The End Of A War

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31730, 13 July 1968, Page 4

The End Of A War

Armistice 1918. By Brigadier C. N. Barclay. Dent. 126 pp. Appendices and Index.

This book, by a prominent military historian, is more suitable reading for a student of military campaigns than for the ordinary reader. Nevertheless the dramatic happenings of 1918 could never be dull, and Brigadier Barclay’s masterly summary of events leading up to the German request for an armistice in November shows the inexorable pressure which was being put on Germany by that time. After their last great offensive on the western front in March the German Army’s strength, following on the enormous casualties suffered in four years of trench warfare, began to decline, as reserves at last started to run out, while the mobilisation of large American armies, many of which did not in the event have to go into action, sustained the weary spirits of the British and French in the final struggle. The actual turning point in the military operations came in the second battle of the Marne beginning on August 8, in which the Germans sustained 75,000 casualties, and the British and French captured 18,500 and 11,373 prisoners respectively. A German writer described this as “The greatest defeat which the German Army had suffered since the beginning of the war." The German naval situation had also become parlous. Though it was the Germans’ persistence in unrestricted submarine warfare which decided the Americans in 1917 to come into the war, they were unable to stem the arrival of American troop transports in England, and the starvation which Germany had hoped to inflict upon England became a factor in the break-up of its own civilian morale.

By suing for the armistice the Germans showed an astuteness which was to pay off in after years, as their army was permitted to retreat unbroken to Germany, thereby giving rise to the myth that it had been “stabbed in the back” by its own people, and “was never beaten.” The author is scrupulously fair to all the combatants in

the war but stoutly defends the tactics of the British Higher Command which was subsequently vilified for unduly sacrificing troops in limited and costly attacks during the years of trench warfare. These actions, the author maintains, kept up the

morale of the British troops, whose discipline never wavered, though the French unhappily had to deal with more than one mutiny. Figures show that between July and November it was the British army which played the principal part in achieving victory, the number of prisoners and guns captured (188,700 and 2840 respectively ) far exceeding those of the other Allies. It is a sad reflection on the mutability of human nature that the vast sacrifices entailed throughout hostilities by all the combatants should have resulted in a Peace Treaty impossible to implement, and the complete failure of the League of Nations to keep racial hatreds for ever in subjection. “The war not only dealt Europe the cradle of modern civilisation—a blow from which she never recovered, it also created conditions for another war twenty-one years later. Together they have resulted in the end of white European supremacy and leadership in world affairs.”