The administrative decentralization exemplified by likin was visiblealso in Tseng's other financial measures.

his meant,first, establishing new categories of local revenue that were not under theBoard of Revenue's direct control; and second, once Tseng's group hadachieved high provincial offices, gathering fiscal power into the hands ofthe governors and governors-general and bypassing the Board ofRevenue.

The personal links thus formed supplied the cohesiveness which theGreen Standard army and its mercenary adjuncts so conspicuously lacked.

All ranks were in fact fastened together by personal relation-ships.

The rise of the Hunan Army represented irregular forms of organiza-tion - by implication highly subversive of imperial authority - which werenevertheless so cloaked in orthodoxy that they were able to coexist withthe established Ch'ing order.

Tseng, however, knew t'uan-lien to be wholly unequal to the Taipingchallenge and after some hesitation resolved to use existing resources ina new way.

Having begun his military career in responseto purely local threats, he was now firmly committed to the larger anti-Taiping campaign.

Militia raised fromChiang's t'uan-lien association played a major role in defeating the rebel-lions of Lei Tsai-hao and Li Yuan-fa.

champion the traditional order during the mid-century rebellions wasalso to contribute in some measure to the early phases of China's moderntransformation.

Yet it retained anasset that the rebels would now have to reckon with: the stubborn hos-tility of significant segments of the orthodox elite towards the alien creedand the new order, a hostility that could now be put to the service of theManchu monarchy.

his faith elevated the Hakka struggles to a new planeof significance: a battle of the saved against the damned.

Ultimately, however, there emergedthe potent combination of minority-group alienation and intense ideo-logical consciousness that was embodied in the Hakka-organized God-Worshipping Society.

ligarchic and hierarchic trends cast seriousdoubt upon the ultimate capacity of the Taipings to carry out a thorough-going and lasting social revolution in China.

Taiping movement was indeed a pro-found social revolution,

the anti-Ch'ing and anti-landlord messages were hardly distinguishable by thosewho considered themselves victims of a system in which power andproperty were so closely entwined

beneath the surface of Taiping social theory lay the interests of thetheocratic state.

A gentrydiarist, recording conditions around occupied Nanking, found thathatred of officials and hatred of landlords contributed in roughly equalproportions to popular support of the Taipings

The abolition of restrictive boundariesamong men, a recurrent theme of Chinese Utopian thought, was constantlyrestated in terms of the brotherhood of men under the supremedeity

heir nationalist aims, the Taipings openly revealed their ultimate inten-tion to build on earth a heavenly kingdom that would embrace all.

theTaipings hid their religious message under more traditionally acceptablenationalist appeals.

ebellionwas proclaimed to be a national uprising against alien oppressors. Theappeal was to national pride in the face of usurpatious rule by China's'traditional enemies' - the northern barbarians - who had fastened uponChina a cruel and corrupt government and had befouled her culture withalien uses.

e leadership group wasthereby established as a band of brothers, with somewhat diminishedstatus for the movement's founder.

impoverishment and social polarization of central China,already apparent in the turmoil of the tax resistance movement of the1840s, had brought its inevitable results

out of theKwangsi river systems and into the Yangtze tributary network.

isorganized and poorly regimented Ch'ing armiesfailed to divert them from their larger strategic purpose

eadership of the God-Worshippers that itwas no longer possible to survive in the Kwangsi environment, and it wasprobably during this critical period that they reached the decision torevolt.

e fatally-fragmented character of theTaiping leadership group can thus be traced to the absence of its foundersduring a critical period of development.

pocalyptic political implications of Liang's tract,which Hung himself had been unready to accept, came to the fore as faithbecame organically bound to social reality.

