And farther north the King--and the Queen--of the Belgians "occupied a little villa within range of the German guns, and in a district incessantly attacked by the enemy's bombing aeroplanes."[2] [2] Maurice, "The Last Four Months," p. 158. * * * * * It was at 3.30 a.m. on the 21st of March, 1918, that the great German attack westwards over the old Somme battlefields commenced. The events of the four following days--the days of the greatest anxiety to most of us since the commencement of the war--are remembered only too well and too painfully. Our armies, unavoidably thinned and for days out of reach of reserves, were, with the French beside them, continuously driven back, until the Germans were close to Villers Bretonneux (ten miles from Amiens), had crossed the Avre to the south, and had taken Albert and crossed the Ancre on the north, wiping out in a few days all our gains of 1917. At least one benefit, the greatest of all possible benefits, resulted from the extreme urgency of the situation. On the 26th of March a special conference was held at Doullens, which in 1914 had been General Foch's H.Q. The Hôtel de Ville of that town (Plate 3), otherwise a commonplace and uninteresting building--in which the conference met--became at once a building notable for ever in history. Lord Milner and General Sir Henry Wilson, who were fortunately in France, attended, with President Poincaré, M. Clemenceau, and M. Loucheur, as well as Sir Douglas Haig, with our four Army Commanders, and General Pétain and General Foch. As an immediate result, arrived at unanimously by the conference,[3] General Foch was made _de facto_--and a few days later _de jure_--Generalissimo of the Allied Armies in France. It was immediately after this decision (on the 28th of March) that General Pershing nobly offered to General Foch, for serving under his authority in any way which he thought most useful, every man whom he had available of the Americans who had arrived. From the moment when, under such conditions, unity of command was at length achieved, and in spite of the further set-backs in Flanders in April--Ludendorff's last despairing efforts--the ultimate issue of the war was no longer in doubt. [3] See Lord Milner's account in the _New Statesman_ of the 23rd of April, 1921. * * * * *