But when General March said in August: "It is up to us to win the war," and the _North American Review_ talked of "virtually impregnable positions," and the impossibility of "anything like conclusive results from the present campaign"--the capture of those "impregnable positions" by the British Army, and thereby the winning of the war, were only a few weeks away! Similar phrases could be quoted from the British Press, and from prominent Englishmen, though not, unless my memory plays me false, from any of our responsible military leaders. The fact is that the view I represented, in my second article, as the view taken by the heads of the British Army, of the March retreat, had turned out by the summer to be the true one. The German armies _had_ to a large extent beaten themselves out against the British defensive battle of the spring: and while the Americans were making their splendid spurt from April to August, and entering the fighting field in force for the first time, the British Army, having absorbed its recruits, taken huge toll of its enemies, and profited by all there was to be learnt from the German offensive, was getting ready every day to give the final strokes in the war, aided, when the moment came, by the supreme leadership of Marshal Foch, by the successes of Generals Mangin and Dégoutte on the Marne, by the masterly campaign of General Gouraud in Champagne, and the gallant push of General Pershing in the Argonne. This position of things was not sufficiently realised by the general public in England, still less by the American public, as is shown by the extracts I have quoted. So that the continuous series of British victories, from August 8th onward, which ended in the Armistice, came as a rather startling surprise to those both here and abroad who, like von Kluck in 1914, had been inclined to make too much of a temporary British retreat.
Moreover, behind the military successes of Great Britain--and not only on the French front, but in the East also--stood always the deadly pressure of the British blockade. When after the capture of the Hindenburg positions, the line indicating "prisoners," on that chart at G.H.Q., a reduced copy of which will be found at the end of this book, leapt up to a height for which the wall in the room of the Director of Operations could hardly find space, it meant not only victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of German _morale_ at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to Germany's undoing, since the opening of the struggle. The final victory of the Allies when it came was thus in a special sense Great Britain's victory, achieved both by her mastery of the sea, and the military expansion forced upon her by the German attack; conditioned, of course, by the whole earlier history of the war, in which France had led the van and borne the brunt, and immensely facilitated by the "splendid American adventure," to use the phrase of an American.