[115] “We have gone on talking of the Eastern front and the Western front, and the Italian front, and the Salonika front, and the Egyptian front, and the Mesopotamia front, forgetting that there is but one front with many flanks; that with these colossal armies the battle-field is continental” (Mr. Lloyd George at Paris, November 12th). CHAPTER XXII VICTORY “O God! Thy arm was here; And not to us, but to Thy arm alone, Ascribe we all.” SHAKESPEARE’S _Henry V_, Act IV, Sc. viii. THE last year of the Great War was undoubtedly the most critical and momentous year in the modern history of these islands. By an amazing combination of events, Western Europe was subject to a sudden revival of extreme peril exceeding in violence the menace of 1914. Looking back from the security of the present time (1920) it is easy to underrate the threat of that great attack by the Central Powers: and, indeed, in our present discussions there is an almost perilous oblivion of the dangers through which we have passed. But those who study the memoirs of the German War Leaders, which have poured out since the close of the war,[116] will realise the complete confidence of the German General Staff in the victory which seemed to lie ahead of them, as the natural climax to the series of smashing blows which they had delivered to their enemies during the two previous years (1916-17). General Ludendorff finds the chief reason for the German defeat in the war spirit which had been aroused in England under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd George, and in France by the inspiration of M. Clemenceau. Neither of those leaders would admit that they alone could have achieved so great a triumph for liberty over the menace of militarism. It was the spirit of the peoples of France and Great Britain that really achieved resounding victory—the peoples who shrank from no sacrifice and faced every trial rather than accept defeat. I have in my memory the spectacle of a regiment of boys of eighteen and nineteen—London boys, freshly plucked from the counter and the van—whom I met one evening, at the height of the crisis in the spring of 1918, marching to be entrained from Norfolk to Northern France. “Shall we win the war?” shouted one half of them, and the other half replied with an echoing shout—“Yes!” Those youths had been cut off from all leave and were being plunged into the firing-line at a few hours’ notice. They went singing to almost certain death. They were the fit crusaders of a race that never contemplated defeat; and no man who had such a people behind him could vainly boast of his own single achievements.