Notwithstanding the lack of arms and munitions the Russian Army rendered the Allies, in the critical days of 1915, assistance that was not less important and serious than that of the days of the Marne and Ypres. Russia, by diverting upon herself, towards the close of 1914, all the efforts of the Central Powers, thereby offered France and England the opportunity for a whole year to prepare for the prosecution of the War. Throughout 1915, when Germany, Austria and Turkey were diverted by Russia, France was enabled quickly to accumulate new reserves, munitions, shells, to recover from the serious wounds of 1914, and to prepare for that inevitable blow from Germany which subsequently took the form of a determined offensive at Verdun in 1916. At the same time England, owing to the fact that Russia had in 1915 taken upon herself the whole burden of the struggle, was enabled in the course of one year to carry out Kitchener's stupendous plan of expanding the small, 150 thousand-strong English Army of volunteers into the four million-strong Army of the English nation in arms. On the other hand Germany, having called to the colors new reserves, was compelled by Russia to expend these reserves on the Russian front, and not on the main front, in France, where the fate of the whole War was to be decided for Germany. All these opportunities, all this stupendous preparation in the creation and development of new armed forces by the Allies, took place undisturbed and in favorable circumstances, solely because 1915 was the year of Russia's single-handed fight against three enemy powers, the year of the greatest self-sacrifice of the Russian Army for the common cause. Who knows what might have been the result of the German offensive in France had those German reserves which perished in Russia broken through somewhere in the north of France simultaneously with the storming of Verdun, in February. Who knows how far the German military catastrophe might have been averted had all the fresh reserves of the Germans, which were being incessantly swallowed up by the Russian front, found themselves in the West! To these questions Ludendorf himself happens to give the answers in his memoirs. Speaking of the offensive of the Germans at Verdun and of the offensive of the Austrians in Italy, he says: "Both offensives suffered from the fact that inadequate reserves prevented the first successes from being followed up."