Hawkeye or Pathfinder, who prowled about through the advanced positions finding out where the American infantry was. The happy-go-lucky system of advance resulted in divisions continually finding themselves 'in the air' and losing touch with one another, leaving perilous gaps in the line.

Thus, in the first attack, the 91st Division pushed forward ahead of the divisions on either side of it, and on September 29 it found itself with both flanks completely exposed and in grave danger of being cut off. It only saved itself by retreating and surrendering ground that had been won at very heavy cost. On October 2 a black regiment which was acting as a liaison unit suddenly fell back in disorder and left the flank of the 77th Division in the air. Seven companies were cut off by the enemy, and managed to hold out in the forest until they were rescued five days later. For several days the Divisional Staffs were entirely in the dark as to the strength of the force that had been cut off, and the most alarming rumors were current. The failure of this negro regiment produced a great impression on the entire army, and it is likely to have a considerable effect on the relations of white and black in the United States. In the successful attack of October 6 on the heights on the eastern side of the Argonne Forest a regiment of the 82d Division failed to get up in time for the attack, and a gap was left in the lines. The result was that the brigade on the left was held up and suffered severely from machine-gun fire, until it sent one of its own battalions to capture the position.

In the earlier battles of the war such mistakes led to terrible consequences, and as it was they cost the Americans heavy losses. If the enemy had been able to counter-attack in force and his artillery had been strong enough to

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prevent the Americans from discovering their position and consolidating their gains, no numbers would have availed. Indeed, not a small part of the American transport troubles came from the excessive number of troops in line. They attacked with nine divisions, with a total infantry strength of about 100,000 men, on a front of eighteen miles, which was held on the day of the attack by five German divisions with a strength of about 15,000 rifles. Against this terrific onslaught the Boches adopted, as was expected, the defensive method which stood General Gouraud in such good stead when in July he broke the last German offensive in Champagne. As soon as they were sure that an attack was impending they evacuated their front lines, leaving only machine-gun nests to hold up the enemy and to cause him as much loss as possible. The American troops were much astonished at the comparatively feeble resistance with which they met on the first day. However, they bustled ahead as far as they could, and their dash and endurance carried them farther than to all appearances the enemy intended. Thus they succeeded in capturing Montfaucon, which dominates the whole region. For a moment it seemed that a brilliant and decisive victory was within the Americans' grasp. Then, however, the advance slackened and came to a standstill. It was not the opposition of the enemy that checked the Americans. There was no big counter-attack or very heavy artillery fire. The nine divisions in the front line were held fast, in the words of a French Staff officer, 'by a stake stuck through their tail.' The Headquarters Staff had no time to think of the enemy; their whole attention had to be given to straightening out their communications, for behind the lines there was utter confusion.

Nothing is more delicate than transport organization before a battle, and a single mistake may be fatal to victory. It was particularly delicate for the Americans, as their sector was very badly provided with roads. In these circumstances a serious blunder was made in the traffic scheme, and it ended in the most colossal traffic jam in the war. Those of us who were on the Somme remember the traffic jams of 1916. In those days we thought that the Guillemont road when it marked the boundary between the British and French beat all the records of confusion, but that road was an orderly, practical means of communication compared to the chaos of the roads behind the American front. At Avocourt, the critical point, there was a jam in which not a wheel turned for seventeen hours. The men in the first line, who had advanced four miles or so, were in many cases without supplies for four days.

The American difficulties were in no way due to the German artillery. On a great part of their front they were fighting on ground that had never been fought on before, so that it was tolerably free of shell-holes. The mud was bad, but certainly not so bad as both at Verdun and in the Somme. The confusion arose, first, from the Staff mistake mentioned above, and, secondly, from want of comprehension of the meaning of traffic discipline.

The great lesson of the war has been the need of submission to authority. This lesson the Americans had not had time to learn, and they are by nature an independent people. There were far too many detached lorries on the roads without any responsible N.C.O., and their drivers seemed to take a malicious delight in holding up all traffic. Much time and confusion might have been saved if the Americans, in the days immediately preceding the attack, had

prepared tracks beside the roads for infantry and horse vehicles. As it was, motors, horse vehicles, and men were all muddled together in a conglomerate mess, and it took miracles of patience and endless delay to reëstablish circulation.

