army was attacked on both flanks and in
the center, and was sent reeling back to escape complete annihilation.

IX

Ludendorff's great offensive had failed and had turned to ruin. Some of
the twenty-six fresh divisions under Rupprecht of Bavaria were put into
the melting-pot to save the Crown Prince. The British army, with its
gaps filled up by 300,000 new drafts from England, the young brothers of
the elder brothers who had gone before, was ready to strike again,
and on August 8th the Canadians and Australians north and south of
the Somme, led by many tanks, broke the enemy's line beyond Amiens and
slowly but surely rolled it back with enormous losses.

For the first time in the war the cavalry had their chance of pursuit,
and made full use of it, rounding up great batches of prisoners,
capturing batteries of heavy and light guns, and fighting in many
actions.

"August 8th," writes Ludendorff, "was the black day of the German army
in the history of this war."

He describes from the German point of view what I and others have
described from the British point of view, and the general narrative
is the same--a succession of hammer-blows by the British armies, which
broke not only the German war-machine, but the German spirit. It was a
marvelous feat when the 19th Division and the Welsh waded at dusk across
the foul waters of the River Ancre, under the heights of Thiepval,
assembled under the guns of the enemy up there, and then, wet to their
skins, and in small numbers compared with the strength of the enemy,
stormed the huge ridges from both sides, and hurled the enemy back from
what he thought was an impregnable position, and followed him day by
day, taking thousands of prisoners and smashing his rear-guard defenses
one by one.

The most decisive battle of the British front in the "come-back," after
our days of retreat, was when with the gallant help of American troops
of the 27th New York Division our men of the English Midlands, the
46th Division, and others, broke the main Hindenburg line along the
St.-Quentin Canal. That canal was sixty feet wide, with steep cliffs
rising sheer to a wonderful system of German machine-gun redoubts and
tunneled defenses, between the villages of Bellicourt and Bellinglis.
It seemed to me an impossible place to assault and capture. If the enemy
could not hold that line they could hold nothing. In a dense fog
on Sunday morning, September 30th, our men, with the Americans a