Yet the operation hardly equalled in positive achievement its spectacular advertisement. Months, if not years, of meticulous preparation in a sector that had not been seriously disturbed by fighting since 1915 had produced an advance of from two to three miles on a front of less than ten. It was a tactical victory of the most limited character; and the strategical value of the ridge was greatly exaggerated. It had never enabled the Germans to master the Ypres salient, and as the autumn showed, its conquest made no serious gap in the strength of the German defences. Neither on the Belgian coast nor on the Lys which protected Lille did the German line budge one inch in three months' strenuous fighting; and the salient created by that campaign between the coast and the Lys melted like wax in the furnace of the German offensive ten months later. Plumer's success might, however, have led to better things but for the untoward circumstances which hampered the Flanders campaign from the start. One of these was its initial delay; seven weeks elapsed before the conquest of the ridge was followed up, and the causes are still obscure. Probably they were political. Belgium, notwithstanding her passion for liberation, cannot have desired the rest of her soil to be restored in the condition of the Wytschaete ridge--a horror of desolation unfit for man or even for nature's growths; and there seemed little prospect of driving the Germans out except by a succession of ruinous tactical victories. Germany, moreover, was playing up to the Stockholm Conference and suggesting restoration without the accompaniment of ruin; and it was clear that if the Entente was to liberate Belgium, it must be done by other methods and at a lesser cost than the total destruction of her soil. Preparations for other than limited tactical gains were made during June and July. The Third Army under Byng, who had succeeded Allenby, was put in charge of the whole British line from Arras southwards, and Rawlinson's Fourth and Gough's Fifth Armies were brought up to the coast and Ypres respectively, while a French army under Anthoine was located between Gough's and the Belgians on the Yser. The Germans were alarmed by Rawlinson's appearance on the coast, and anticipated a possible attack in that sector by delivering a defensive blow on 10 July against the bridgehead we held north-east of the Yser between Nieuport and the coast. We were apparently not prepared: two battalions were wiped out, part of the bridgehead was lost, and Rawlinson's Fourth Army remained a more or less passive spectator of the subsequent campaign. Its own chance of making a thrust had gone, and it waited in vain for the thrust elsewhere to turn the gate the Germans had barred between the Yser floods and the sea.