An increase of 1,426,000 in the number of women employed since 1914 is shown in figures announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The greatest increase was in industries, which took in 530,000 more women, but the largest proportionate increase was 214,000 additional women taken into Government service. Women have replaced 1,413,000 men since 1914. Industrial and Government work has taken 400,000 women formerly employed in domestic service or in dressmaking. THE BATTLE OF PICARDY Military Review of the Greatest Battle in History From March 21 to April 17, 1918 On March 21 the Germans began the great battle which military experts of both sides believe may decide the war. What was indicated in broad lines was that they wished to reach the Channel by way of the Somme and thereby isolate most of the British Army and the entire Belgian and Portuguese Armies in the north. A corollary to such an isolation would have been a movement south on Paris. As to the narrower lines of the German military plan, however, they became clear. The Germans struck from points where their railways allowed them the greatest possible concentration of troops and at points where the lines of the Allies, owing to the uncompleted battles of Flanders and Cambrai and the failures at Lens, St. Quentin, and La Fère last year, were relatively weak or could be out-manoeuvred with superior force of men and material. In the first phase of the battle, which carried the enemy down the Somme and its southern tributary, the Avre, to within six miles of Amiens, and to within forty-six miles of the Channel, they first eliminated the Cambrai salient so as to protect their northern flank and then concentrated their attack between St. Quentin and La Fère, near the point where the French and the British Armies joined. The flanks of the great salient thereby developed, however, made dangerous further progress down the Somme. On the north it was threatened by the Arras salient with its protecting ridge of Vimy; on the south by the watershed of the Oise and Aisne. Frontal attacks to eliminate the Arras salient and the, Oise-Aisne watershed having failed, a flanking movement against the former, which should also have strategic ramifications further north, followed as a matter of military expediency. Thus on April 9 the second phase began. Again they sought the line of cleavage between two armies, where differences of language and tactics made military cohesion difficult--between the British and the Portuguese on the Lille front. A successful penetration of this front for a distance of ten miles would have placed the enemy on the left-rear of Vimy Ridge in the south, and in the north on the right-rear of Messines Ridge, which protects Ypres, the capture of which by the British a year ago had made the subsequent battle of Flanders and their occupation of Passchendaele in the direction of Roulers possible.