The German road discipline was one of the most impressive qualities of the German Army. An American officer who had occasion to pass a German corps during its retreat after the armistice told me that his car was able to travel practically at full speed along the road past the marching infantry with all its impedimenta. Rigid Prussian discipline insisted on every man and every driver keeping to the right as much as possible and leaving fully half the road absolutely clear.

The American communications were sadly hampered by the want of light railways. In modern warfare the light railway is indispensable. Some time before the Somme Battle of 1916, General Gouraud said to the writer, 'Do try and persuade your people that they will never succeed in any offensive without light railways. Motor traffic is no substitute for them. Without them everything will be held up.' In the Somme we soon learned that nothing could be done without railways, and after our terrible difficulties with road traffic the engineers began to lay down an efficient light railway system. General Gouraud practised what he preached. He had more miles of light railway to the mile of front in his sector than any other general on the French front. Not a little of his success in resisting the German advance last July was due to that admirable railway organization.

The part played by the railways in the war seems to be singularly misunderstood at home. Mr. Lovat Fraser in the Daily Mail of March 3, wrote, "The motors did far more than

the locomotives toward winning the war on the Western Front.' Such a total misconception of all the lessons of the war is little less than astounding. One might be tempted in opposition to put forward the paradox that it was an actual advantage to the Germans that they were so short of motor-lorries, since this very shortage compelled them to build efficient light-railway systems everywhere. The motor-lorry is undoubtedly valuable, but its use should be confined to emergency. Verdun was saved by motor-lorries, but it would have been saved far more easily and with far less loss if only the French authorities had previously built a system of military railways out of reach of the German guns. There were three thousand lorries plying daily along the famous road between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. The eternal procession was maintained by thousands of men working on the road, and by mercilessly sacrificing every motor that broke down; but it was a strain which could not have been kept up indefinitely. Yet all those lorries only represented fifteen trains a day in either direction on an ordinary line. They were eventually replaced by a branch line built from Revigny, and when that line was opened communications with Verdun were assured in a way that the lorries had never been able to assure them. A glance at any German map will always show behind the lines a magnificent system of railways both narrow and broad gauge, and it is hardly to be doubted that our efforts would have been more successful if only we had had a similar organization.

There followed for the whole American Army a period of acute disappointment. The British in the north were advancing with enormous strides, while they themselves, burning with eagerness and enthusiasm, were held

up after the first two days' success. The American High Command had hoped to reach its first main objective on the second or third day of fighting and to have cleared the Argonne within a week; their patrols were to have met the French patrols at Grandpré. The whole plan was upset by the disorganization behind the lines. A precious week was lost and the enemy had time to strengthen his defenses in the rear, with the result that they were able to stave off military disasters until the armistice.

On the American side there was a want of realization of the real difficulties which had to be faced. I myself heard one of the highest officers of General Pershing's Staff remark that on by far the greater part of the French front it was as easy to fight in winter as in summer. It was rather hard on the wounded, perhaps, he admitted, but otherwise quite simple. It was impossible for raw troops to realize the power of General Mud. There was an idea abroad that the French and British stuck in trenches and kept more or less quiet during winter because they liked it. The Americans did not understand that there is a certain state of weather and soil which makes all fighting on a large scale literally impossible. Had they realized the difficulty of transport and its importance, they might, thanks to their numbers and dash, have won a really great victory before hostilities came to an end.

On October 1, after six days' battle, they were still between one and a half and three miles away from the main points of their first objective and the enemy's resistance had not weakened. In the second stage of the battle the Americans succeeded in clearing the Argonne by a well-conceived operation. A sudden conversion of the front of their left wing to the west enabled

them to scale the heights on the eastern edge of the forest, and their success clinched the victory won by the French three days before, when they had occupied Challerange. Their next business was to get into touch with the Kriemhilde-Stellung all along the line. Throughout the action the Americans were hampered by an insufficiency of intelligence. The positions and extent of the various lines were only vaguely known, and for a time the Kriemhilde-Stellung must have seemed to the infantry to be either a myth or a position which was moving steadily northward. It was not till November 1 that the Americans reached the Kriemhilde-Stellung. The new lines, in the absence of big German counter-attacks, had been consolidated and were ready for the final advance on the last main objective which was to seal the fate of the German Army. Unhappily, the battle had already lasted thirtyseven days, and the enemy had only to stave off defeat for ten more days before the armistice.

