“But why,” asks one of the men best qualified to speak in our Army—­“why use the words ‘retreat’ and ‘disaster’ at all?” They were indeed commonly used at the time both in England and abroad, and have been often used since about the fighting of the British Army last March and April.  Strictly speaking, my interlocutor suggests, neither word is applicable.  The British Army indeed fell back some thirty-five miles on its southern front, till the German attack was finally stayed before Amiens.  The British centre stood firm from Arras to Bethune.  But in the north we had to yield almost all the ground gained in the Salient the year before, and some that had never yet been in German hands.  We lost heavily in men and guns, and a shudder of alarm ran through all the Allied countries.

Nevertheless what Europe was then witnessing—­I am of course quoting not any opinion of my own, to which I have no right, but what I have gathered from those responsible men who were in the forefront of the fighting—­was in truth a great defensive battle, long and anxiously foreseen, in which the German forces were double the British forces opposed to them (64 to 32 divisions—­73 to 32—­and so on), while none the less all that was vitally necessary to the Allied cause was finally achieved by the British Army, against these huge odds.  Germany, in fact, made her last desperate effort a year ago to break through the beleaguering British, forces, and failed.  On our side there was no real surprise, though our withdrawal was deeper and our losses greater than had been foreseen.  The troops themselves may have been confident; it is the habit of gallant men.  But the British command knew well what it had to face, and had considered carefully weeks beforehand where ground could be given—­as in all probability it would have to be given—­with the least disadvantage.  Some accidents, if one may call them so, indeed there were—­the thick white fog, for instance, which “on the morning of March 21st enveloped our outpost line, and made it impossible to see more than fifty yards in any direction, so that the machine guns and forward field-guns which had been disposed so as to cover this zone with their fire were robbed almost entirely of their effect—­and the masses of German infantry advanced comparatively unharassed, so closely supporting each other that loss of direction was impossible.”  Hence the rapidity of the German advance through the front lines on March 21st, and the alarming break-through south of St. Quentin, where our recently extended line was weakest and newest.  A second accident was the drying up of the Oise Marshes at a time when in a normal year they might have been reckoned on to stop the enemy’s advance.  A third piece of ill-luck was the fact that in the newest section of the British line, where the enemy attack broke at its hottest, there had been no time, since it had been given over to us by the French—­who had held it lightly, as a quiet sector, during the