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Updated: June 14, 2025
The tremendous German drive, which Ludendorff had confidently promised the German people would bring a smashing and decisive victory, was stopped. Retrocession began.
The line once broken, the advantage must be followed up by a series of fresh divisions passing through and beyond the others like successive waves, maintaining the continuity of the flowing tide. The Eastern front was used as a training ground for these new tactics, which served Ludendorff better than any advance into Russia could have done; and they came as a complete surprise at Caporetto.
How many of us, for example, realise that the Germans relied mainly on gas for success in the great March assault of 1918, which threatened to influence the destinies of the world. Yet Ludendorff goes out of his way to tell us how much he counted upon it. How many understand that the 1918 hostilities were no longer a war of explosives.
He spoke knowingly, notwithstanding the Sekt and the smile with which he seemed to be belying his remarks. Thus, the Majority Socialists were traitors. Scheidemann had sold the revolution for a kiss from Graf Rantzau. The masses.... "Ah, m'sieur, they are arming. There will be an overthrow." And then, Ludendorff had framed the revolution actually manufactured it. All the old officers were back.
Ludendorff declared that the negotiations with Russia must be concluded within three days, and when a telegram from Petersburg was picked up in Berlin calling on the German Army to rise in revolt Herr von Kühlmann was strictly ordered not to be content with the cessions already agreed to, but to demand the further cession of the unoccupied territories of Livonia and Esthonia.
I do not know to whom the Muse of History will give the credit of the tactics of "Infiltration," whether to Ludendorff or von Hutier or some other proud captain of Germany, or to Foch, who revised and perfected them.
Since, however, General Ludendorff, simply on the grounds of my particular views, made his "impassioned" attack on me before the Examination Committee of the National Assembly, I have no longer been in any doubt whatsoever as to the nature of the influence that was at work at General Headquarters.
We maintained the blockade, and German children starved, and German mothers weakened, and German girls swooned in the tram-cars, and German babies died. Ludendorff did not starve or die. Neither did Hindenburg, nor any German war lord, nor any profiteer. Down the streets of Cologne came people of the rich middle classes, who gorged themselves on buns and cakes for afternoon tea.
But German calculations were utterly wrong, as Ludendorff in his Memoirs now admits, in estimating the amount of time needed to break her bonds by submarine warfare before America could send over great armies to Europe. The German war lords were wrong again in underestimating the defensive and offensive success of the British navy and mercantile marine against submarine activities.
Situated as the Germans were between two fronts, they were quicker to grasp the significance of events in the East than were Western Powers; and the collapse of Russia had already inspired Ludendorff with the idea and hopes of a final and victorious offensive on the West in the spring of 1918. It must come soon, or the advent of American armies would make it too late.
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