During the feuds of the 1840s thesepoor and indefensible Hakka communities were sometimes utterly dis-placed from their holdings

partly becauseof the deterioration of local government; and partly because of the tra-dition of intercommunity vendettas

he politicization of hisvision and the absorption of the Good words' rebellious undertone were notto take place until Hung's revelation had become firmly embodied in thebeleaguered Hakka communities of Kwangsi.

the leaders of which despised the Manchus for their weakness beforethe barbarians.

he sequential confusion of the biblical materialsuggests that the coming of the Messiah was not simply an historicalevent that happened at a single point in the past, but rather an apocalypticworld crisis that might occur any number of times.

Liang's Good words embodies seriouspolitical implications. There is, first, the repeated suggestion that Chinesesociety as a whole stands at the brink of disaster as a result of a long pro-cess of moral decline - an unmistakable suggestion, to a Chinese readerof the 1830s, of the low point in a dynastic cycle.

ocal gentry, convinced that they could expect little aidfrom a corrupt and incompetent officialdom, formed local defenceassociations (t'uan), which assumed a leading role in community affairsand mobilized defence militia

Cleavage theory conceives layers of partisan attachment rather than thereplacement of one dimension of contestation by another.

Both parties give these issues much greater salience in theirappeals to voters than mainstream parties, and they are less handicappedby internal divisions.

their efforts are constrained by the policycommitments of self-selected activists and leaders, by brand reputationsembedded in the expectations of voters, and by the interests and values oftheir social base.

Hence, opposition to transnationalism is for many a populist reaction againstélites who have little sympathy for national borders

Nationalism has long been the refuge ofthose who are insecure, who sense they are losing status, and who seek stand-ing by identifying with the group.

European integration raised fundamental issues of rule and belongingfor those who wished to ‘defend national culture, language, community andnational sovereignty against the influx of immigrants, against competingsources of identity within the state, and against external pressures fromother countries and international organizations’

political parties are programmatically inflexible;

It was experiential, the outcome of repeatedconflict which defined and solidified the composition of in-groups and out-groups

national revolution that produced a cleavage between the central state andperipheral communities and between the central state and a supranationalchurch; and the industrial revolution that produced an urban/rural cleavage,and later a worker/employer cleavage.

Cleavage theory, originating in Lipset and Rokkan (1967), conceives a nationalparty system as the expression of underlying social conflicts.

The emergence of a new cleavage reveals the causal power of social forcesin the face of established institutions.

We term this cleavage a transnational cleavage because it has as its focalpoint the defense of national political, social and economic ways of lifeagainst external actors who penetrate the state by migrating, exchanginggoods or exerting rule.

y began slowly and reluctantlyto reassess the realism of this in the summer of i9i5 when it becameapparent that the Germans would not oblige the allies by attackingtheir line in the west and that the French and Russians were not preparedto bear the burden of the land war alon

The policy-making elite knew the ends they wanted to achieve,maximum victory for Britain at minimum cost, but they could notagree about the me

nt. It was now the way in whi

It meant that tactically the high commandnow conducted a sequence of assaults each with limited objectives.

heinsisted that Rawlinson should seek to break through the Germandefences in his first assault by 'getting as large a combined force ofFrench and British across the Somme and fighting the enemy in theopen.

best way to do thisappears to me to be to seize points of tactical importance which willprovide us with good observation and which we may feel quite certainthe Germans will counter-attack.

Robertson and Haighad so blurred the distinction between Kitchener's concept of attritionand a break-through battle that they had lulled them into believingthat the forthcoming operations would not seek to break through theGerman line but would be no more than 'nibbling & gnawing' ona large scal

alled for a series of co-ordinated offensives to exhaust the enemy'sreserves before the final attempt at a break-through was made

January I9I6 the conscriptionists won because in theend a majority of Cabinet ministers were convinced by Robertson'sand Kitchener's arguments that unless they agreed to conscription andparticipated in the plans arranged at Chantilly there was a strong possi-bility that one or more of Britain's allies might make a separate pe

at French manpower reserves were now so ser-iously depleted that a growing burden of the land war in the westwould fall on the BEF.

