satisfactory progress, while in Italy we were preparing the final decisive measures concerning our army there. In the United States we had started a recruiting movement for France, and about 2,000 of our troops were already waiting in barracks at Cognac for the final decision on our army in France. The development of affairs in Russia during December and January aroused the hope that about 50,000 of our troops would be able to proceed to France.
Such was the general view which was taken of our movement by official circles and the Ministry of War. It subsequently turned out that on a number of points the estimates made by them and us were too optimistic, but it meant a great deal to Clemenceau as Minister of War, who realized the full significance of Caporetta, who could see the military consequences of the collapse of the Eastern front, who in the meanwhile had only a few American regiments at his disposal in France, and who understood that France was at that very moment passing through the most critical juncture of the war in which every contribution to victory, however small, deserved to be appreciated.
The events during the first months of 1918 crystallized Clemenceau’s policy. Czernin’s speech on December 4, 1917, at Budapest, in which he made it plain that Vienna would act with Berlin until the end of the war; the Italian reverse, the consequences of which demanded a final military victory upon that front also; the armistice in the East, which merged into peace negotiations, and concluded on March 3, 1918, with the peace of Brest-Litovsk; and the peace concluded on March 7th at Buftei with Rumania, now completely humiliated and obliged to cede considerable areas to Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria; finally, the preparation of a great offensive in the West and the danger of an approaching attack on Paris—all this, far from inducing despondency in a man of Clemenceau’s temperament, on the contrary made him exert every effort to cope with all these problems in the only possible way, by achieving a final and decisive military victory.
In my opinion, the great political and military victories of the Central Powers at the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918; their ruthless and, from a political and psychological point of view, faulty tactics, which culminated in the humiliation of Rumania and the Balkans; the assumption of control over Poland, the new Balkan States, and Finland; the separa-
