When after the capture of the Hindenburg positions, the line indicating "prisoners," on that chart at G.H.Q., a reduced copy of which will be found at the end of this book, leapt up to a height for which the wall in the room of the Director of Operations could hardly find space, it meant not only victory over Germany in the field, but also the disintegration of German _morale_ at home; owing first and foremost to that deadly watch which the British Navy, supported during the last year of the war by the American embargo, had kept over the seas of the world, to Germany's undoing, since the opening of the struggle.

The final victory of the Allies when it came was thus in a special sense Great Britain's victory, achieved both by her mastery of the sea, and the military expansion forced upon her by the German attack; conditioned, of course, by the whole earlier history of the war, in which France had led the van and borne the brunt, and immensely facilitated by the "splendid American adventure," to use the phrase of an American.
For to show that, in a strictly military sense, the British and Dominion Armies, backed by the British Navy, brought the war to a successful end--a simple matter of figures and dates--is not all, or nearly all.

The American intervention, and especially the marvellous speeding-up of American action, from March to the end of the war, quite apart from the brilliant promise of America's first appearances in the field, had an effect upon Europe--Great Britain, France, Italy--akin to that which the American climate and atmosphere produces on the visitor from this side of the Atlantic.

It breathed new life into everything, and especially into the heart of France, the chief sufferer by three years of atrocious war.

As weary and devastated France watched the American stream of eager and high-hearted youth, flowing from Bordeaux eastwards, column after column, regiment after regiment, of men admirable in physique, fearless in danger, and full of a laughing and boundless confidence in America's power to help, and resolve to win--at last it seemed that the long horror of the war must be indeed coming to an end.