And as to the feeling of the Army--it is expressed, and, as far as I have been able to judge from much talk with those under his command, most truly expressed, in Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig's December despatch--which came out, as it happens, the very day I had the honour of standing at his side in the Commander-in-Chief's room, at G.H.Q., and looking with him at the last maps of the final campaign. "The effect of the great assaults," says the Field-Marshal, "in which, during nine days of battle (September 26th--October 5th), the First, Third, and Fourth Armies stormed the line of the Canal du Nord, and broke through the Hindenburg line, upon the subsequent course of the campaign, was decisive.... Great as were the material losses the enemy had suffered, the effect of so overwhelming a defeat upon a _morale_ already deteriorated, was of even larger importance." Again: "By the end of October, the rapid succession of heavy blows dealt by the British forces had had a cumulative effect, both moral and material, upon the German Armies. The British Armies were now in a position to force an immediate conclusion." That conclusion was forced in the battle of the Sambre (1st to 11th November). By that "great victory," says Sir Douglas Haig, "the enemy's resistance was definitely broken;" and thus "in three months of epic fighting the British Armies in France had brought to a sudden and dramatic end the great wearing-out battle of the past four years." [Illustration: British Battles During 1918 (8th Aug. to 11th Nov., 1918).] Do these sentences--the utterances of a man conspicuously modest and reticent in statement, indicate any consciousness of "lost prestige" in "a last desperate campaign"?