Book Description

Excerpt from The European War, Vol. 3: September 1915 March 1916 The comparative calm which obtained along this western portion of the end of the western battle front from late in August was not interrupted until the third week of September, when a joint offensive began on the part of both the French and the English. The joint offensive was commanded by Sir John French and General Foch and had as its purpose the forcing of a way between the projection of the line kown as the La Bassee salient and the river Scarpe into the plain of the Scheldt, while at the same time the French, under Gen. Castelnau, opened an offensive to the east of Rheims, between this city and the beginning of the Argonne Forest, with the object of throwing back the German line in this region to the other side of the Aisne River. The entire latter part of the summer the British had been engaged in forwarding supplies of men and particularly large quantities of artillery and ammunition from England, with this offensive in view, and indeed it was necessary for the British to supply themselves amply with artillery since the attack upon the German lines which they intended to launch was of necessity a frontal one which could not be delivered with any hope of success before the defences of the trenches of the existing German position were blown away and holes made therein by the artillery so that the infantry could advance. We will consider the western offensive first and discuss the eastern offensive subsequently. The battle opened with feigned attacks both on the Belgian sea coast, and on land at points other than the points at which the real effort was intended to be made. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.