BOOK TWO: THROUGH HOSTILE

GATES

I

The advance of the Allied Armies towards the Rhine was by definite, slow stages, enabling the German Army to withdraw in advance of us with as much material of war as was left to them by the conditions of the Armistice. On that retreat of theirs they abandoned so much that it was clearly impossible for them to resist our demands by fighting again, however hard might be the Peace Terms. Their acceptance of the Armistice drawn up by Marshal Foch with a relentless severity in every clause, so that the whole document was a sentence of death to the German military system, proved that they had no more "fight" in them. It was the most abject and humiliating surrender ever made by a great nation in the hour of defeat, and an acknowledgment before the whole world that their armies had broken to bits, in organisation and in spirit.

On the roads for hundreds of kilometres out from Mons and Le Cateau, past Brussels and Liège and Namur, was the visible proof of the disintegration and downfall of what had been the greatest military machine in the world. Mile after mile and score after score of miles, on each side of the long straight roads, down which, four years before, the first German Armies had marched in endless columns after the first brief check at