Page:The Great War.djvu/210

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1 86 The Great War In Picardy and Champagne. The courage, the des- peration, which marked the French at Waterloo, the devotion which had made that struggle the ad- miration of the succeeding century, had been dis- played by the Kaiser's troops; but as Waterloo marked the extermination of the Napoleonic army, so the struggle In Northern France meant grave weakening of that marvellous machine of commis- sioned and non-commissioned officers on which the whole German system rested. German armies were certain to continue to fight as they had fought before. The comparison after the great battle, for actual military considerations, was with Gettysburg, not Waterloo. But was it unreasonable that to the world Lagny near the Marne the high water mark of German advance, should have seemed comparable with the 'extreme point of Pickett's charge at Gettysburg? After Gettysburg the South had many victories still to win, more than a year of splendid resistance to offer, but after Gettysburg the issue of the Civil War was no longer in real doubt. Beyond this, however, the thing that stood out boldly was the overthrow of the tradition of Ger- man military invincibility. As gallantly as Na- poleon's veterans at Waterloo the German con- scripts had upheld their reputation by their fight. But as the Old Guard failed they have failed, and with their failure the whole splendid fabric of Ger- man military domination in Europe was shaken.

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