ECHOES OF THE WAR

Evening Star, Issue 17926, 23 March 1922, Page 2

ECHOES OF THE WAR

[From Our Own Correspondent.] LONDON, February 2. Tho talk was in the groat bay window of a famous club in St. James’s street, and, ' as it will among men of military ago, it turned on tho war and concentrated on that over debatable Subject—the March retreat of. 1910. There were men with D.S.O.s and other honorable attachments to their name who had been in tho area of the break. .And, as it will, the criticism of the staff work was unsparing. “Do you know,” said one disgusted major, “ that, with tho exception of tho front lino, there was not a single lino of trenches between the Allies and St. Quentin ? Wo had only the Engineers’ marks where the other trendies should have been.” A captain of Horse capped this by tho luridly expressed description, imbued by personal experience, of three Cavalry divisions engaged in manuring French farm land when, of course, they should have been digging trenches. Even the great advance which ended with the armistice did not soothe these critics of the staff. The armistice, they held, was concluded because tho staff’s arrangements were so bad that the advance could scarcely have proceeded. As a matter of what was at one time secret history, this is Jess than just to the staff. It can now be said that tho reasons for tho conclusion of tho armistice at the particular time chosen were political rather than military. The ultimate decision lay in the advice of that very wise statesman, as well as soldier, Foch. In summing up the situation the marshal held that, while tho Allies and Associate America could without the least doubt overrun Germany up to Berlin, the last stage, owing to the depletion and exhaustion of the French and British armies, would have to bo left to our cousins. Their’s would have been the army to make the triumphal entry, and their’s would have been the appearance of tho real winners of the war. It was decided that this would give tho Americans an undue power of dictation in tho settlement of the European situation. And So we had the armistice on November 11, instead of the entry into Berlin in -the Mowing spring