But in private their most telling argument wasthat without conscription Britain would not be able to marshal herhuman and economic resources to sustain herself and her allies througha long war.

the resources of the Allies aresufficient to enable them to wear out the enemy and finally to beathim, if only the will to conquer and a sound direction of their unitedefforts and resources are not wantin

by a co-ordinated series of allied offensives on the eastern,western and Italian fronts designed to bring the Central Powers tothe peace table by the end of i9i6

2 Clearly they could not afford to slacken theirefforts and on i S November French ordered his army commandersto mount local offensive operations throughout the winter 'to wearout and exhaust the enemy's troop

he failure of the Loos offensive caused them to lay more stresson the need to prolong the 'wearing-out' stage of the next atta

e commander-in-chief had discovered theweakest point in the enemy's line, should he commit his army reservesin a break-through attemp

Haigexplained that this might be done if the British launched an offensiveon a front of twenty-five miles preceded by a heavy artillery bombard-ment of several days duration followed by infantry attacks all alongthe front to draw in and exhaust the enemy's reserv

We must keep hammering away & todo that must have more & more men & more and more ammunition.If we can only keep our attacks going we shall wear Germany out& the war will be over in six mo

, although the British high command was well aware of the poten-tially annihilating results of defensive fire-power, they nurtured notionsabout offensive warfare which emphasized that superior moral qualitiesrather than sheer weight of fire-power would lead to victories andthat remaining on the defensive for prolonged periods was dangerousbecause it sapped their troops' offensive spiri

. They believed that with sufficient men, guns andammunition they could break through.

'we must act with all our energy, and do our utmost to helpthe French, even though by so doing, we suffered very heavy lossesindeed.'S

s. It collapsed inlate August in the face of the failure of Sir Ian Hamilton's second majorattempt to carry the Gallipoli peninsula, the German capture of Warsawand two political crises in Paris and Petrograd which frightened theCabinet into believing that the very stability of the Entente alliancewould be endangered unless they agreed to the BEF participating inthe major offensive Joffre planned for the autum

hey gave the French a timetable showing when the New Armies wouldbe ready and when they would be sent to France, but also pointedout that they were short of artillery ammunition, that they could onlybe used to hold the trenches and were not ready to take part in majoroffensive operation

o support the French by 'an active defenas possible on the enemy, & nibbling & gnawing along the wholefront, but no great offensive movement until ample supplies of ammuni-tion are available

best be furthered by the allies in the Wesattrition by means o

Haig warned that unless some progresswas made in driving the Germans out of France the 'peace-party mayget the upper hand & peace may be made before wint

disgusted by Britain's reluctance to commitherself to the continental land war and who might be ready to listento German blandishment

here is no prospect,I believe, of the Allies obtaining an old-fashioned victory over theGermans at this stage of the w

'Lord Kitchener's stra-tegy is to continue for the present the war of attrition in the hopethat the Germans will continue to break themselves up by costlyattempts to shatter our lines - attempts which can never succeed aslong as we keep proper reserves in hand to meet the

.' Kitchener'spreference was very much for attrition. He was afraid that if the allieslaunched another premature offensive they would simply exhaust theirown reserves and enable the Germans to bring back their troops fromRussia and inflict a serious defeat on the Anglo-French armies in thewest

But Kitchener was adamant.Apart from two Territorial divisions already earmarked for the BEFhe would not send the New Armies to France 'till the line was brok

t 'If we are victorious, the end of the war mustcome through one of the two following causes: (i) By a decisive victory,or a succession of decisive victories, of the Allies ... (2) by attrition,for when Germany is no longer able to support her armies in sufficientstrength in the field she must sue for peace.

