With the coming of the fourth year, however, conditions began to grow bad even at the front, and the winter of 1917-18 brought a marked decrease of rations, both in quantity and quality. Cavalrymen and soldiers belonging to munition or work columns ate the potatoes issued for their horses. They ground in their coffee-mills their horses' scant rations of barley and made pancakes. A high military official who took part in the drive for the English Channel that started in March, 1918, assured the writer that the chief reason for the failure to reach the objective was that the German soldiers stopped to eat the provisions found in the enemy camps, and could not be made to resume the advance until they had satisfied their hunger and assured themselves that none of the captured stores had been overlooked. Ludendorff, hearing of this, is said to have declared: "Then it's all over." This, while probably untrue, would have been a justified and prophetic summing-up of the situation. Not only were the soldiers hungry by this time, but they were insufficiently clad. Their boots were without soles, and they had neither socks nor the _Fusslappen_ (bandages) which most of them preferred to wear instead of socks. A shirt issued from the military stores in the summer of 1918 to a German soldier-friend of the writer was a woman's ribbed shirt, cut low in the neck and gathered with a ribbon. The military reverses of this summer thus found a soldiery hungry and ill-clad, dispirited by complaints from their home-folk of increasing privations, and, as we shall see in the following chapter, subjected to a revolutionary propaganda of enormous extent by radical German Socialists and by the enemy. CHAPTER V. Internationalism at Work. No people ever entered upon a war with more enthusiasm or a firmer conviction of the justice of their cause than did the Germans. Beset for generations on all sides by potential enemies, they had lived under the constant threat of impending war, and the events of the first days of August, 1914, were hailed as that "end of terror" (_ein Ende mit Schrecken_) which, according to an old proverb, was preferable to "terror without end" (_Schrecken ohne Ende_). The teachings of internationalism were forgotten for the moment even by the Socialists. The veteran August Bebel, one of the founders of German Socialism, had never been able entirely to overcome an inborn feeling of nationalism, and had said in one famous speech in the Reichstag that it was conceivable that a situation could arise where even he would shoulder _die alte Buechse_ (the old musket) and go to the front to defend the Fatherland.