The Last Four Months; How The War Was Won

The epic story of the last campaign of the Allied armies that shattered the German Army on the Western Front in 1918, ending the First World War. Renowned military writer Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice brings together the stories of the victorious armies who advanced from the Belgian coastline to the Swiss frontiers in vivid detail. 'WHO won the war?' is a question that has been often asked. In the countries of all the great Allied Powers there have been found those who answered it to their own satisfaction as patriots, because it is easy to demonstrate that the war would not have been won, as and when it was won, had any of those countries failed to do what it actually achieved. Most of us, however, are agreed that victory was the result of combination, an opinion that will almost certainly grow stronger the better the story is known. This book gives a picture of Foch's great campaign and sketches in due proportion the parts that went to make up the whole. Battles are described in the simplest terms, because the object is to explain the broad causes of success and of failure, and there is danger, in entering into details of operations on so vast a scale, of losing sight of the wood for the trees. As no story of a campaign can be complete unless it describes the intentions, aims and feelings of the enemy, at least at the most critical periods, the best information available on these points has been collected from captured documents or from publications in Germany.