New Armies were intended to win the peace forBritain, after the French and Russians had all but won the war.

prepare his own troops so that by the begining of the third yearof the war, when the French, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarianarmies had fought each other to a standstill and were running shortof men, Britain's reserves of military manpower would still be intac

his evidence suggests that when Kitchener was raising the NewArmies he did not intend that they should be prematurely committedto a series of costly wearing-out battles on the western f

He did not believe that the mere fact that Britainwas now allied to them meant that the war had extinguished theirpre-war rivalries and he was afraid that in the post-war world theywould reassert themselves

'our Army should reach its full strength at the beginning of the thirdyear of the War, just when France is getting into rather low waterand Germany is beginning to feel the pinc

it was his duty so to prepareour land forces that by their steadily expanding numbers and constantlyincreasing efficiency they should enable us to play a part worthy ofEngland, and at the peace to impose terms in consonance with ourinterests.

It therefore followed that it was worthwhile to raise large numbersof new troops because the war would not be over quickly

nd. 'Nofinancial pressure has ever yet stopped a war in progre

. The Cabinet hoped that they could be usedas bargaining counters at the eventual peace confere

I9I4; theywished to defeat the Central Powers; and they wanted to ensure thatwhen the time came for the belligerents to make peace that Britainwas the strongest of them all and therefore was in a position to imposeher peace terms on both her enemies and her a

s he insisted that allied strategy, especially in the first two yearsof the war, had been fatally mistaken. Instead of exploiting the immensesuperiority in manpower which the Entente powers of Russia, France,the British Empire, Serbia, Italy, Roumania and Belgium possessedand instead of attacking the Central Powers where they were weakest,on the eastern and Balkan fronts, the British government heeded theadvice of Lord Kitchener and threw their weight into the war on thewestern front.

The evacuation of Gallipoli made it apparent that there wouldbe no rapid end to the war and ministers felt they had no option otherthan to accept the recommendations of the Chantilly conference of6-8 December I9I5 that the British should concentrate their army inFrance to take part in a grand co-ordinated allied offensive in

Attrition was what eventuated when these overly ambi-tious plans failed.

What it does add up to is attrition, in that the armies of allthe combatants were being worn down

On an average day on the Somme and at Verdun just a handfulof divisions were engaged in an attack, large battles being followed by a rapiddiminution in intensity.

Despite theircasualties, the initiative at the end of 1916 still lay with the Entente.

from a quiteunexpected source – the British.

The Somme saw the martyrdom of the volunteer armies raised in Britainbetween 1914 and 1916

Notonly was Arras not in sight, but the German front trenches still were. Groundgained started to be measured in feet, and on some sections of the front eventhat proved too large a scale.

October he wrote to the War Committee and soughtpermission to continue the offensive. Here was a chance for the civilians toreassert their authority.

They had totally lost the will to question their chiefmilitary adviser or their Commander-in-Chief in the West. The offensivewould continue. Haig could do what he liked.

most members of the Committee werethoroughly alarmed at the casualty total and perplexed that Romania couldbe overrun when they had been assured that at the very least the Sommeoffensive was pinning German troops to the Western Front

But as Haig paused in late September he made what could have been aserious mistake

Below lay more Germandefences. But it was late in the campaigning season

So, accompanied by a creeping barrage fired across the whole front, theFourth Army subdued the German defence and made reasonable ground (inGreat War terms) at modest cost.

ess sensibly, he decided not to fire a creepingbarrage, which by this time had become the standard form of infantryprotection in an attack, for fear of hitting the tanks

he weapon was untriedand to base a war-winning campaign on an untested weapon would haveinvolved the utmost peril.

Britain had very deep pockets (4,000 million pounds were available to it inforeign investments in 1914) and the Germans could only watch as British warproduction reached new heights with American help.

By 1916 Britain had assembled a mass army on a continental scale and it wasbacked by what was soon to become the largest munitions effort in the world.

were under continuous bombardment from the British artillery. The Somme,despite the crude tactics used by Haig, reflected the arrival of Britain as amajor military power.

ountered by similar attacks by smallnumbers of German troops. In this manner Falkenhayn, against the odds,managed to restore some kind of balance to the casualty lists.

nched forward at great costbecause the tactics employed allowed the Germans to concentrate the max-imum amount of artillery against the small areas of the front under threat.

