was burned
to the ground, and caused us to abandon all the ridges of Flanders which
had been gained at such great cost, and fall back to the edge of Ypres.
In this book I need not narrate all this history again.

They were evil days for us. The German offensive was conducted with
masterly skill, according to the new method of "infiltration" which
had been tried against Italy with great success in the autumn of '17 at
Caporetto.

It consisted in a penetration of our lines by wedges of machine-gunners
constantly reinforced and working inward so that our men, attacked
frontally after terrific bombardment, found themselves under flanking
fire on their right and left and in danger of being cut off. Taking
advantage of a dense fog, for which they had waited according to
meteorological forecast, the Germans had easily made their way between
our forward redoubts on the Fifth Army front, where our garrisons held