Purposely, we have dwelt on the soldier’s view. To him it mattered not at all that the Versailles (Supreme War) Council had been formed at Rapallo in the previous November, or that Mr. Lloyd George, on his way home through Paris, had delivered a rousing speech on the topic of the barrier in the West. Neither Council nor speeches would break that barrier, the dams of which were about to burst on _him_. To him, again, it mattered little more that, before the dams burst in fury on his long, thin, tired khaki line, the same doubts, or nearly the same doubts, weighed heavily on the minds of his Commanders as had oppressed them in 1915, when the 49th Division first came out to France. Now, as then, behind the narrow wall of Troops, which still guarded Ypres from the invader, lay Dunkirk, Calais, Boulogne. We may call this the horizontal line, leading from Brussels to the sea, and across the sea to hated England. That way lay the end of the war, and Prussia’s satisfied ambition. Now, as then, too, a vertical line pointed southwards from Ostend to Paris, through Arras, Albert and Amiens, and the battlefields of 1916. That way lay a bisection of the Allied Forces, a spectacular occupation of the French capital, and, at best, a prolongation of the war into 1919 and even 1920. Either way lay disaster to British arms; and the stars pointed both ways at once. To the soldier, as we say, it mattered little that a kind of choice had to be made, and a kind of balance had to be struck, between two alternative enemy aims, which were yet not mutually exclusive. His business was to fight, not to think, and, in the fighting days to which we are now coming, he fought tenaciously till he fell, leaving to those whom they concerned the fate of London and Paris. Yet, because their fate was involved in the disposition of the Allied Armies at the beginning of 1918, we are bound to consider the problem by which Sir Douglas Haig was confronted. ‘In the northern portion of the British area,’ he wrote, in the Despatch which we have already quoted in this chapter, ‘lie the northern channel ports, the security of which necessitated the maintenance of sufficient troops in the neighbourhood. Little or no ground could be given up on this front.... In the central portion,’ he continued, ‘lie the northern collieries of France and certain important tactical features which cover our lateral communications. Here, also, little or no ground could be given up.’ What could be given up? A hateful consideration for the High Command, but it had to be faced and answered, in order to save what could not, or to concert, at least, the best measures for its safety. ‘In the southern portion of the British area, south-east of Arras,’ it was held, ‘ground could be given up under great pressure without serious consequences.’ The ‘great pressure’ was certain to be applied, and it afforded some consolation to reflect that, in contrast to the central