There was never any doubt that despite these losses the battle would becontinued. The French were still under pressure at Verdun and the lengthypreparations made by Haig could hardly be broken off after twenty-fourhours.

inadequate and inaccurate artillery bombardment had missed much of theGerman defensive systems and most of the German batteries ranged on no-man’s-land

However, the type of infantry tactics employed wassupremely irrelevant in the face of unsubdued German machine guns andartillery.

Rawlinson could have suggested that such an operation on the WesternFront in 1916 was quite chimerical.

He planned to capture all three German lines. Howelse could the four divisions of cavalry he had massed just behind the frontbreak through and gallop towards the coast, thus rolling up the Germandefences in the northern sector of the Western Front?

And it was not just in numbers that the artillery would prove to beinsufficient. There were serious inadequacies in quality, type and manner ofdelivery.

o attack on a wide front (in this case eleven kilo-metres) it was necessary to accumulate massive amounts of ammunition andguns to demolish the extensive German trench lines and fortified villages facedby the British.

But as the killing at Verdun proceeded, it became clear that the Allies’ frontof attack would be narrower than at first thought

Yet it is not easy to find another promisingarea for an offensive

adicaldeparture from Britain’s previous wars.

Meanwhile back on the Western Front, where the war would be won orlost, the British army was slowly building to a size where a considerableoffensive could be launched.

the decision was taken to proceed with the northernoperation. This proved to be a mistake. In short order the Germans stoppedthe offensive in its tracks.

onrad’soffensive was running out of steam because, as was often the case in the GreatWar, his troops had outrun their artillery support.

If this did not amount to ‘bleeding white’, it at least meant progress hadbeen made by Falkenhayn towards that goal. The problem was that he hadbled his own army white as well.

alkenhayn had in any case seemed to growtired of his own conception. Losses for both sides approached 250,000.

The fighting at Verdun had by this point lost all sensible purpose. It shouldhave been obvious to the Germans that the price to be paid to gain theadditional seven kilometres of ground that they needed to take the city wastoo high.

to whicharmy was being bled white.

or these reasons the fire support received bythe German troops suffered a savage diminution and as a result the first phaseof the Verdun operation fizzled out.

the German command found it impossible tomove them forward over this ground.

No doubt the introductionof flamethrowers was one reason that the French defence gradually wilted

alkenhayn was not swayed. Hereckoned, not without reason, that to sufficiently devastate the French defend-ers his artillery fire must be as concentrated as possible.

He conceded that the defences needed reinforcement and offeredtwo additional infantry divisions. There was to be no reinforcement in guns,either for the forts or the field artillery.

many of the garrisons of the forts werealso removed.

gaps inthe enemy line would be achieved by the same means put forward byFalkenhayn – that is, huge amounts of artillery and shells would be used toeliminate the dominance of defensive trench positions.

They were not designed tobe attritional battles. Great masses of cavalry would sweep through gaps madein the enemy defences and roll up the German positions

hat he proposed was to assemble the largest amount of artillery yetseen in war, about 1,200 guns of which 500 were heavy calibre, and inrelatively short but devastating bombardments destroy the French defendersuntil the ground could be occupied with modest infantry resources

His new idea was toattack at a point that was bound to be defended and then use his superiority inartillery to batter the defenders into submission

The longer the war, they reasoned, the less chance Germany would have ofwinning it.

The year 1915 was the one in which totalisation of the war was substantiallyset in motion. But it was still some way from reaching its full destructivepotential.

In acontext of extreme ‘negative mobilisation’,28 1915 confirms that the totality ofthe enemy population – and sometimes a part of one’s own people – was nowthe enemy, and not only the nation’s armed and fighting fraction

theseacts of war, of a new kind, signalled a depth of hostility to the ‘Other’ in whichno part of the ‘enemy’ population within would be spared

None of the nations at war had a fiscal system capable of meeting the costsof the war; all had recourse to credit – in France, this applied from thebeginning of 1915, in the form of Treasury Bonds and long-term war loans.