From November 1 to November 11 was the last stage of the ArgonneMeuse battle. Up to this time the enemy had hoped to escape defeat and save his main railway line by defensive tactics, but now he saw that the end was near. The courage of the American Army and its practically unlimited supply of men made it only a question of time before the defense was overpowered. Yet he made a last desperate effort to save the situation. On November 1 he threw three new divisions into the line, three more on November 2, six on November 3, two on November 4, and three on November 5, so that he engaged no less than seventeen fresh divisions during these five days. Then his reserves were ex

The National Review

hausted and there was nothing left for him but to withdraw behind the Meuse. The main object of the battle was fulfilled. The Mézières railway line was within reach of the American guns. From the German point of view the whole situation was saved by the armistice.

The long struggle ended in a victory for the Americans. They were fortunate enough to come at a moment when numbers and courage could turn the balance. Some four years before General Joffre had said cheerfully that he was 'nibbling away' at the German lines, and that continuous nibbling had brought the German Army to the point at which its reserves were exhausted. At the time of the armistice Germany had on the entire western front only one fresh division in reserve, and a great attack was preparing in Lorraine under General Mangin's command with twenty divisions. The Americans had shown that their army was excellent material from which after another eighteen months' fighting a fine set of scientific soldiers could have been made. As it was, their success cost them dearly. The French used to say after the battle of the Somme that there were three first-rate armies in the world, the British, the French, and the German. Had the war continued for another eighteen months the American Army, would, no doubt, have taken rank in that category.*

*The Americans estimate that forty-six German divisions were engaged against them in the Argonne battle. At the moment of going to press I have received an official estimate from the French Intelligence Department, which states that in all twenty-seven German divisions were engaged against the Americans in the Argonne battle between September 26 and November 11. 1918. At that time the strength of the German company was between fifty and seventy men so that the infantry strength of the division amounted to about 2,500 rifles. Thus according to the French the Germans engaged about 60,000 rifles against 260,000 Americans. THE AUTHOR.

ENGLAND, whether a learned country or not, is a country in which the 'more Humane Letters' have a strangely potent influence on life. Reforms are pending in regard to their place in our schools. It may not be amiss for an ordinary parent (no expert in teaching) to set down simply his trite reflections on this limited part of the vast field of our national education.

One cannot read recent authoritative reports on this matter without the sense that a wise constructive spirit prevails among our educational leaders. But much depends on the influence which parents exercise on schools. It is the besetting temptation of authority, while being in general too conservative, to yield in the wrong direction to the wrong kind of pressure. And public opinion easily forgets fundamental principles about education.

Strange delusions sometimes have the countenance of eminent men. There was recently a conference of scientific personages of almost overpowering distinction. They delivered each his oration; they then collected letters from parents with sons at our most famous public school, and they circulated the result far and wide. It may be summarized thus: 'It is disgraceful that our schools do not teach their pupils... which would be so useful to them afterwards, and which every educated man ought to know.' We are left to fill the blanks with the various subjects which the men of science and their correspond

ents severally named. If we do so, their collective demand comes to this: Our public schools must provide more teaching in every nameable branch of physical science, in mathematics up to a higher point than school boys now reach, in English literature as a whole, in the most recent history of every important country, in French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, in geography, in bookkeeping, in commercial correspondence, in the elements of political economy, and in the theory of foreign exchanges.

Those of us who have ever been at school know that this is nonsense. We can form some notion of what is involved in the organizing and staffing of a school; we can also recall what we were like as boys. We know that it would be idle to try to fit every boy with just that sort of information that shall have the most direct bearing on the pursuits which will engage him ten years hence. But when distinguished men can publish stuff like this, lesser men may easily forget the leading principle which governs all education. The intellectual benefit (not to speak here of the more distinctively moral benefit) which schools can offer lies not so much in definite information as in an increased facility for learning whatever the student may hereafter need to learn, and an attitude of more alert receptiveness toward all that the world has to teach. And to this main purpose of schools all other purposes must be kept subordinate. We want capable and enlightened citizens more than skilled professional men. And