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The trench deadlock in northern France and Belgium was broken by Ludendorff's fatuous drive in March, 1918. After the allies had stopped it and inaugurated their counter-offensive all Europe made a startling discovery. The Germans were tenacious enough in trench warfare; in open fighting, known as war of maneouvre, they could not stand before American and the allied troops.
The 7th Division bore the brunt of the attack, and Haig's 1st Corps was precluded from a counter-offensive by the need of detaching supports to the south-east of Ypres, where long stretches of line were only held by cavalry, and Pulteney was being pressed in front of Ploegstreet.
THE ALLIED COUNTER-OFFENSIVE In spite of the disasters she had suffered in 1915 and of her winter campaigns in Galicia and the Caucasus, Russia was the first of the Allies to take the offensive in 1916. She was, indeed, engaged in attacking at some point or other along her vast and various fronts from December till April.
Here on 1 November Sakharov arrived to take the command with several new divisions, for Alexeiev did his best to redeem the failings of his Government, and a counter-offensive was begun. On the 9th Sakharov recaptured Hirsova, and by the 15th he had advanced to within seven miles of Mackensen's lines defending the Constanza railway.
In the winter in view of the threatening attitude of France in regard to Belgium he drew up a war plan, and it was designed not on the Napoleonic method of making the enemy's armed force the main strategical objective, but on seizing a limited territorial object and forcing a disadvantageous counter-offensive upon the French.
A counter-offensive, which led to the temporary loss of Bitlis and Mush, was nullified by a Russian thrust at Rayat on 25 August, and Bitlis and Mush were recovered. Asia Minor seemed to be slipping from Turkey's grasp, and her hold on Arabia was still more precarious.
In 563 Chou made preparations for a decisive blow against Ch'i, but suffered defeat because the Turks, who had promised aid, gave none and shortly afterwards began campaigns of their own against Ch'i. In 571 Ch'i had some success in the west against Chou, but then it lost parts of its territory to the South Chinese empire, and finally in 576-7 it was defeated by Chou in a great counter-offensive.
I have called it in the earlier pages of this book "the open strategic square," and I have shown how this theoretical arrangement was in practice complicated and modified so that it came to mean, under the existing circumstances of the campaign, the deliberate thrusting forth of the fraction called "the operative corner," behind which larger masses, "the mass of manoeuvre," were to come up in aid and assume the general counter-offensive when the operative corner should have drawn the enemy down to that position in which such a general counter-offensive would be most efficacious.
So far the operations of the British Army had not differed greatly from the expected or at least one of the expected developments of the campaign. The operative corner, if it should not have the luck, through losses or blunders on the part of the enemy, to take the counter-offensive after receiving the third shock, is intended to retire, and to draw upon itself a maximum of the enemy's efforts.
He knew that the enemy had literally overstepped his lines of communications, was exhausted, and nervous of failure so far from his bases. He knew that as long as de Castelnau clung on to the heights around Verdun, his centre and left were safely hinged upon a fortress under cover of which he could launch his counter-offensive with all the weight of his now completely mobilised reinforcements.
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