The year 1915 was thus identified as a first point of take-off for production,24even though it continued to be hampered by multiple pinch-points character-istic of an accelerated crisis of growth

showed the extent to which from 1915onwards the blockade helped to extend and intensify the violence of the war.1

operated in the occupied territories and the rationing system imposed ontheir civilian populations: total exploitation (ameliorated to some extent bythe Commission of Relief for Belgium) was established.

question of control of the seas was of centralimportance during the course of 1915.

transmitted extreme hostility to theenemy.

it was these which signalled the intention to eradicate the Armeniancommunity.

Against the setback to their externalmilitary projects, the Young Turks’ leadership to some extent turned to thedestruction of the designated internal enemy.

vicissitudes of the war alsocontributed to setting a cumulative genocidal spiral in motion.

setting of a pan-Turkishethnicity designated the Armenians as potential enemies of the ‘Turkish race’destined to regenerate the Empire

econd year of thewar played a central role in the process of totalisation and ‘brutalisation’ ofthe war.

1915 was also characterised by an unprecedented radical-isation of violence towards populations seen as too unreliable to be left alivein their towns and villages.

erman and Austro-Hungarian occupations ofthe second year of the war, however severe, constituted a stage designed tore-establish order

iolence was part of this process,less in relation to the German occupation in Belgium and the north and east ofFrance than to the Austro-Hungarian presence in Serbia and above all theBulgarians in Macedonia;

he primary concern was the material exploitation of resources; thelocal occupied population was itself an important local resource, to be put toactive use as part of the invaders’ war effort.

extension of institutionalised concentration – with the prolongedinternment, on both sides, of non-national individuals present on national soilat the time of the outbreak of war – was fundamentally part of the same logic.

without truestrategic objective, they signalled that enemy populations in their entiretywere henceforward considered enemies and were therefore now a legitimatetarget.

atrocities continued to feature in powerfulreplays of memory:

1915, for example, the ‘war cultures’became enduringly crystallised around a body of mobilising themes, wordsand images which confirmed the meaning initially attributed to the war itself –both in justifying its continuation and the new sacrifices that this implied

All these practices stimulated movements of mass exodus: the effects ofthe refugee phenomenon, a central feature of the outbreak of war, continuedto be felt throughout 1915, upsetting the fragile equilibrium of the homefronts.

he events of 1914 had established mass attacks on unarmed civilians as theorder of the day.

Thus by the end of 1915, not only had movement continued to be the orderof the day everywhere except on the Western Front, but even there, the end of1915 showed that there was still hope of a breakthrough followed by a return tomanoeuvre

o set off for the Adriatic at the cost of a murderous wintermarch through the Albanian mountains, while the Allied troops had no choicebut to withdraw to the Greek frontier.

yet the ‘great advance’ of the Germans was the chiefmilitary victory in 1915: Russia lost Galicia, Poland, Lithuania and Courlandin their ‘Great Retreat’, representing a withdrawal of 250 kilometres betweenJanuary and September, provoking the decision of the Tsar to take over themilitary High Command in person.

than its equivalent in the West.

By the end of the summer all thetroops present on the peninsula were immobilised in a dense network oftrenches, similar to those on the Western Front but concentrated into a muchsmaller area.

the troops were pinned down on the beaches and dominated byOttoman defensive positions.

Designed to take control of the Dardanelles Straitsand Constantinople while simultaneously creating solid and direct liaisonwith Russia, the plan for the operation was an interesting attempt to getround the strategic blockade in the West, supported by the British navy.

This superiority of defence over attack was repeated all the more easilyelsewhere because the experience of static warfare was broadly valid on otherfronts.

Then the escalation began.

