Sir Douglas Haig took the lead.  A year before this date he had refused in other circumstances, as one supremely responsible for the British Army, to agree to a unified command under a French general, and the events had justified him.  But now the hour had arrived, and the man.  The proposal that General Foch should take the supreme control of the four Allied armies now fighting or gathering in France was made and pressed by Sir Douglas Haig.  There was anxious debate, some opposition in unexpected quarters, and finally a unanimous decision.  General Foch, waiting in an adjoining room, was called in and accepted the task with the simplicity of the great soldier who is also a man of religious faith.  For Foch, the devout Catholic and pupil of the Jesuits, and Haig the Presbyterian, are alike in this:  there rules in both of them the conviction that this world is not an aimless scene of chance, and that man has an Unseen Helper.

Such, at least, is the story as it runs; and, at any rate, from that meeting at Doullens dates the transformation of the war.  For five weeks afterwards the German attack beat against the British front, bending and denting but never breaking it.  Then at the end of April the attack died down, brought up against the British and French reserves which Ludendorff had immensely underrated, and—­strategically—­it had failed.

A month later came the “violent surprise attack” on the Aisne, which, as we all know, carried the enemy to the Marne and across it, and on the 7th of June the French were again attacked between Noyon and Montdidier.  The strain was great.  But Foch was making his plans; the British Army was being steadily reorganised; the drafts from England were being absorbed and trained under a Commander-in-Chief who, by the consent of all his subordinates, is a supreme manipulator and trainer of fighting men, while never forgetting the human reality which is the foundation of it all.  Soon the number of effective infantry divisions on the British front had risen from forty-five to fifty-two.  And meanwhile American energy was pouring men across the Atlantic, and everywhere along the Allied front and in the Allied countries, but especially in ravaged, war-weary France, the news of the weekly arrivals, 80,000, 100,000, 70,000 men, was exactly the stimulus that the older armies needed.

It was a race between the German Army and the growing strength of the Allies—­and it was presently a duel between Ludendorff and Foch.  “Attack! attack!” was the German military cry, “or it will be too late!” And on July 15th Ludendorff struck again to the east and south-west of Rheims.  General Gouraud, who was in command of the Fourth French Army to the east of Rheims, told me at Strasbourg the dramatic story of that attack and of its brilliant and overwhelming repulse.  I will return to it in a later letter.  Meanwhile the German Command in the Marne salient plunged blindly on, deepening the pocket in which his forces were engaged—­striking for Montmirail, Meaux, and Paris.