It had proved a sort of inverted Verdun, and the comfort we had derived from that successful defence was now extracted by the Germans from their defence of Bapaume. The parallel was not exact, because while the German gains at Verdun narrowed down to a point, ours on the Somme expanded in a circle. Yet the arguments were substantially the same: the French at Verdun were willing to sell any number of acres for armies, and the Germans professed an equal content on the Somme. Each side contended in turn that the offensive was the more costly form of warfare, and then repudiated the contention when it came to attack itself; and there was not a great deal to choose between them so far as logic was concerned. It is also clear that the Germans would have been at least as successful at Verdun as we were on the Somme but for the relief afforded by counter-offensives elsewhere, and that we should have profited no more from the Somme than the Germans did from Verdun had our Somme campaign been interrupted by German offensives on other fronts. Nor was there much to choose in the way of casualties: our estimate of the German losses as approximating 600,000 was a reasonable guess, but our own casualties were well over 400,000. The French losses were lighter, but the two together cannot have been less than the German. The Germans on the Somme, like the French at Verdun, withdrew divisions to refit before they were hopelessly broken; but what was considered wisdom in the French was reckoned weakness in the Germans and the Prussian Guards, whose return to Berlin, concealed in furniture-vans to hide their pitiable plight, was graphically described in the English press by an imaginative American journalist, were really sent as a contribution to that immense effort in the East by which, in spite of the Somme campaign, Germany first closed the gaps in the crumbling Austrian front and then overran Rumania. There was thus a good deal of justice in the German comparison between Verdun and the Somme. The fallacy lay in the facts that our offensive was not brought to a stand by a German counter-attack but by the advent of winter, that the moves elsewhere in the West were the French ripostes at Verdun in October and December and not German counter-offensives, and that their campaign in Rumania, in spite of its painful success, had no effect upon the vital situation in the West. That episode was against us, but the tendencies were in our favour; our losses might equal the German, but equal attrition would leave us paramount in the end, barring collapse on the part of a principal ally. It was the fundamental situation which led to the German proposals for peace at Christmas, and the superficial impression which provoked the simultaneous fall of the Asquith Government.