The introduction of gas and flamethrowers in the same year marked aninflection in violence of a different order, inflicting death or wounds withoutbreaking the anatomical barrier of the skin, and thus without spilling blood

Theenemy drew even closer as weapons for hand-to-hand fighting became morewidespread:

long-term installation of the war of position, a defining feature of thesecond year of the war, also contributed to the institutionalisation of a fullrange of practices which radicalised the inherent violence of the battlefield.

wo offensives continued until mid October, however, in a pattern character-istic of a war which was slow to learn from an initial setback.

hen, between 9 May and 18 June, the combined French and Britishforces launched a massive attack in Artois: in some places this achievedpenetration of up to four kilometres in depth along a front of around fifteenkilometres, but without achieving a decisive breakthrough – in static warfare,this breach was too narrow for lasting exploitation

ven wherethe enemy front line was pierced, no one could hope to exploit the initialsuccess

support trenches were strengthened and supplementary lines of defence werelaid out well to the rear

prevailingsomewhat simple techniques of attack, the temptation was strong to launchtroops into an assault without adequate artillery preparation.

Several elements contributed to this – barbed wire, which prevented anysimple crossing of no-man’s-land; infantry rifle fire, above all machine-gunfire, setting up a virtually impassable wall of bullets; and barrages of artilleryshells, which shattered assault troops as soon as they left their trenc

Further,there was no question of abandoning any particular stretch of front line that wastoo exposed, or of shortening the lines in the interests of easier defence: theposition remained where battle had established it.

extreme difficulty for the High Command to fully understand thisnew factor,

he superiority of the defence over assault

1915 confirmed and even reinforced the strategic deadlockwhich was apparent from the autumn of 1914.

Ludendorff finally realised that the war could not be won but he still heldhopes that a peace with favourable conditions was possible as German troopswere standing in France and Belgium and controlled most of EasternEurope.

he Allies attacked with superior manpower, artillery fire and tanks, and amuch higher morale. The failure of the spring offensive and the success of theAllied attacks were disastrous for the morale of German soldiers, and theeffect on the morale of the High Command was even more disastrous

artillery and aerialsuperiority was overwhelming and the assault troops were well equipped withLewis guns and mortars. Every battalion was accompanied by six tanks. Theresult of the attack was an impressive victory.

he Allied attacks did not go furtherthan their artillery could reach

offensives were launched in rapid succession to prevent the OHL fromdirecting reinforcements to critical points

Foch devised a plan consisting of a series of attacks aimed at reachingimportant railway hubs and improving the lines of communication.

Theirsuperiority in terms of firepower was re-established in the summer of 1918.Rupprecht realised much earlier than Ludendorff that morale among theGerman soldiers was droppin

utthey anticipated that counter-attacks and offensives with narrow objectivescould be effective and break the morale of the German army.

Germans held positions which still had tobe fortified. The soldiers were much more vulnerable to Allied attacks than inthe fortified positions they had held before the spring offensive.

he German army hadretaken old battlefields or territory which had been destroyed by its troopsduring the tactical retreat to the Hindenburg Line

All in all, the German offensives had made considerable territorial gains,but none of the strategic objectives had been achieved. The BEF and theFrench army had neither been separated, nor had the British troops beenpushed back to the Channel ports, nor had Paris been taken

aunched a successful counter-attack – also using tanks – against theGerman Fifth and Seventh Armies on 18 July, which forced the Germans toretreat to Soissons on the River Aisn

Once again logistical, especially transportation problems prevented theGerman army from exploiting the strategic opportunities. The attack divisionswere exhausted and supplies, artillery and fresh troops could not be broughtforward quickly enough

Casualties were high, as here – wherethe BEF could not afford to lose much ground – the defences were deep andheavily fortified. Ludendorff stopped the offensive on 29 April.

The German troopswere exhausted and too far from the railway heads. The lines were over-stretched, there was insufficient motorised transportation and horses, andneither fresh troops nor supplies could be brought forward quickly enough