April 26th, 1917.

DEAR MR. ROOSEVELT,—­Amid the rushing events of these days—­America rousing herself like an eagle “with eyes intentive to bedare the sun”; the steady and victorious advance along the whole front in France, which day by day is changing the whole aspect of the war; the Balfour Mission; the signs of deep distress in Germany—­it is sometimes difficult to throw oneself back into the mood of even six weeks ago!  History is coming so fast off the loom!  And yet six weeks ago I stood at the pregnant beginnings of it all, when, though nature in the bitter frost and slush of early March showed no signs of spring, the winter lull was over, and everywhere on the British front men knew that great things were stirring.

Before I reached G.H.Q., Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig had already reported the recapture or surrender of eleven villages on the Ancre during February, including Serre and Gommecourt, which had defied our efforts in the summer of 1916.  That is to say, after three months of trench routine and trench endurance imposed by a winter which seemed to have let loose every possible misery of cold and wet, of storm and darkness, on the fighting hosts in France, the battle of the Somme had moved steadily forward again from the point it had reached in November.  Only, when the curtain rose on the new scene it was found that during these three months strange things had been happening.

About the middle of November, after General Gough’s brilliant strokes on the Ancre, which gave us St. Pierre Divion, Beaucourt, and Beaumont Hamel, and took us up to the outskirts of Grandcourt, the Frankfurter Zeitung wrote—­“For us Germans the days of the crisis on the Somme are over.  Let the French and English go on sacrificing the youth of their countries here.  They will not thereby achieve anything more.”  Yet when this was written the German Higher Command was already well aware that the battle of the Somme had been won by the Allies, and that it would be impossible for Germany to hold out on the same ground against another similar attack.

Three months, however, of an extraordinarily hard winter gave them a respite, and enabled them to veil the facts from their own people.  The preparations for retirement, which snow and fog and the long nights of January helped them to conceal in part from our Air Service, must have actually begun not many weeks after General Gough’s last successes on the Ancre, when the British advance paused, under stress of weather, before Grandcourt and Bapaume.  So that in the latter half of February, when General Gough again pushed forward, it was to feel the German line yielding before him; and by March 3rd, the day of my visit to the Somme, it was only a question of how far the Germans would go and what the retreat meant.

Meanwhile, in another section of the line our own plans were maturing, which were to bear fruit five weeks later in the brilliant capture of that Vimy ridge I had seen on March 2, filling the blue middle distance, from the bare upland of Notre Dame de Lorette.  If on the Somme the anvil was to some extent escaping from the hammer, in the coming battle of Arras the hammer was to take its full revenge.