More than two years before the war concluded a junior officer from the front remarked that he could not say when, but knew where, it would end, and that was not far from our existing lines in France and Flanders. As time wore on and the limitations of strategy under modern conditions grew clearer, the war assumed more and more the aspect of a single battle varying in its intensity from season to season and place to place, but constant in its continuity and in its absorption of the principal forces of the main belligerents. The unity of control culminating in unity of command which marked the closing stages of the war was therefore not so much a brilliant improvisation on the part of any general or statesman as the inevitable result of the history of the war; and the misfortunes of the Entente did more than its foresight to bring that consummation to pass. In the main it was due to the gradual weakening and then the collapse of Russia, which first involved the ruin of Serbia and Rumania and the wrecking of our Balkan plans, and finally dissolved the Eastern front. There could have been no unity of command had Russia remained our predominant military partner; and even in the West it never comprised the Italian Army, which retained its independence of action or inaction until the end of the war. But in 1918 the Italian front sank into a subordination almost as marked as the Russian, and the war that counted grew to a climax where it had started between the Alps and the Belgian coast. There were concentrated the French and British armies which Germany must beat before she could win peace; and there came in the American hosts which turned the scale against her.